why are standalone mods so much less popular than they were 10-20 years ago?
9 replies, posted
something like team fortress would be a dead mod nowadays. i can't count the number of multiplayer mods i've seen or tried that died very quickly. what's the deal?
It's not that standalone mods are dead, it's that the ability to easily make and provide standalone mods is dead.
Many big publishers treat modding their game as copyright infringement and whatnot for whatever reason so they go after the devs.
what standalone mods lol
hardly any game comes with modding tools nowadays
What flak said, plus changing tastes in video game genres I suppose. Now MOBAs and class-based shooters like overwatch are having their day.
Besides nowadays you have free good game engines available, something that pretty much did not exist in the time of Counter-Strike and TFC, back then you HAD to ride on someone else's game and hope they liked your mod enough to allow it to go standalone, nowadays it's just easier and better to make a standalone game than a standalone mod.
I think it's abundance.
Now that modding platforms and sites have gained prominence with a decade provided, it's easier to recognize garden variety experiences as the majority in the sea of mediocre projects and releases.
Everything was impressive ten years ago because there if you heard about something it had to have already gained headway or at least credibility. Now, skepticism is harbored because there's an actual community that can smell bullshit and bad ideas from a mile away.
Just my thoughts.
[QUOTE=Electrocuter;50819933]Besides nowadays you have free good game engines available, something that pretty much did not exist in the time of Counter-Strike and TFC, back then you HAD to ride on someone else's game and hope they liked your mod enough to allow it to go standalone, nowadays it's just easier and better to make a standalone game than a standalone mod.[/QUOTE]
Definitely this too. Those modders are now indie devs. Plenty of examples of modders moving to their own games. You can make a game exactly how you want yourself vs riding on a bastardization of another game.
Total conversion mods are very hard to make and they're pointless these days. If you want to make a game, you would make it on an engine like Unity or Unreal Engine 4, not bother with modding tools that are inferior to the tools you get with these engines.
Standalone total conversion mods were more popular back in the day because people didn't have engines like Unity or UE that you could use for free. You got three choices: write an engine from scratch, buy a license for an engine (this was expensive as fuck), or mod an engine that was intended for another game. Making a mod was obviously the most reasonable choice for the amateur game developer, but it's not anymore
It's a number of factors.
a) lack of modding tools
b) the amount of asset creation needed is insane compared to a decade ago
c) it's much easier to make a game running on UDK or unity rather than a mod.
Perhaps the only mods that still exist in some respect these days are Addons to RPGs and Conversions for RTS games. The latter because it's harder to get a decent engine for those. There's mostly just spring and that has ....issues.
I'll add another reason- the nature of modding has changed.
Lots of games now have a dedicated folder for mods, or a dedicated distribution network like Workshop, and/or are structured so that mods have minimal conflicts. It's less like modding and more like overriding
As a result, lots of the biggest modding efforts are now split into several inter-related modules instead of a single big fat total conversion mod. See: Long War [URL="http://steamcommunity.com/id/longwarstudios/myworkshopfiles/?appid=268500"]mods[/URL] for XCOM 2 or 5dim's [URL="https://mods.factorio.com/mods/McGuten"]total overhaul[/URL] for Factorio. For a mod to get popular, it needs to be in a format that lets players choose what parts of the mods they want AND they work perfectly fine alongside completely unrelated mods.
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