More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Were you playing games through the late 90s and early 00s, by any chance? Because we’ve been here before. At least three of the most-played games on Steam right now came from mods.
Didnt the whole moba genre start as mod?
The third-most populated game on Steam right now is Dota 2. Dota 1 is a mod. Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. PUBG came from the designer of a Battle Royale mod for Arma.
And Auto Chess genre came from a custom game in Dota 2
Is LoL still the most popular game in the world?
Based off Dota
Almost certainly not, but it’s probably not far down the list.
And Half-Life was essentially a Quake mod. (More extensive than most mods, since the developers were able to modify the Quake source code, but a mod nevertheless.)
No, that’s too much of a stretch. Half-Life is it’s own game, they licensed and then modified Quake’s engine. That’d be like calling Satisfactory a mod of Fortnite.
Yes, as is Counter-Strike.
Yes, mod is short for modification.
The distinction you’re drawing seems pretty arbitrary to me. Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding. They were more closely tied to the original game’s internals, and they were harder to make, but they were still mods. Even today, it’s not uncommon for mods to add features to or change behavior in an engine, via loaders or DLLs.
I suppose it’s a matter of one’s perspective.
Yes they did. id Software, Valve and 3D Realms included their SDKs on the disk. All the way back in the 90’s they gave players the same tools they used to build the game. Any game that descends from Doom, all the way into the Source engine, store their assets in .wad files. We were replacing imps with Simpsons characters and titty chicks back when Clinton was president.
Now, the distinction between a game and a mod, I don’t buy the standard to be it’s own game as “started from scratch.”
Valve licensed the Quake engine from id Software. They changed it so much that the GoldSrc engine is considered it’s own thing; anything from skeletal animations to weapon reloading. They hired a novelist to write the story, they generated a ton of their own textures, models, sound effects and music.
Compare that to the original Counter Strike which was a pack of maps and some logic layered over Half-Life’s deathmatch mode.
Standalone product? Buy and run with no other dependencies? Game.
Officially released product from the same developer and/or publisher and/or rights holder that requires owning the original to function? Expansion pack.
Officially released product from the same publisher/developer/rights holder that does not require owning the original to function? Sequel.
Unofficially released product often a fan work that requires a copy of the original game to function? Mod.
I didn’t have to buy Quake to run my copy of Half-Life GOTY edition back in 1999. Though it came with a copy of TFC, which I think is technically an expansion pack as it required Half-Life to function but was officially released as a showcase of those modding tools I talked about in the beginning.
Those were not the first modded games.
In any case, you’ve already made it clear that you disagree. That’s fine, but it doesn’t make your view the defining one.
Mods are developed by fans in their free time, like the original Counter-Strike. To play it you had to own the original game and could get the mod for free. In contrast games like Half-Life are developed by a company with full-time employees, and sold for money.
Of course Counter-Strike hasn’t been a mod for a long time now. Valve took it over and turned it into a full game.
Started as Warcraft 3 custom maps before Dota 1.
I did in fact play games then. But back then, modded games weren’t anywhere near as common as they are now. And the games that were modded to make new great games were great to begin with.
Now adays we seem to start from trash and use mods to make it playable. Soo, do we need the trash?
Roblox gets mods and UGC because people wanted to be there to begin with. Mostly children, but still people. I don’t know how to make an apples to apples comparison about how prevalent modding was back then, because there are just way more games out today in general; but there were still tons of mods. Elder Scrolls and the mod community have always been intertwined, and once again, people like what’s there in the first place. Even with the reputation of Elder Scrolls being a game you install mods on, it’s only something like 10% of players that ever install them. I have never modded Elder Scrolls.
In fact Morrowind (arguably Bethesda’s best game) is still getting mods made for it over 24 years later. It’s biggest mod, Project Tamriel/Tamriel Rebuilt, is still getting made and worked on, and just had a major update last April.
I wonder if there are metrics on % of players using mods across lots of games to see if there are patterns.