2005 Moddb Award Results

An anonymous reader writes "After nearly 30,000 votes were tallied, Mod DB has posted its 2005 Mod of the Year winners. Source engine mods really cleaned up with the occasional Unreal, Doom and Battlefield mod making the cut. What started out as a slow mod-making year quickly gained momentum as mod teams made the switch to the next generation games, and began learning the in-and-outs of these new engines. 2005 was an exciting year with lots of great mods and games. Now it's time to look forward to a fresh year of creative minds formulating engines into masterpieces as we enter the next generation of gaming."

Comments

No Classic Doom 3?!?!

[RingDev]

http://cdoom.d3files.com/index.php?page=news

Episode 1 of the original Doom game in the Doom 3. Greatest mod ever.*

-Rick

*Note on bias, the music for CDoom was written by a friend of mine (http://sonicclang.ringdev.com/

Modding as the Game

[AKAImBatman]

With mods being so prevalent these days, you almost have to wonder. I remember when Quake came out. (No bloody, II, III, IV, or D) The game itself was actually kind of dull. But it made such an amazing platform for cool single and multiplayer mods! There was nothing quite like dueling the reaper bot or swinging into a CTF castle on your grappling hook.

Now that more and more games are moddable, one has to wonder if modding has become the game. Rather than purchasing a title which we will play until we finish it or get bored of it, are we now purchasing titles just so we can invent new games based on them? Heck, even many commercial games (Elite Forces, Half Life, etc.) are really nothing more than Total Conversion mods of the engine. While some companies take the time to modify the source code, for the most part they don't ever need to touch the engine. Just take the platform and make a fun game.

This really has been an interesting trend in gaming. My only fear is that it's been slowly erroding the PC industry's ability to produce an actual game for playing rather than a platform for playing with. I love modding just as much as the next guy, but sometimes it's kind of fun to just do some semi-mindless shooting/puzzle solving/adventure. :-)

Re:Modding as the Game

[AKAImBatman]

And just to add to my point, from the #1 entry:

It will come as a surprise to some of you (and no surprise at all to others) that Garry's Mod has won the 2005 Mod of the Year award. Beginning small and rapidly working its way up, Garry's Mod isn't a game as much as a sandbox where you can make one.

Re:Modding as the Game

[RingDev]

"Now that more and more games are moddable, one has to wonder if modding has become the game."

I would say yes, and for some of us, it already has been. I started modding in Doom2 and Quake, making simple levels (nothing fancy). NFS2 would have died out much earlier then it did on my PC had it not been for the joy of custom car models. I got bit by the MMORPG bug a few years back, when the game got boring I pulled out 3ds-Max and got to the fun stuff (http://dmoc.ringdev.com./ I would have kept it up too but I wound up getting married and having a son (not necesarilly in that order) which pretty much put and end to my gaming and modding time.

-Rick

Re:Modding as the Game

[tengennewseditor]

'Modding as the game' was the idea behind Quake 3: Arena. They didn't have a storyline mode, just simple (but good) multiplayer and bot deathmatch/team modes. They figured if they focused on the game engine the modding community would fill in the holes.

The problem with this approach is that modders gravitate toward games that everyone has already. That's why Halflife 1 was such a popular modding platform even though it really wasn't the best engine or modding platform. The original game was so good that everyone had it, so everyone would be able to play your mod. The best way to kickstart modding is by creating a game that everyone wants, so modding won't lead to many more skeleton graphics engine games like Q3A unless more developers fail to learn the lesson.

Re:Modding as the Game

[ReverendLoki]

Back in the day, the only reason I picked up a copy of Half-Life was 'cause I had fun playing some of the mods. For me, a FPS is all about multiplayer - I just don't have as much interest in a single player FPS.

I think a big part of it is that developers are striving to make their games not only capable of being modded, but actually mod-friendly in the hopes of extending it's life and selling a few more copies.

In a way, this is just an extension of what we are already seeing amongst the developers - the actual content producers are becoming more seperated from the engine developers. Whereas once the person making the game engine also designed levels, wrote out scripts and made content (for better or worse), now the people who develop the engine concentrate on the game engine and on producing tools for the content developers to use. Now, which group actually made "the game"? You could take the script and all the visual goodies and stick them on a different engine (such as levels from the orginal Doom on the Doom 3 engine) - is it the same game?

Since the developers are already seperating engine from content in house, it's only reasonable that the same principle be applied out of house (?). It's odd seeing that the first game to be released utilizing a new game engine isn't the game for which the engine was designed (Didn't that happen with that last Vampire: The Masquerade game?); it just seems somehow counter-intuitive. But from a business perspective, it kind of makes sense.

Re:Modding as the Game

[Ford Prefect]

This really has been an interesting trend in gaming. My only fear is that it's been slowly erroding the PC industry's ability to produce an actual game for playing rather than a platform for playing with. I love modding just as much as the next guy, but sometimes it's kind of fun to just do some semi-mindless shooting/puzzle solving/adventure. :-)

I'm one of the winners in this contest (you'll never guess what for), and I must admit that modding is one of the things I enjoy most about PC gaming. That said, there has to be a really good game underneath it all - I'd much rather be borrowing content from some world-class production than be messing around with building everything from scratch. I'm probably not the only one to think this.

Games that have intentionally set out to become the world's greatest modding platforms while neglecting the underlying games don't seem to do so well overall. Quake 3, for example, was a masterpiece of an engine, but the game itself wasn't so interesting to many people - including myself. So, while there were eventually some incredibly polished mods for the game, they never managed to be as popular as some of those on the archaic, primitive Half-Life engine.

I guess good mods might help sustain sales of a good game (look at Half-Life and its Counter-Strike), but there's the game to think about first - and if so many games do end up using the same or similar underlying engines, then sod the technology - it's the content, design and game-play which make the difference!

Modding Resources?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect story for this question. What books, and other resources does the slashdot audience recommend for the beginning modder?

Re:Modding Resources?

[Ford Prefect]

Perfect story for this question. What books, and other resources does the slashdot audience recommend for the beginning modder?

I haven't seen any useful books (although admittedly I've never looked) - I guess the best way of learning is by doing. If you're interested in the Source engine, have a look at the Valve Developer Community wiki, which has a huge amount of information available. There are also innumerable web forums and other communities dedicated to mapping, modelling, coding and whatever - I'm sure there'll be one aimed precisely at whichever game you're interested in.

My best advice would be to start small. Don't make the usual mistake of creating a team intent on building the next Counter-Strike killer - instead, start off by building something like a deathmatch map, a new prop, a new texture or some altered behaviour in the game's code. If it's worth releasing, then release it - otherwise, continue learning and having fun.

You don't have to create a massive total conversion to get recognition - for example, the first MINERVA map has no new code, a couple of modified textures, a few transplanted sounds and a new music track - other than the map itself, it's all standard Half-Life 2 content. But well over 160,000 downloads and counting. :-)

Modding as a movie.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's two other things that can be done with game engines. Making movies, and making "serious games" (educational usually).

BTW modding is a good way to save a mediocre game from extinction.

Is that you, Paul Atreides?

[Sunrun]

Sorry, totally off-topic...

Just that I initially read the title as "2005 Moddb (mwahd-DEEB = Muad 'Dib) Awards".

Re:Is that you, Paul Atreides?

[ClamIAm]

Hmm, I figured something like this was likely to happen.

More info would be nice...

[funklord9]

This article might be a good rundown of the best mods of the year for someone in the modding community, but for me as an outsider, this was terrible. Some of the descriptions of the mods were decent, however I found most to be useless.

For example:

Most mods struggle to introduce a few new guns, models, maps etc... This isn't surprising either, to add one model you have to make it, skin it, add sounds, sprites, animate it and then code it in..... christ almighty!! Forgotten Hope hasn't just added a few toys to play with either, they've added __250__ new things from guns to tanks to planes to people. That is one hell of an effort and this is one hell of a mod. Hats off to this team for a fantastic job. Play IT.

Such information as, say, what game this is a mod for and what exactly the mod does would have been nice. What they provide is a good indication of what sets this mod apart from others, but not much else.

Re:More info would be nice...

[Chabo]

Next to the title of each mod they had an icon for the original game. Mouse-over to see the title if you don't recognize the icon. For example, the mod you're taking about was based on Battlefield 1942.

Also, if you clicked on the links to those mods' pages, it says it there.