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A Look At Successful Game Mods
Parz writes "Mods have been an important part of gaming for well over 15 years. Not only have they provided plenty of additional free gaming to players, but they've acted as a launch pad for independent and amateur programmers to show off their skills to potential employers. This Gameplayer article highlights the programmers who are doing it best, and what mods have made biggest and most enjoyable impact on gaming. The article not only provides details for each game, but also links to the downloads, and is a great resource for those interesting in getting up-to-date with this exciting scene."
Obviously, this list will seem incomplete to anyone whose favorite mod was omitted. What mods contributed most to your enjoyment?
I think Warcraft III was the only game that I played where I never actually played the normal game. I always had some kind of mod like Tower D, or DoTa.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I played the original (not source) counter strike for countless hours! The source version was faithful to the original, almost exactly the same but with a couple of new guns and physics like ragdoll bodies and barrels moving with explosions! Fast frantic team based strategy shooter. Great.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
...the Doom (or was it Wolfenstein?) mod that let you blast Barney into oblivion.
not even a mention of one of the original FPS mods. I am talking about Team Fortress for Quake. I think, (and people can/will correct me if I am wrong), that it was one of if not the first mod out there.
it is a shame to not have mentioned the mod that started it all.
seems to have misplaced his
The Unreal4Ever & ChaosUT mods for the Unreal series.
The TeamBG tools & mods for Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Torment, etc) I made a few mods for these games, you can still fine them at purveyors of fine Infinity Engine mods.
More mods than I can even recount for Morrowind & to a lesser extent Oblivion.
Anything that adds content that was cut from Knights of the Old Republic II (replaying it now)
My really cool space mines for GalCiv I :D
Neverwinter Nights. nuff said.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Seriously, it is probably the most professionally done mod I've ever seen.
They took the buggy piece of crap that was vanilla Bloodlines and turned it into one of the most immersive role playing worlds I've ever seen.
You could argue that the dev team should have done this job, but I say that it's the end gameplay that counts, and this mod really delivers. Check it out.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
The reviewer is obviously too young or too obsessed with the present state of modding, since not even one of the many dozens of mods and thousands of units created by fans for Total Annihilation was mentioned. It's still being actively modded now, even though the game is over ten years old and has more recent "sequels".
Total Annihilation is very likely the most heavily modded game of all time, and it wasn't even mentioned? Pffft.
I believe "maps" aren't really mods, sorry.
And if you wish to take that route, then the many maps in Starcraft were the original "mods". Warcraft 3 just took most of Starcraft and made it 3D with a "hero" system. Guess that's why I never really enjoyed WC3, but loved Starcraft to death (SC2 and its now many 'expansions')
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
First game I ever modded was QBasic Gorillas. I found the variable that determined the blast radius of the bananas and increased it to ridiculous amounts, discovered that the game used colour-checking to do collision detection and gave the gorillas armoured helmets, found the palette entries and made the gorillas green, and composed my own song for the intro. That game was quite possibly the only good piece of software Microsoft ever produced.
For me Quake had some of the best mods ever. For Quake I there was Future vs. Fantasy, a great mod where you could play as different characters either from the future, or from the fantasy realm.
Quake II had a great one called Action Quake, which is somewhat similar in playing-style to counterstrike. But it had nice things like if you got hit in the leg, you'd bleed, and have trouble walking, until you applied a bandage. Thery were so much fun at the time!
They stayed a lot in my mind, though lately all I've been playing is DotA... :-)
Thanks a ton for posting the textual content of the article. Before even reading / searching through it, I somehow knew in my heart that not a single racing simulation related mod would be mentioned.
No GPLEA (the folks who continue to breathe new life into "Grand Prix Legends" on an annual basis, a sim that is over a decade old), no mention of rfactor (a racing sim essentially designed to allow easy modding by the community which right now has over 500 mods and tracks, on separate counts available), heck not even a single flight sim on this list.
Well, I guess I'm just not mainstream enough anymore ;-)
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
I'd have to put in my vote for Discovery mod for Freelancer. Not only does it add great features to multiplay,but it really makes the original single player game shine. If you have ever played the original Freelance,you know that battles often are a turkey shoot,either you die instantly or they do. With Discovery the battles from the very start are challenging,because the AI IMHO acts more like playing a real player. They really give you a good fight. And there are so many new things to see and do in Discovery I don't even know where to start. Really a great example IMHO of a great mod.
And this article is a good example of why I still prefer PC gaming. Thanks to modders after a game is beaten often you can go online and find so many new things to try and do with your game that IMHO it really adds value to the games that allow modding.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Although they had a few Half-Life 2 metions in the article. They failed to mention the fact that Steam was made mainly for the purpose of creating and maintaining a MOD community for Half-Life.
The article is loaded with phrases like 'our research indicates' and half the mods aren't even released. How can you decide what the best mods are if you've not even played them? Having ALFA (A Land Far Away) listed is amusing considering it was the laughing stock of the NWN community for years and despite its 'ambition' never did anything dozens of other persistent worlds hadn't already done.
The "we have no clue but slashvertisments pay"-kind.
Slashdot is declining but still attracts roughly 8 million page views per day.
The article has 10 pages, each carries 5 banners.
Let's assume they are paid a very conservative $.50 USD per one thousand unique visitors for each of these banners.
Let's further assume slashdot drove 2 million unique's to the article.
Let's further assume those people, on average, clicked through 3 pages before they realized there is nothing to see.
That's a solid $15000 USD, under fairly pessimisic assumptions. They probably made closer to $30000 by the time you are reading this.
A mod for Unreal Tournament is what drove me to buy my first "gaming" rig. When I saw Infiltration being played and my friend explained it was made by other players using the unreal editor something resonated and I have been a mod fan ever since. Sadly, the unreal franchise has lost its credibility for supporting mods despite the success mods brought them Same with EA and the Battlefield series. A great mod revived the franchise yet they cripple real modders now from being able to do inventive, creative changes. The only champion for mods I suppose is Valve. I buy all my games from Valve now.
This game was awesome for it's hackability.
Everyone hated the hackers, and so did I when they ruined non-hacking games, but it was really amazing to see the kinds of stuff they could do. When it was hacker against hacker, you'd see the extent of their bag of tricks: measures, counter-measures, counter-counter-...-measures, never before seen tricks, etc.
Basic example: You had people that could "fade" which required setting a flag on an opponent's character to make the game think they were falling to their death. The victim's screen would then constantly fade to black as if they were falling off of a cliff, and deaths would be counted against them. Setting your victim's death flag required altering the code for various force skills. For example, you could alter the force grip code to set the "fade" flag instead of the intended "choke" flag on your victim.
That was the most basic hack. Then you had people that had counter-fades, counter-counter-fades, counter-fade penetrating fades, etc. Of course, this is just an example, there were a plethora of things you could do: shoot all manner of projectiles (AT-AT out of a repeater? Sure!), fill the level with water, almost anything you could think of.
Some of the great hackers just couldn't be killed by anything you threw at them, hacked or not, and your attempts to make yourself invincible just wouldn't work against them.
The hacking became a game of its own. You couldn't just alter any code any way you liked, you still had to play by a certain set of rules. The game used (basic) checksums, and you had to be clever with your hacks in order to have them work.
This ease of modification led to some really awesome mods, but it was the ways people could twist the original game within the constraints that really intrigued me.
I think there's still a community on IRC that keeps this game alive, and I bet there's still a hacking community :)
Seriously, how can this be called "The Best Game Mods"? As much as I hate it, Counter-Strike has to be one of the biggest and widely played mods (and now standalone game) of all time, and it doesn't even get a mention???
I could list countless other mods over the past 10+ years that make a lot of the vaporware in that article look like some 14 year-old kid just heard about modding and started making some screenshots.
Some of the big mods that should/could have been on that list if I were to write it:
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.