Game development these days is too bloated and time consuming. Creative positions have taken a back seat to technical challenges.
In most cases when a studio decides to start a game, they start from scratch. They hire an army of programmers, modelers, animators, management, QA, lawyers, and marketing people. Nameless workers in cubicles then devote the next few years of their life trying to make it all work. It would be absurd for a filmmaker to build a camera every time he wanted to make a film, yet this is the norm for the game industry.
As a result, games are taking longer to develop than ever before. Half-Life 2 famously missed it’s stated release date by 14 months, Team Fortress 2 took 9 years, Starcraft 2 still has no release date after being in development for at least 5 years, and many upcoming games are following this trend.
Half-Life had a huge mod scene in it’s early years. Counter-Strike was created with a team of two people and went on to become the most popular online game for many years. Unfortunately, the ability to make a game with such a small team has diminished. Even with the much larger online player base of Half-Life 2, very few mods are being made. It’s all become too much work and too complicated.
While I enjoy using different games to create machinima, I must learn new tools for each game that comes out, often with little or no documentation. Game developers give little priority to releasing or fixing tools that can aid with machinima or modding.
The Spore creature creator is a great example of game design done right. Although the game itself received mediocre reviews, the creature creator is what it will be remembered for the most. People with no experience were creating amazing creatures that looked about 90% as good as something professionally made.
This is the key for independent games to make a comeback in a huge way. People with an idea could pursue it rather than have technical hurdles slow them down. The days of making games with C++ and Maya should be history. The future is procedural and player generated content.
Give players the tools to enhance your game and they will bring it to a new audience.
i don’t dislike modding and machinima but i thought the devalopers hated modders and were trying to stop them
I think you’re getting a little confused between modding and hacking/cheating/piracy, Nathan. I think most developers are fine with their games being modded – a large amount of their staff probably come from modding backgrounds and if someone wants to play a mod they have to buy the original game, it’s win-win.
Anyway, I think this post is a little flawed. You use Spore as an example of a game where players can create something that looks professional very easily. The problem here is that they aren’t really creating anything. They’re just putting a bunch of premade models together and tweaking some parameters all from a user-friendly interface.
C++ and Maya are here to stay. Why try to replace a proven content creation pipeline with a player-friendly one which – although easy to use – requires a lot of work on the premade assets, a lot of work making them morphable and is, in the end, very limited in what can actually be created with it.
The modding side of gaming shouldn’t be catered to people with the lowest skill. If someone is too lazy to learn how to model/animate or learn some basic C++, then should they really be modding at all? The problem I see with the modding scene today is the rafts of modding newbies starting up ridiculously ambitious mods and expecting to produce the next big thing. At the moment, all they end up making is a Half-Life clone with maybe a few changed skins and some blocky maps.
Is that really a bad thing? No. These people may choose to continue to learn and get better, eventually progressing to a level where they’re turning out pretty stuff. At this point, they’ll have a good skill-base in mapping or modelling or programming, etc.
If the modding scene was to follow this idea of easy content creation and newbie-friendly tools, then we’d just get hundreds of permutations on the same thing. Sure, they all might look professional-ish, but they’ll be boring as hell. We’d only have one or two kinds of gameplay, because programming won’t be considered “cool” and at the basic level, everything will look the same. What’s more, all these so-called modders will consider themselves highly skilled and close to the level of professional developers. Then, if they try to go into any real game industry they’ll get a big slap in the face when they’re forced to learn real tools used by real people – because they’ve spent too long being pampered with rubbish.
Bottom-line: leave the modding to the people with the conviction to stick it out and learn how to use software that – although it may be difficult to use at first – allows true freedom in content creation.
I disagree with Hamish, I don’t think modding should be an issue.
so what software can i use to mod, if i wanted to
With C++ and Maya, your options are more or less unlimited. With the Unreal Engine or (insert competitor here), you are more restricted but still have a great deal of flexibility and pwer in creating content. With Spore’s creature creator, you can make… a creature for Spore. Similarly for those games with map editors. When it comes to learning curves and ease of use, it seems that by and large you get what you pay for.
I’ve starcraft 2 beta, yet all attempts to use it have failed, I have tried ALL mac/laptop VMs, crossover, wine and the remaining, all lead to the same error. So I’ll bide my time and look forward to a mac version to be sent. Kinda inconsiderate to send a person who states they own a mac a laptop beta :( . I simply wish they will release the game quickly!
As is my understanding, the high quality titles MOSTLY have a construction kit and ways to mod. You can look at many of those top selling titles and see there’s ways to mod them.
Amazing post here along with discussion! Am i allowed to translate it for our site community in Belgium?