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.