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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?
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.
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.
Really. A list of history's greatest mods, and no Counter-Strike? No Team Fortress? No Ricochet?.....
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.
They must mean best current mods.
Otherwise this list would probably be very different and would include the original Counter-Strike and Team Fortress mods, amongst others.
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.
No Half-Life mods? No Quake mods? No DOOM mods? The legends of modding go back much, much farther than Crysis and Oblivion, geez.
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.