Your take on mods?

[bryce777]

Mostly, I have found them pretty painful.

Some say that modding is a crutch for lousy game designers. This does make sense - the modders' overlap with disgusting fanboi cum larper seems excruciatingly high to me. I tried to play some of the BG mods, for example, but what I found was a lot of excuciatingly horrible romances, including incest with imoen, and a lot of 'fixes' - some good, and some utterly retarded. I also found an amazing total conversion to use the bg2 engine...which was unfortunately unplayable for me a quarter of the way through.

On the other hand, I have been enjoying a few of the mount and blade mods. Sadly, they don't offer a lot as far as a real plot goes in general, but they at least offer some basic point to the game. But, maybe this just shows that modding is really to fix broken gameplay since m&b is really still just in the betas and has no story or strategic elements....

 

[Daigoji_Gai]

Mostly, I have found them pretty painful.

Some say that modding is a crutch for lousy game designers. This does make sense - the modders' overlap with disgusting fanboi cum larper seems excruciatingly high to me. I tried to play some of the BG mods, for example, but what I found was a lot of excuciatingly horrible romances, including incest with imoen, and a lot of 'fixes' - some good, and some utterly retarded. I also found an amazing total conversion to use the bg2 engine...which was unfortunately unplayable for me a quarter of the way through.

On the other hand, I have been enjoying a few of the mount and blade mods. Sadly, they don't offer a lot as far as a real plot goes in general, but they at least offer some basic point to the game. But, maybe this just shows that modding is really to fix broken gameplay since m&b is really still just in the betas and has no story or strategic elements....

Mods naturally vary in quality based on the modder's skills, the support they have (you are finding more mod teams pop up), and the time they invest.
To say that mod tools are simply a crutch of lousy developers misses the point and is naive. Moddable games have extended shelf life, contributes somewhat to sales, and extends the lifespan of a title.

There are great mods, like the Lazarus project for Dungeon Siege and Alien Swarm:
http://www.blackcatgames.com/swarm/

Then there are tons of crappy mods you can find by simply searching Filefront or Fileplanet.

Even for Morrowind, the quality varied from looking professional produced to piss poor.

It is hit or miss, but the moddability of a game is one of the features that helps me decide whether to purchase a game or not.

Example: I got oblivion for the pc instead of 360, because I knew it would be customizable.

 

[sheek]

I like how you don't have to mention you're talking about TES4 in the thread title any more. If the game's name is missing you assume it's more of the Oblivion crap.

 

[bryce777]

I like how you don't have to mention you're talking about TES4 in the thread title any more. If the game's name is missing you assume it's more of the Oblivion crap.

No, dipshit. If I were talking about that piece of shit game I would mention it.

Get out of my thread you fucking idjit.

 

[sheek]

Maybe you didn't want to start an Oblivion thread but I'll be proved right, you'll see.

 

[bryce777]

Discussing oblivion is fine, so long as it pertains to the topic at hand.

I don't play oblivion, but I remember playing arcanum not long ago and hunting for mods. There were a lot of promising mods, but a lot of them had serious issues even if they fixed some very messed up problems.

I spent so much time trying to find mods that did what I want without doing stupid stuff that I grew bored of it and just gave up completely.

 

[El Dee]

I generally have not used a lot of mods. Most ly because I am lazy. IMO it is also hard to find good ones and usely I don't have the time or motivation to sift through the shitty ones.

When I eventually get around to playing Mount and Blade I am going to check out some of the mods for it, because I have heard some positive things about certain ones here.

 

[Jason]

The only games I used a lot of mods with were Morrowind and NWN. With Morrowind, it was a matter of fixing and tweaking the game to my liking. With NWN, it was just trying to get my money's worth after that shitty OC.

 

[LlamaGod]

The thing is is that NWN and Morrowind were both made with the mod set already planned from the start. So anything they suck too much to implement, or can only implement half-assed or anything anyone might dislike at all: "The modders will fix it!"

Games like Mount and Blade didn't have that in mind with it's original creation. Also, M&B mods are usually just new ways to play the game, whereas Morrowind mods are mostly 'patch-ups' of the games tons of fucked up stuff.

 

[Old Scratch]

Most mods are shit, so I don't mess with them. The only mod I've downloaded that didn't seem like a complete waste of my time was CounterStrike. I generally don't want another player sticking their filthy paws into my experience with a single-player game, and I'm not the kind of guy who often tries to replay games. If I'm going to replay something, it will be because the game has that much complexity in its original state, not to see what some modder managed to sling into it.

 

[LlamaGod]

Like I said, the best mods are usually entirely new ways to play the game. When it comes to RPGs with mod kits, that's rarely the intention. Instead they end up being patch kits for whatever.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Most mods I tried were either for Half-Life or MW. In both cases they really did a lot for the longevity and "bang for the buck" of those games.
Call it a crutch if you want, but NO game can grant the degree of options, customizability and contiuous flow of new content that MW's mods allowed.

 

[Daigoji_Gai]

Like I said, the best mods are usually entirely new ways to play the game. When it comes to RPGs with mod kits, that's rarely the intention. Instead they end up being patch kits for whatever.

There were some damn impressive mods for Baldurs Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 that didn't fix things, but added tons of new content (but not new gameplay). Also the mods for the original Vampire: The Maquerade were decent (but not great).

Mods for RPGs I've seen in two flavors: Like you said those that change gameplay, and those that offer new gameplay.

While there were numerous tweaks to Morrowind, some of my favorite mods added new content, dungeons, houses, npcs, and quests. I think in that case, as I hope for Oblivion, it is a good thing once you exhausted your travels around the world and completed all the quests you wanted to do.

 

[LlamaGod]

Alot of the things they've added where shit that should've been in to begin with.

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

If I'm modding a game it's because I enjoy the gameplay and want more content. Now with a RPG it's hard to produce content (writing, voice, art of quality) that can really compete with the manufacturers/autorized licenseholders. At least none that I've ever see.

If a game essentially requires 3rd party modding to make it worth playing right off the bat, what the fuck am I paying for?

 

[Daigoji_Gai]

Alot of the things they've added where shit that should've been in to begin with.

Ok... you know, that I will grant "somewhat". The removal of pack mules (for whatever reason), only to have a modder re-add them is a prime example.

 

[galsiah]

The thing is is that NWN and Morrowind were both made with the mod set already planned from the start. So anything they suck too much to implement, or can only implement half-assed or anything anyone might dislike at all: "The modders will fix it!"

I'm not sure that's correct, for a couple of reasons (with Morrowind at least):

From a community / fan perspective, I think the "The modders can fix it" line is only as common for Oblivion because people know that a lot of changes were made by modders for Morrowind. Was this line as common when Morrowind first came out? I don't know, but I doubt it.

From a developer perspective, if they were taking a "This element is a bit crap, but the modders can fix it" attitude, you'd expect the CS to support such fixes. Quite often it doesn't because, as Bethesda readily admit, it is designed for them to create content for the game - not for modders.
For example, my mod, which addressed what was the largest (isolated) problem with Morrowind for me, was certainly not supported. It was just about possible after fighting the CS and the game every inch of the way.

For NWN, I think you have much more of a case - I think the toolset was a much larger selling point of the game, and that the focus was mainly on the game engine, rather than the original campaign. In that sense, it would have been reasonable for the developers to rely on the toolset to fix the problems of the game, since the problems were (I think most agree) in the design of the content, not the engine.

For Morrowind, I don't think the devs were thinking "This can be fixed later" when they made bad design decisions. I think they just weren't thinking.


As to the idea that mods are not good because "Most of them are crap", that's just a stupid argument - on its own in any case.
It makes as much sense as to say that music is crap because "Most musicians / recordings are crap". Are most musicians crap? Sure they are. Are most recordings crap? Absolutely. That doesn't mean that music is pointless.

The difference with mods is that all the crap is freely available for you to see, play and hate. If some bloke plays the piano very badly, or makes a terrible guitar recording, the chances are that you'll never come across it. If someone makes a terrible mod, the chances are very high he'll put it on the net, and that it will end up on one or more mod sites. Given that it takes an hour and no talent to make a bad mod, and weeks and talent to make good ones, there will probably be more bad ones than good ones.

The problem is not that "Most mods are crap" - most music is crap too, and most games aren't too special. The problem is the difficulty of finding the good mods amoungst all the crap. For Morrowind, I don't think this is hard (though getting a perfect setup certainly is). For other games I'm not sure.

With regard to Oblivion, expecting good quality, non-trivial mods this soon after release is just a little silly. If you're only going to use mods in the first few months after a game's release, then of course most will be simple, and many will be buggy.


As to the "Mods provide an excuse for poor game design" argument, I don't think that's a significant factor. By far the most significant excuse for poor game design of modern games is that much of the target audience doesn't care about element X. That and the ever present time and money issues.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Well said Galsiah, my opinion exactly.

 

[Rat Keeng]

I'm mostly disappointed with what modders tend to focus on. As was said, Baldur's Gate II's modding community is littered with new party member mods (often with romances and/or conflicts with other romances), and just plain old romances (often with conflicts and/or incest). Seems like the only reason they haven't made a Gorion romance mod is because they haven't thought of it yet

Bloodlines has a couple of half-decent mods that alter it's gameplay a bit, the rest of it is retextures, new textures, texture-swapping and model-swapping. It shows just how talentless modders are, that the only thing they're capable of is re-painting models.

 

[bryce777]

'As to the idea that mods are not good because "Most of them are crap", that's just a stupid argument - on its own in any case.
It makes as much sense as to say that music is crap because "Most musicians / recordings are crap". Are most musicians crap? Sure they are. Are most recordings crap? Absolutely. That doesn't mean that music is pointless. '

Well, there are a lot of problems with mods compared to music.

First, you can tell that music is crap or at least not to your taste in a minute or two. With a mod, it is difficult to tell without quite a bit of play, and the descriptions are often all pretty vague. If you don't know the game well already then it is hard to tell what's been modded in the mod. I've soldiered on with mods a few times never quite sure if I was making the right decision til I finally gave up.

Another issue is mods that do not do much - you are expecting sweeping changes and get a bunch of minor fixes. Not horrible, but not enough to be worth the effort to hunt down, usually.
Musis is super competitive and there is a massive selection, so even on limewire or whatever most of the music is at least of some value to someone. With mods, you are usually stuck with half a dozen choices, if you are lucky, and even when there is a lot of selection the quality does not seem to improve much overall.

 

[Zomg]

galsiah's points are good, but even good mods can feel kind of slippery sometimes. I hate the feeling of assembling mods and then sticking them in a game like Morrowind, even if the mod content itself is good; I'd rather a game be a monolithic object in my mind, rather than giving me reasons to perceive the game as a hodgepodge of disparate elements. On the other hand, total conversions are usually pretty terrible, just because of incongruous leftovers from the original game like UI elements.

 

[bryce777]

I'm mostly disappointed with what modders tend to focus on. As was said, Baldur's Gate II's modding community is littered with new party member mods (often with romances and/or conflicts with other romances), and just plain old romances (often with conflicts and/or incest). Seems like the only reason they haven't made a Gorion romance mod is because they haven't thought of it yet

Bloodlines has a couple of half-decent mods that alter it's gameplay a bit, the rest of it is retextures, new textures, texture-swapping and model-swapping. It shows just how talentless modders are, that the only thing they're capable of is re-painting models.

That is another thing - I don't care about extra textures and artwork. The only way I might care is 10 years down the road. For example, if someone could mod in some updated models for xcom that retain the same style with better resolution,t hat would be awesome. The extra textures in the last days mod for M&B are sort of nice but I would not even bother downloading it if that's all it were.

One problem with modding a game like morrowind or oblivion is that the userbase seems so childish, even more so than the bioware fanbois. It makes it extremely difficult to decipher what mods I might actually like and what ones are for the "I love hosries" crowd or the retarded romances crowd using user feedback.

 

[Daigoji_Gai]

For example, if someone could mod in some updated models for xcom that retain the same style with better resolution,t hat would be awesome.

That has happened in the case of a few games. I came across a foreign mod for Blue Byte's INCUBATION (awesome game that never got respect here in the U.S.) which updated ALL the models and graphics but retained the gameplay.

The same occured with System Shock 2 with the high res pack a modder came up with which replaced nearly every model in the game with ones that had higher res textures, and more intricate model designs that expanded on the original.

Most modders are amateurs... Amateur modders focus on textures and skins. If you are lamenting that the only mods you see are for textures and such those are basically kids playing with a photoshop.

Again real modders make sick stuff - and I can't point enough to Alien Swarm as one of the most amazing examples of what is possible when REAL talented modders unleash a real mod.

Like the poster said making a correlation to music (which was brilliant) it is naive to say all modders suck/only do textures.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

galsiah's points are good, but even good mods can feel kind of slippery sometimes. I hate the feeling of assembling mods and then sticking them in a game like Morrowind, even if the mod content itself is good; I'd rather a game be a monolithic object in my mind, rather than giving me reasons to perceive the game as a hodgepodge of disparate elements.

That's really a meta problem of yours then. The beauty of the MW plugin system, to me, is really that a mod, if done well, integrates absolutely seamlessly, instead of the tacked on stuff for some other games, so it's very easy to forget about the mods you use altogether. E.g. I was rather surprised after reinstalling MW on my new system, that the raodsigns were unreadable - because I had played with a mod that replaced them with fully readable models for so long, I had forgotten that was even a mod.

Bryce, there are numerous excellent lists available on the net about the best mods and what they do. Should be rather simple to avoid anything (in your opinion) childish. So that should not really be a problem.

 

[bryce777]

"Like the poster said making a correlation to music (which was brilliant) it is naive to say all modders suck/only do textures." I never said that, but it makes for a lot of crap to wade through, and a lot of mods I have seen, after reading up on them (sometimes for hours wading through long threads) I have realzied basically they have a bunch of skins - perhaps they make the game looks starwarsy or something, with a couple of tweaks to the gameplay to fit the mods.

The alien swarm might be pretty awesome from the achievement standpoint, but I am not sure it is something in a genre I'd like to see.