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2007 Mod of the Year Winners
intenscia writes "The 2007 Mod of the Year Awards players choice winners have been announced, capping off a great year in gaming. This year titles which were influenced by the War in Iraq fared well, with Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2 and the GPL'd ID Tech 3 engine polling strongly in the indie games and released mods categories. Crysis mods, though still in the early stages of development, did well in the best upcoming category as indie developers attention shifts to some of the next-gen engines."
Was all the people who gave me + moderation for this comment.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
"The 2007 Mod of the Year Awards players choice winners have been announced, crapping on a great year in gaming"
I'm sorry, I take all video games awards with a grain of salt now since the spike VGAs and gamecock... Some games get better with mods... others, not so much... I just know I don't want to be the one sorting the gems from the crap.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
[Sigh] Maybe next year.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Player's choice - it's the players who voted for these. Mod DB had no say in who won, only the people who voted did. If you're interested in the Civ IV mods though, feel free to look and you can vote for your favourite next year.
Disclaimer: I am a site manager for Mod DB.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Lots of straight-up FPS/RTS action. Beyond the Red Line (the BSG mod for Freespace 2) took first place in its category, and rightly so. the BtRL team has worked wonders in recreating the dogfights from the reimagined Galactica. Sound, voice chatter, environments and visuals all look Just Like The Show. And the dogfights play out like the ones on TV too. Gotta spend more time in multiplayer with that...
It is a shame that the Silent Hunter mod community isn't represented on ModDB. The Grey Wolves Expansion (GWX) is an amazing piece of work. One truisim of sim development is that most commercial projects aren't made up of enthusiasts (IL-2 Sturmovik is lucky to have aerospace engineers and pilots writing code), so commercial sim releases tend to have weak campaign modes and compromises to detail and realism. The GWX mod (now at 2.0) changes damage models, sounds, AI behavior, ship and aircraft models and textures and overhauls the dynamic world in which you run missions. Stock SH III campaigns get boring fast, in GWX you never know what you might run into on your next patrol. Oddly, it's both more varied and more realistic. And SH III always had the fear factor, attacking an escorted convoy is an exercise in applied terror: applied to you. Many SH III veterans will admit that their hands shake after an attack no matter how many times they hear depth charge splashes above them.
If you're at all interested in submarines or naval warfare, try it. Skip it if you get motion sickness, North Atlantic storms make for very rough patrols. SH III is still available cheaply, may still be available for download. GWX itself is a free download, check the www.subsim.com forums for links.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
...and can safely assure you that unless you are a fan of very minor variations on the "I have a gun, you have a gun" FPS concept, there is *nothing* for you here.
The expectation may be for some original, Portal-quality games. If that's the case, then these fan-selected winners will be a disappointment.
Given that mods are pretty much dead (or at least not where they once were) it is good to see that people are still playing around with Valve's Source SDK (though not too much else it seems).
If someone could just come up with a quicker method of creating new meshes/maps/art I think the mod comminuty would obviously be in a better state. Lets face it, the time it takes to create new assets has gotten crazy. It isn't something for a 15 year-old kid with 5 hours to burn and a copy of Milkshape anymore.
Blender devs are you listening?
I play the GWX mod pretty frequently, and cannot recommend it enough! It's much more than a graphics update. I love the added REALISM that the team has added to the vanilla SH3 platform. And the way the difficulty level is scaled, as things get more realistic, they also get way more difficult.
No longer can you surface and go toe-to-toe with your deck gun against a destroyer with impunity, like you could in vanilla SH3. The oceans are littered with roving convoys of war machines bent on sinking you. Planes will hound you until you dive, and one well-placed depth charge is all it takes to end your career.
Playing GWX feels like the submarine itself is working against you. In even the most advanced subs, diving times are realistically abysmal. Fuel, battery power, and CO2 levels must be carefully managed. And even your ultimate weapon scarcely helps things: Torpedoes must be precisely aimed using high school trigonometry, and you'll probably need more than one shot to safeguard against duds or glancing blows.
If you are able to sink anything at all under those circumstances, then it truly is cause for celebration.
Happy hunting!
A lot of real quality mods didn't come to light in the Unreleased, which is a shame. More of the same stuff we always see, more of the same mechanics and scenarios. Still a lot of "hey we have a lot of models" with no actual new code or gameplay being shown off. Zombie Panic had an absolutely awful launch and I still prefer Zombie Master. Insurgency is a snoozefest, I really tried to like it, though. Project Reality is fine if you can find a populated server: good luck! Empires is really the best one out of the picks gameplay wise as the customizable tank thing and the amazingly well done RTS/FPS hybrid system makes it shine. It's still imperfect though.
Also, the narrator wasn't so great, sounds like they just hired some random teenager or something. This sort of production should have a more professional tone IMO.
you insensitive clod!
Warcraft 3 has excellent Mods (maps). The map editor is totally awesome. A friend and I recently broke out wc3 and played some Final Fantasy Epic RPG and Tower Defense maps.
I wrote about 6-7 maps, and fine-tuning those things takes ages to get right. I learned a lot about game balance doing that.
I would dearly love to have a platform that was open source and similar in power to WC3. WC3 has a bunch of limitations especially in regard to reaction times and keyboard mapping that would easily be remedied by continued open source development.
A good expandable game mod environment needs support for:
Scripting/programming in a api/language tailored for the job
WC3 has very accessible dialog driven scripting. (You could go to text but was harder to use).
Model support
WC3 has good but not excellent model support.
Terrain editing.
WC3 has a very easy to use and powerful terrain editor.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Vague approximation from memory: first stage late last year, each ModDB mod and game profile had a vote button on it - each ModDB member was allowed to nominate an unlimited number of mods and games.
Second stage: the top hundred mods and games from the first stage were subjected to a second vote. I think that, once again, each site member could vote for as many as they liked. I think there may be limits on new user accounts, or something - I wasn't paying much attention.
Finals: the top five unreleased mods, then the top five independent games (apparently there weren't enough unreleased games to make it worthwhile, or something), and the top five released mods are posted. Winners!
Tomorrow: the editors' choice awards, which will almost certainly be more esoteric than today's populist results.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
can someone please summarise this? The video has a lot of 'I learned editing yesterday, watch me play music and show images I made' stuff in it. I just want a list of the winners, dammit!
Sure thing. Ford Prefect (above) got it almost perfect.
Any mod or independent game (Not commercial titles) which hasn't been archived (Marked as inactive with no signs of life) or deleted (Through simply being a waste of oxygen, no signs of anything more than a vague idea, think the countless CS clones) is eligible to be nominated for MotY by any registered user of the site. Each user has unlimited votes, but may only nominate a mod or game once. At the end of the phase one voting, the top 100 mods and games (by number of nominations) are all collated and made available for voting, again by any registered user with unlimited votes, capped at one per mod/game. End of phase two, we remove those mods which are ineligible (through winning in previous years) and are left with the top 5, who are picked out in the awards article.
All the voting is subject to pretty intensive anti-rigging techniques and is fully automated, only senior site staff can see the results before they're announced. All the nomination for awards is entirely done by the public.
We think it's the most honest 'public opinion' awards for gaming there is, all a mod needs to be in with a chance of winning is a fanbase and a Mod DB profile (which is free). We usually suspend our indie and mod reviews etc during MotY as well, to limit our influence on the voting by linking profiles (and hence the 'nominate' or 'vote' buttons) from the front page any more than the normal 'most popular' columns (again automatic) would achieve.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I have been playing Urban Terror the Q3 mod since my son was inside my wife's belly 7 years ago. I love that it's still going strong with updates, new maps, and new players. Now it has a version of the open source'd Q3 code so it's free to play.
you must have: - tanks - guns that fire bullets - soldiers - realism - fans that can't decipher anything more than the above in gameplay terms and you've got a winner. Shame OA and Fortress Forever didn't make it. OA was only 7 votes away from being in the Top 100 and it didn't even call its community out for any votes. Ever.
What is so implausible about a program that provides the tools to customize and animate a generous selection of pre-built models? Pixar uses in-house tools like "Universal Man."
There are other professional tools out there to generate realistic terrain, trees, and so forth.
Why not something for the modder?
..It's unfortunate that the much hyped Black Mesa: Source is unavailable to enter this contest. Early screen shots have it looking so nice that it's almost a crime that this should be a Mod to Half-Life 2: Source. This should have been a project taken under by Valve, and completed with-in a shorter time frame.