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

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

[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

[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!