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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 loved the PDS mod for Homeworld 2. Really enhanced the flight mechanics of some of the ships.
TWCTF for the original Quake is probably the best mod of all time. Not Counterstrike, or Team Fortress (lol sorry). Not only because the inventor of the Geek Code Block had something to do with it. KTHXBYE!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Was "PornDoom"
Yay
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
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.
Way back in the annals of gaming history - the early nineties to be precise - an incredibly important game was released on the PC. That game was iD Software's now permanently immortalised Doom. We don't have to tell you about it, you already know, but depending on just how old you are and just how much you tinker with your games you might not realise Doom possessed one of the first heavily modded game engines.
By the time Doom was released people had already dabbled in modding on earlier games like Wolfenstien 3D and A Bard's Tale with such fervour that iD co-founder Tom Hall made one of his early goals with Doom to allow user created content to be designed with as much ease as possible. At release users could alter the graphics, levels, sounds and even core design of Doom by taking to its internal 'WAD' file format with an array of MS-DOS based tools creating new, funny and downright stupid content for the 'father-figure' FPS game. Enterprising folk created new maps, new themes or even comedic endeavours like 'Mock 2: The Speed of Stupid' - a bundle of Doom maps whose designs were intentionally bizarre, boring or downright freaky.
From early forays like this an unspoken partnership was born between developers and end users that has exploded into a fiery dynamic world of user created content that takes the games we know and love, and makes them better. Counter-Strike is a case in point; a mod that turned the alien infested Half-Life into a detailed tactical shooter. It became so damned popular it overshadowed the original game engine it was built on, like the student outshining the teacher. Counter-Strike - like other big names in the modding world - only served to fan the flames.
The advantages of modding are easily spotted; the consumer gets to purchase a new game that once conquered, can be re-played in a new setting with new content or environments, while old games have their shelf life extended considerably through modding teams pushing the engine further with their own imagination and ingenuity. For the developer, the trade-off of spending time bundling good tools to expose the inner workings of its games for the modding community begets better sales of the title thanks to the attractiveness of the extra content available. And happily nestled in the middle of all this are the modders themselves, who get unprecedented exposure online to sell their own skills by building on the foundations of commercially released games.
Developers now look to the modding community for fresh talent to scoop up into professional roles and some of the best in the business have risen through the ranks from a starting point of game mods. The one downside of this gigantic orgy of creativity and content is the admittedly haphazard quality. With a few freeware tools and a decent game engine any nut and their army of trained monkeys can create and release a mod onto the market, resulting in the good stuff hidden amongst great wads of less than shining work.
That's where we come in. Gameplayer has scoured the length and breadth of the internet to find you some of the most promising game mods for some of the best games, and we're going to take you through each one. Some are new, some are old, some are finished while others are still very much a work-in-progress, but each one is well worth a look if you're on the hunt to get the most out of your games. Read on, and have your browser ready to do some serious downloading but just remember - the modding scene is big, huge in fact, so what we're showing here is just a drop in the ocean.
First Person Shooter Mods
BFWoWMod (Battlefield 2)
Complete and utter insanity often breeds excellent results, and there's no denying whoever thought up the concept of combining Blizzard's rich fantasy World of Warcraft setting with the anti-tank tomfoolery of EA's Battlefield 2 was a few elves short of an enchanted forest. The mod is an almost complete conversion of the graphics, sounds and playable classes of Battlefield 2, allowing WoW fans to take up the mantle of
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
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
I know there is some kind of page click metric that people get paid on, but honestly, would it hurt to put a list on the first page so I don't have to try to click through a site that is probably already getting hammered.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
No mention of Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat, in a collection of great mods, is shameful.
Also, the article doesn't mention Goldeneye: Source, which disappoints me. That mod has serious potential to scratch my Goldeneye itch.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
NoCD patches are incredibly useful.
I buy software. I don't abide most of the bullshit copy protection, though. I didn't carry a CD player in my laptop, I don't like the battery drain, and I don't like having to have the disk with me. NoCD patches made such games tolerable.
It states:
"This Gameplayer article highlights the programmers who are doing it best, and what mods have made biggest and most enjoyable impact on gaming."
The biggest impact on gaming when, in the last 6 months? Seriously most of those mods can't even begin to call themselves the best when compared to some of the originals done in Quake, Quake 2, Half-Life, etc.
My guess is the author is like 12 years old or something like that.
The list only covered mods for current games and games that are hardly old. There was no mention of Counter-Strike, the mod that exploded and practically brought millions of gamers back to half-life. There was no mention of mods for games like Diablo or Diablo II. It mentioned Doom, but didn't explore any of the fantastic mods that arose. Not even similar games like Hexen or Duke Nukem. Lame list. Period.
ZDoom is an excellent Doom update, and, although I can't find the rickroll mod itself at the moment, check this video example out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aJjMOy-Ops
Rome Total Realism (for Rome Total War) - still the best strategy game ever made.
sic transit gloria mundi
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.
This subgenera has a lot of potential, and has never been fully realized, but it has been tried before.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
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... :-)
It's clear that this list is a list of recent popular mods, rather than a list of the most successful and influential mods of all time, since pretty much every game listed is a rather current game, and that the submitter clearly didn't even read his own submitted article.
It even says it in the article itself:
Gameplayer has scoured the length and breadth of the internet to find you some of the most promising game mods for some of the best games, and weâ(TM)re going to take you through each one. Some are new, some are old, some are finished while others are still very much a work-in-progress
Leaving off mods like Counter Strike (hello, most played FPS ever), DotA (played more than vanilla War3), Team Fortress and Enemy Territory (both have real-game sequels), and TWCTF (which introduced CTF to FPSes) completely disqualifies it from being a serious list of the most influential mods of all time. I mean, the first mod listed, "BFWoWMod" for BF2, is still in beta.
This is akin to listing the "Most influential programmers of all time" and excluding Don Knuth while listing "that kid down the street that likes computers."
The article itself isn't half bad once you realize that it's the "Current Best Mods Available" and not "The Best Mods of All Time."
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
Clearly the most enjoyable and addictive Quake 4 mod, now a standalone. Are you having a good semester? A little too good? Then fuck it up by playing Urt 12h/day.
Um... Doom predates Warcraft 3. And I was creating maps for my friends in Wolfenstein 3D before Doom was even released.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
There's also Giants: Citizen Kabuto , which is exactly that: an action-RTS game, with an interesting story and a GREAT sense of humor! If you missed it, you can pick it up for $6.00 from Good Old Games.
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
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.
hi guys, I just wanted to say that the original title was Mods that Matter in 2008. It just seems like a lot of the comments are specifically reacting to the work 'successful' which was not added by me in the submission and is a bit misleading. Also to the person who copy and pasted the whole article. That is a pretty big breach of copyright, you shoud probably remove it.
It was also the only MS program that came with the source. ;)
Would mentioning WiX kill the joke?
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.
Aliens TC was one of the better ones for DOOM.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
were Starship Trooper maps for SC
and the intensly complex maps people would make for WC3. I haven't played in years, but it was so much fun! People did really neet things like wagon races, and Peon fights!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
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.
nuff said
Greetings, programs!
In my mind there are mods, and then there are total conversions. Mods alter aspects of the original game. A great example of this is Dawn of War. It's a really good RTS, but given the wealth of lore it was inevitable that the game would have to omit or modify a lot of material. The game also has strong mod support, and the number of mods designed to bring the game closer to lore, add more units, and so on is just absurd. On the other hand, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are frequently host to total conversions, where people pretty much make their own games and just borrow the engine and some textures. I got Half-Life 1 for Christmas the year it was released. I really didn't feel the need to buy a new shooter for years after that thanks to the variety of mods available.
The common thread in both of the games I mentioned? They both released mod tools. In Dawn of War's case, there was even a menu in the game where you could choose which mod to start. I'm sure this has paid off for the developers. In Valve's case, they even hired some of the mod teams. I'm sure Counter-Strike alone kept Half-Life 1 selling years after it should have been forgotten. I know my family owned a second copy so my brother and I could play online together, something I don't think I'd bother with for the majority of the games I play.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
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 :)
Though it hasn't been developed further, as far as I can tell, in the last 4 years - the Heroes of Might & Magic III mod "Wake of the Gods" http://wakeofthegods.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/
really deserves a lot of credit. Not only does it extend the basic game play, but it *ADDS* a scripting language that the original didn't have in any form, allowing for even *MORE* expansion. Map and Campaign editors are almost a given these days - but this one dives deeper, making changes that would almost seem to require the original source code.
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.
I totally agree.
Counterstrike (pre-source), or CS, was the first community-driven mod that turned into a huge commercial success. Based on the original HalfLife 1 engine, the now classic war between Terrorists and Counter Terrorists ran smoothly on even an old 300 MHz Celeron with a 3DFX graphics card. In a way CS is "the mother of all 3D mods" (that is to say: the first serious mod for a 3D FPS). Read more on Wikipedia.
Day of Defeay (pre-source), or DOD, was very much like CS but was the first mod to bring deployable weapons and player-classes to the world of modding, in a WW2 setting. While not as successful as CS in total number of players, it was the first 3D FPS mod to achieve huge success in a relatively short period of time. Read more on Wikipedia.
Natural Selection (pre-source), or NS, is the first game to mix FPS and RTS gameplay, by allowing a "Commander" to order his "troops" (all other players on his team) around the map using an FPS-like interface - a concept many games has since copied. Set in a sci-fi horror world, Natural Selection tells the story of the good and friendly aliens with big sharp teeth vs. the evil-evil Space Marines with their big and nasty guns... To my knowledge it was also the first FPS mod to allow multiple "game modes". Having a rather advanced gameplay which demands a lot of cooperation from players, "combat maps" where introduced as a means of teaching new players the basic concepts of the game. Read more on Wikipedia or on Unknown Worlds homepage where you can also read about the progress on Natural Selection 2.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...