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Developers Ever More Encouraging Of Modding
Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for its column discussing game companies' continuing encouragement of 'modders' for content creation purposes. Valve's Doug Lombardi points out the obvious advantages his company received from modding: "In the typical scenario, even if a game is a mega-hit, within eight to 12 months on the store shelves, it's gone. But, in the case of 'Half-Life,' our revenue stream increased year after year for the first three years of the game's life. I attribute a lot of that to three mods -- 'Day Of Defeat,' 'Team Fortress,' and 'Counter-Strike.'" It's also mentioned that modding is starting even before a game hits the shelves, since Vivendi Universal has "even licensed an outside team that is building a mod, 'Starsiege 2845,' using the [as yet publically unreleased] 'Tribes Vengeance' engine."
A cheap way for them to get others to make extra levels for them for free instead of making expansion packs to keep the interest up.
Secondly its free advertisement cause sometimes these mod packs get distributed on game mags/sites etc.
Thirdly it allows everyone to be happy when the game leaves out something that the fan wants. Don't like something? change it. miss something that was in the prequel? add it back! take for instance civ 3. When it first came out there were no engineer units but with a couple of changes to the config files and ripping the pic from civ 2 (or making your own), engineers were back. Microspose eventually put it back in in Gold edition but the ease of mdding the game meant fans didnt have to wait.
You tried to make a map? And you gave up in 15 minutes? Oh well. Most of the mapmaking programs are not intuitive, at least they aren't like other programs you've used. You cannot just jump in and whip out a map. There is a steep learning curve, due to the nature of the content you are creating, and you really need to dedicate time to following some tutorials. It's the same with virtually every other 3D modeling program out there...Blender, Lightwave, Maya, etc.
The reason that people CAN make beautiful maps with this software is because the software does not restrict you to a few easy-to-use options. The existence of good fan-built maps should prove that the software is not at fault here.
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