I was looking at the thread about greentooths influence on PC and then clicked on the "Way back when" archive and started wondering and thinking about modding, No one really does it anymore, if they do it's an older game or an older engine, now days everyone is always focused on being the next big thing and making their own game.....what happened to just modding and being like "look heres my weapon inside this game!" or "here's my cool new map! play it!" i mean people make stuff for tf2 sure but the majority of modding died out, i remember playing so many games back in the day and checking out awesome new maps and finding cool character skins....lets find a cool old game, and make a simple mod, i guess ill just have to do what Chris Holden does and make old TDM and DM style maps and such. What does everyone else think? want mods back? or am i just completely out of the loop and there's still a huge mod community out there?

The mod scene is pretty active dude.

Tf2 monetizes map and asset creation.

There's a big thread for dota2 workshop in p&p.

fpsbanana and similar places still get tons of traffic for weapon models and skins.

There are several active source, ut3, and crysis mods indev.

There are tons of custom maps for games like unreal tournament still getting kicked around.

Arma2 modding, which was always steady, just became explosively popular...

DLC.
Why let players make their own weapons and maps to distribute for free when you can charge them for it? Obviously there's still studio's(publishers) that encourage modding; Valve, Bethesda (Skyrim) and a few others and they've got a lot of great systems in place to help facilitate things. Modding used to be great for extending a games life after release, but there's a lot of others that just want you to give em your money, play the game, and then give em more money for the next version.

http://www.moddb.com/mods

Originally Posted by z0ltan

http://www.moddb.com/mods

Thank you.......for being an asshole

A lot of stuff happening with Blender game community all the time.

as for making mods for older games, people usually attempt to match the style or asset quality of game they're modding. With new games you got to have skills at pro or almost pro level in order to be able to make levels and assets of similar quality.
and even if you have pro skills, developing such high quality mod will take unbelievable amount of time compared to a studio making a short game of same quality.
by making mod for older engine you're increasing your chances of ever finishing it.

and finally, lots of people are simply nostalgic aboout old games and would play anything that gives them more of same experience. that's why those mods are still popular.

when I was into modding in the Quake days everyone really just wanted to be a game dev but there weren't a lot of easily available tools to make your own game. In fact, most of the mods I was involved with eventually fell apart because the best members would get hired away.

There were also less mod-able games at the time, Doom & then Quake afterwords really had no competition until Unreal came out 2 years later. Each moddable game that came split up the modding community even more.

also... how much new titles have SDK? Modding is not dead (daaaaaayz!) but it will be soon.

dpaynter, pointing you to moddb isnt being an arsehole, its showing you that people are still making mods.

But by all means ignore Josephs post too.

Modding is far from dead, and there's a ton more dedicated sites for modding in general or specific games. I think people see all the super quality stuff here and shy away from posting, or would rather show off their work to a crowd that would receive it better. Personally, I'm moving away from mods for now, and want to focus on getting a career in games, I'd bet there's others in that boat as well.

A number of factors have affected the Mod Scene:

Number of tools released for modding - individual engines have their tools but there are fewer engines nowadays than before.
An Abundance of usable game engines - I think this is the biggest. Back in the Quake 3 era, you didn't have actual game engines available at entry-level prices. Nowadays you can use Unity, Ogre, UDK, and a shit ton more.
PC Gaming - PC Gaming has diversified significantly - the biggest game genres are MMOs (which can't be modded) and casual games (which don't really appeal to modding - the Peggle community isn't going to download custom patch .exes and horseshit around for 30 minutes to play your unauthorized Peggle maps). There are a ton of divergent Indie games which aren't all in the position to put out tools, and don't necessarily amass the critical mass of fans required to spawn a modding community.

And finally: you aren't fucking looking. There are plenty of PC mods out there for a number of games. What you don't see any more is full-fledged Total Conversion type deals, because you could just make those in UDK/Unity straight up and actually be able to publish.

http://www.torchlight2game.com/

There are a lot of factors...

Hardware is probably one of the biggest. You can't just pop your 360 game disc in your PC and browse around. Back when the PC was the dominant hardware and piracy was restricted to making physical copies, developers just left the game bits sitting around out in the open. Now a lot of gamers are console owners don't even have PC's... Or if they do its just a porn box.

The work and skill it takes to make a mod has shot through the roof. Before you could spend a few hours swapping out a few textures and change the games in significant ways.

Now if you're going to have the same level of impact you have to make a high poly sculpt, bake, do complex materials, figure out how to bind the mesh, even for the guys that like to dig in and jump the technical hurdles its going to take a lot more effort than it did in the past, you will probably have an easier time just making something from scratch.

Also there seems to be a lot of people who need tutorials telling them how to wipe their own ass...

Originally Posted by Mark Dygert

There are a lot of factors...

Now a lot of gamers are console owners don't even have PC's... Or if they do its just a porn box.

Also there seems to be a lot of people who need tutorials telling them how to wipe their own ass...

All too true. Sad but funny.

The release of UDK and game engines like Unity make it much easier for the average Joe to make their own game, where PC games get more and more difficult to pick apart.

Also, indie game successes on Apple's App store and on Steam seem to motivate more people to want to make their own game instead of modding existing ones.

Modding still happens, but you don't hear about it nearly as much.

Just my 2 cents.

People mostly no more doing mods they do royalty based projects instead.Only thing unchanged is their noobish attempts on making their own stuff.For someone who doesn't aware of difficulties of developing games would choose the option that rewarding money and yeah that kind of attitude started after release of some tools like udk,unity,appstore etc that helps to create standalone games that can be commercially doable.At the end,the success ratio haven't changed as it's name.Tons of royalties projects dies before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as happened to most of the mods.

We don't get less mods, we just get more games these days.

On top of that we've got way more powerful toolsets such as UDK and Unity, there simply is no point to modding when you can make your entirely own game.

Yet even with that I will have to point towards games from bethesda or something like minecraft, minecraft modding scene is MASSIVE.

Originally Posted by igi

People mostly no more doing mods they do royalty based projects instead.Only thing unchanged is their noobish attempts on making their own stuff.For someone who doesn't aware of difficulties of developing games would choose the option that rewarding money and yeah that kind of attitude started after release of some tools like udk,unity,appstore etc that helps to create standalone games that can be commercially doable.At the end,the success ratio haven't changed as it's name.Tons of royalties projects dies before seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as happened to most of the mods.

yeah

Originally Posted by Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

yeah

Yep, mod teams haven't gone away, they're just called "indie teams" now. 10 years ago you would be talking hundreds of thousands of dollars to license a game engine and bring a product to market, so it just wasn't feasible for small groups to make commercial projects, hence the large "mod" scene where people did projects for fun.

With UDK, Unity etc with cheap/royalty based licensing the feasibility of actually releasing a game with a small team/budget is much more realistic. Back in the days most mod teams had delusions of going pro eventually, its just that today most people skip the modding part and jump straight into pretending to be professional developers.

Its the same end result though, 95% of indie/mod teams will never actually release a product/mod.

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

. Back in the days most mod teams had delusions of going pro eventually, its just that today most people skip the modding part and jump straight into pretending to be professional developers.

Hows that ego holding up there EQ?

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

Its the same end result though, 95% of indie/mod teams will never actually release a product/mod.

Depends on the team and the title scope. Most teams try to pack in every feature before releasing it.


PS: I wish we didn't refer to our medium as products but instead pieces. "Title" seems less corporate stiff-ish

yeah the required skill increase is a big blow. Long gone are the days of pushing verts in milkshape XD

But the upside is SDK's have gotten better, altho fewer. Plus alot of people who started off from the modding scene don't have as much time know they've got jurbs.

Would be cool to have a Polycount Mod Competition or something, even if it was just abunch of DM_scifi_corridor_98974051 lol

I have to agree with eld we just get more new games lol

The entry to modding has become less advertised these days too. Back when we had only so many PC games and most of them had mod tools, developers advertised it and people knew about it. I've seen a lot of games recently with "mods" in the menu or just some editor .exe in the folder, but until then had no idea anybody could do it in the game.

A lot of developers are doing what DICE said they we're doing: they said they weren't going to make mod tools for their latest Battlefields because it would take so much effort they would rather put into making new instalments and DLC.