Will we ever see this kind of a modding community ever again?

nah. games don't come with dedicated SDKs any more that the devs would use. If they do it's a half-baked asset placing map editor at best, or lol you can just edit cfg files. modding has been dead for fucking years and it always tickles my prostate whenever redditors try to act like its relevant any more except for old as fuck games a pentium 3 can play.

Pretty sure in the near future people will be claiming that modding is stealing. Fuck, it already happened with Project M.

Yeah, stealing money from the devs because your mod is better than the original horseshit they put out and they expect your game to step up to the plate.

And the corporate drones will cry to have your mod removed because you're starving those poor hungry AAA devs :(.

This.
Today there is such huge disparity between low tech indie games, that are usually 2D or some sorta minecraft clones, and full priced AAA games that are all knee-deep in the uncanny valley, you just can't expect modders to make something that will look not out of place of those games, even if they're moddable to hell and back.
There is no middle ground where some average student can make a model comparable to that in the commercial game in his free time.

When Half-Life 1 came out it was relatively hard for newbies to actually make models

Software at the time to make models was either A) extremely expensive stuff like 3dsmax. Or B) extremely shit free/trial software. There wasn't middle of the road stuff like today where you have extremely functional and yet free software like Blender.

Most of the time so called "newbies" are actually more making their first models that they actually finished. Making low poly art isn't necessarily "easier" to make than higher poly art. Infact most beginner modelling tutorials aren't low poly. Low poly art is somewhat challenging to make well and takes a lot of knowledge of how to make actually good art first.

I don't necessarily agree with this. There's significantly more resources than there ever were at the time for making models for things like video games. And indeed a lot of students make models for games like Skyrim and other stuff.

It's moreso that 3D modelling has such a high learning curve that it takes a while to get to the status where you are employable on something like a video game. At least 3-4 years unless you're taking a course and have a practicum.

A big reason why this is, is because fewer and fewer devs actually make their own software. They tend to license it all. Like almost all developers now license their engines and use shit like Unreal and Unity.

Because of this making an SDK actually costs the dev a lot of money because they aren't legally allowed to redistribute code that they've licensed. Most of the time an sdk is released now it's done post release because the developer needs to essentially rewrite a lot of the sdk they used to avoid giving out that code.

There's also less incentive for devs to make sdks now due to the amount of free game engines there are nowadays. They figure players are more inclined to attempt to make their own games rather than spend a lot of time working on a mod for one.

nah this is bullshit, the main reason people even buy bethesda games are the mods, having a good sdk tool allows your game to be enjoyed by more people and it gives a huge amount of replayability to the community without even trying.

bethesda's sdk is shit and its worldview and crap is shit too. for fuck sakes you cant even use wasd keys to move around.

That's Bethesda games user. Bethesda games are AAA games that are well known for mods. There's plenty of games that have sdks that nobody even knew had mods.

That's long term sales. Bethesda is aware of this sort of thing and they can afford to spend money on this sort of thing because they know people expect it and buy the game on PC mostly because of it. But also that it translates into long term sales years down the line.

Most game devs/publishers don't give a fuck about long term sales. They do not care how well the game sells in 3 years. They care about preorders, the first few months and after that all they care about is marketing for a sequel. Because it actually costs money to release sdks now a lot of the time the publisher doesn't see it as an actually worthy investment compared to something like DLC which has a measurable gain in revenue and is short term profit.

Games cost so much to make nowadays they don't feel like it's worth taking unnecessary risks that don't necessarily actually pay off. Plus most of the executives making these sorts of decisions only work at the company for a couple of years so they don't even see these long term gains while they're working there.

Games don't cost more money, publishers are spending 80% of all the money on advertising rather than the game.

Pfft. I was still using a text editor for all my 3D modeling needs, at that time.

Yes they absolutely do. More and better GRAFIX take a lot of man-hours so if you're not stylizing your game it just gets more and more expensive. Of course GRAFIX of any given quality get a lot cheaper and more efficient as time marches on and advertising budgets these days are disgusting but on the other hand the ceiling for GRAFIX just keeps getting higher and pandering to retards with the "look how pretty our game is" approach is timeless and highly effective.

more and better graphics require just as much man hours as it did in the 2000's, there are tools today that do most of the work for you, the only thing that it requires is textures which takes man hours. you don't realize how much money is spend on advertising budget alone.

To be fair it doesn't really matter how good the actual game is. Because people will blindly buy it regardless. Like look at how shit No Man's Sky was and how it just looks like so little work was actually put into it. Then look at the marketing

The lack of SDKs isn't the only reason the golden era of modding is gone. A lot of people would rather work on a game they could sell rather than a free total conversion. With the rise of digital platforms making it possible to self publish, why even work for free? These days total conversions are mostly dead and it's just simpler tweak mods which don't require as much effort to make.

I was actually surprised when Black Cops 3 got a mod kit released. It has prop hunt servers now.

I havn't really gone through many Doom mods, but from what I've seen, they usually are just Doom with a few things modified. While some half-life mods went into some crazy directions you forgot you where even playing half-life.

There was a horror themed TDM mod called Vampire Slayer that I remember being decent.

HOLY SHIT THIS IS BEAUTIFUL, WE NEED TO PLAY THIS SOMETIME.

No they don't. The reason it is costing more is because of advertising and marketing as well as an excessive amount of people in a dev team which results in a bureaucratic bloat.

You're not looking at it from the dev/publisher's perspective

The market does not buy games because of quality. They buy games based on hype. Especially now there's an enormous amount of competition everywhere. It makes it so that it really does not matter how good the game is, if it's marketed really well and pushed really hard more people will buy it.

And that's ultimately what causes these games to be greenlit in the first place.

If we want more lower budget games we have to actually buy them when they're made. When most lower budget games come out they get buried and barely anyone plays them until a sequel comes out with better marketing. You can see Hitman as evidence of that, it was a franchise that was barely known by mainstream consumers until Absolution pushed it's marketing hard.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare and World At War had sdks. All of the Call of Duty games actually run off a modified Quake engine. They even still call their map editor "Radiant". Making an sdk was just throwing a bone at PC fans of the franchise. It's similar to how they added bots into the original Black Ops due to fan demand and since there were mods for it for 4 and WaW.

There are plenty of games that have huge modding communities like Mount and Blade or Command and Conquer

Thief 2 still has an active modding community, and every now and then someone makes a mission for The Dark Mod.