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I've recently been playing Egosoft's X3: Terran Conflict. I got it a long time ago, but didn't really take the time to figure it out until Steam's Summer Camp introduced a curious bit of bonus content that ended up really hooking me on the game. And I was having plenty of fun traipsing about the galaxy, battling pirates and xenons, setting up a little trade complex, and building up my own personal empire, until I captured a corvette who's pilot bailed out under the ruthless barrage of my Phased Repeater Guns... and had to repair it.
In X3:TC, you eject from your ship to claim an abandoned ship. While in your space suit, you have a small repair laser for patching up hull damage. For the smaller ships you start the game with, it's all fine and dandy, but it takes 10 minutes to fully repair a Centaur corvette. TEN MINUTES. That's TEN MINUTES of sitting there, holding the right mouse button, waiting. Granted, you can follow the advice on the forums and jam something on the button and go afk while you wait for your ship to patch up... and go watch a movie because it can take over 80 minutes to repair some of the larger ships.
Or you could be like me, and exclaim "this sucks! I wish I could fix it!"
So what did I do? I fixed it. Thankfully, X3 has extended support for modifications, both in terms of an in-game scripting tool and external database editing. The latter proved to be the simplest solution: I simply had to open up the “Bullets” file, find the repair bullet, increase its effectiveness from 20 to 500, and then save it as a mod. Voila! Repairs now only take 3 minutes for those big capital ships!
This isn’t the first time I’ve turned to mods to fix a game. I found Civilization 5 nearly unplayable due to units taking longer to produce than buildings, wonders building faster than buildings, and research occurring so quickly your unit would be obsolete by the time you moved it from your city to your enemy’s borders. A number of XML and SQL edits later and, voila! Playable and fun.
In both games I found that a small frustration led me to fixing a small piece of the game, which in turn revealed more design flaws and provoked more fixing, which eventually led to a snowballing redesign campaign that would come to a crashing halt when I realized something I wanted to fix was beyond my power to do so. In Civ 5, this was the unit maintenance cost scaling, which seems to be hard-coded into the game as an increase based on the number of turns that have transpired. This prevented me from causing unit maintenance to scale based on the number of units in the field. In X3, I was foiled by a hard-coded calculation for factory production which prevented me from making certain factories more economically viable by increasing their output.
Still, both of these games have given me more opportunities to flex my designer muscle than most others. More importantly though, I’ve had a lot more fun and invested a lot more hours playing these games than many others. Instead of just saying “yeah this game sucks” and tossing it aside, now I can say “this game sucks… BUT!” and try to fix it. I tend to spend about 30 hours playing a game that feels well designed before moving on; in comparison, I’ve already burned 80 hours in X3 and nearly 200 hours in Civ 5… and that doesn’t include the time I’ve spend in the mod tools, staring at tables of numbers and wondering how best to tweak them!
Whenever I buy a game now, I look to see what kind of mod support it has. Just in case I buy a game that sucks, I want to make sure I can fix it. Developers of the world: release more mod tools!
I often wonder what other developers feel about modding, though. When you release a game and your players accuse it of sucking and start over-ruling your design decisions in order to make the game appeal to them, do you feel that they’re somehow trampling on your hard work? Would you rather not release any mod tools and force people to play your game your way, or are you happy to see the creative input of your passionate fans focused on improving your masterpiece?
If you have any interesting stories of modding a game or having your game modded, please share in the comments section below!
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If I can ask, do you think modding has any negative consequences on the industry? I sometimes worry that certain industry bigwigs test less harshly and allow bugs out the door because they know they can always fix them with a patch later, or let a community member do it for them. Anything to push up the deadline, of course. Good post.
In that case though, modders had to write the tools first.
As for mods, it really depends on the game. I play a lot of older RPGs, and some of them outright rely on mods to work well with new operating systems, to speak nothing of the bugs many of those games shipped with (I'm looking at you, Arcanum). Right now I'm playing System Shock 2, and lowered both the enemy respawn and gun degradation rate because I find them far too high to provide an enjoyable experience... it was intended by the developers, to keep players on their toes at all times, and to provide a balance for powerful weapons, but in the end it hurts fun and becomes annoying. Of course, the two problems are also interlinked, because the more enemies you have respawning, the more fighting you have to do, and the more your weapons get worn out.
Generally, I'm not a huge fan of mods that change the gameplay, though - I much prefer to go with bug fixes and content extensions, but I'm also a stickler about "playing games the way they were meant to be played" (same with music and movies as well), so I can completely understand why others can't play some titles without huge numbers of mods installed.
1) Shift to console-focused development
With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Little Big Planet), the console UI isn't well suited for game modding and tweaking - and console hardware manufacturers are generally wary of anything which gives users potentially exploitable access to the platform.
2) Shift to multiplayer-focused gameplay
With most games now offering at least some multiplayer elements, it's important to ensure a consistent playing experience
3) Lack of return on investment
Even when mod tools are available, very few games develop a self-sustaining community; as a result, there's minimal growth in the userbase
4) High cost of implementing mod-tools
Internal tools are often unpolished, undocumented and occasionally buggy. Getting them into a state fit for public release can be resource-intensive
5) Concerns over game hacking
Mod tools can be used to produce politically incorrect hacks (e.g. making Lara Croft topless) and/or find unused content, such as the infamous Hot Coffee incident, or the many "obscene content/unlicenced IP" LBP levels which have been deleted. The developer/publisher could therefore be opening themselves up to potential bad publicity and/or lawsuits.
All told, it's not altogether surprising that there's not many mod-able games out there, these days...
I see no danger in allowing players to mod your games. As a game developer, your core mission is to let the player have a good time. If the player wants to change something to do this, more power to them.
Where modding tends to fall down, is simply when it comes to multiplayer. Even if you've got your game setup in the most awesome-cool-superfun way possible, the fact that your version is now out of sync with everyone else you'd like to play with is a killer. Once again, the ability to easily plug and play mod packages so that your friends can match your configuration (or simply have the behavior changed for one single game) is a real win.
Do all games need this sort of design capability? No, not at all. But I think any game that banks on player created content, should really strive for as much moddability as possible.
@Eric, when it comes to "meant to be played" there's often internal disagreements about direction. Like when a movie comes out and it's got the theatrical version but later you get the "director's cut" which can be very different. Which way was it "meant" to be? Your System Shock 2 example also shows that sometimes a player wants to play a game differently than it was "meant" to be played. That's really what I'm getting at: if a player disagrees about the game, shouldn't they be able to tweak it to make it more fun?
@Jamie, another example of how consoles are killing gaming, eh? :) I'm not sure that implementing mod tools has to be expensive though. Consider Civ 5, where "mod tools" just means shipping the game with raw XML data files rather than an encrypted file. And even if the tools are raw and buggy, why not make them available anyways? Say "here's some buggy tools, maybe you can make something fun with them" doesn't mean that gamers who only want polished content have to touch them.
I don't think "game hacking" in terms of obscene content is any concern at all. Hot Coffee was a problem because it was actually made by the developers and shipped in the game; it was just unlocked by players. I've never heard of any dev facing legal challenges because someone modding their game and added completely original obscene content to it.
On the issue of multiplayer, modding can be problematic. A game would have to ship with a fairly robust modding system whereby a game can be sure what its modified state was and only allow clients of the same modified state to connect. Still, multiplayer mods brought us the likes of Team Fortress, Counterstrike, and Defense of the Ancients, so I think modding is just as important for multiplayer as it is for singleplayer.
No comments yet about whether or not you guys think the experience of modding itself can be fun. Could developers see modding itself as a sort of meta-game that enhances fun and replayability in their games? Even without the community aspect of it, modding can allow players to get a lot more fun-hours out of a game.
Boo hoo... this means instead of sequel-itis game developers should get off their ass and develop new games.
Implementing user-friendly mod tools is very difficult; if players just hack the game's internal config files, there's a good risk that they'll end up putting the game into an unplayable state and be forced to reinstall, as it's likely to be unclear what caused the problem. It's possible for people to avoid this by using systems such as change control and testing changes on an individual basis, but it takes a lot more dedication and effort.
Shipping raw/buggy mod tools: this reduces the potential audience for the mod-tool, which in turn limits the promotional/sales benefit of the tools. And as with any system, supporting/fixing bugs after deployment is far more costly (and far more likely to generate negative reactions from the audience) than fixing it before release.
Game hacking: the problem is more about negative publicity than legal action - though Hot Coffee is still a prime example: the content may have been created by the developer, but it was disabled until unlocked via modding tools.
Also, legal actions have gone the other way - for instance, Tecmo has launched several lawsuits against people releasing nude-mods of it's DOA series:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=5591
Multiplayer: I'll fully agree that a robust modding system is required - certainly something more robust than modifying XML in Notepad ;)
In the end, modding can be fun - but equally, it's something which is only enjoyed by a fairly small subset of users and (much like multiplayer) tends to only be used for a short period before interest declines sharply, as new games are released. It therefore offers minimal benefits from a business perspective.
After all, how many third-party mods have seen significant commercial success? Counterstrike (Half Life), Team Fortress (Quake), Gary's Mod (Half Life 2) and... that's pretty much it, give or take a few expansion packs such as the ones for Doom and Civ 4. There's plenty of mods which have received critical acclaim within the modding community (e.g. System Shock 2, GTA:VC, Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls, Stalker, etc), but the key phrase there is "within the modding community".
Equally, when it comes to games which are designed from the ground-up to be user-moddable, results have been heavily mixed. The Sims series has been a runaway success, but Spore seriously failed to meet expectations and Sony's Little Big Planet had seriously low initial sales (though to be fair, it does appear to have become something of a slow burner, with 4.5 million lifetime sales). Then there's the Guitar Hero music-making system , which failed miserably - and in the case of both LBP and GH, the fact that achievements/trophies were tied into creating media meant that players were soon overwhelmed by poor quality mods created just to get the reward.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't release mod tools. The number of games which see measurable direct commercial benefit from them can be counted on one hand, but it does help the game get good press and there's considerable secondary benefits to the industry as a whole: not only can entire genres be invented or popularised (e.g. FPS team-multiplayer, Tower Defence) but there's also been several examples of modders using their "tinkering" experience to get a foothold in the industry...
"Boo hoo... this means instead of sequel-itis game developers should get off their ass and develop new games."
You mean game publishers should.
I didn't like the way that the Free Market choice was defined in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. I thought it was too heavily penalized for the benefits it offered. (A commentary from one of the designers, perhaps?) Happily, SMAC -- by design -- was easy to mod. So I tweaked that value and had a more enjoyable gameplay experience.
Was SMAC "broken?" Or did making SMAC easy to mod mean that it *can't* be considered broken?
Can it be speeded up through skill (or I fear monetization)? If not I am really curious what is the reason to design such a failure...?