Why Modding died

When the Warcraft3 map maker came out people did not have access to game engines. You either worked for a company that licensed one or you paid the 50k+ they where asking per license.
People back in the day had nothing better to do so they learned the editor and started to pump out custom games.

Blizzard noticed that there was a community forming around their map maker so they naturally moved to limit the rights of the map makers by changing their terms of service.
If you limit and suppress the freedom of the users who add value to your game, those users will simply adjust to your will, they will not leave your platform because reasons…

In 2010 Starcraft2 come out with a much more powerful map editor. The standard maps got ported and development halted.
I can assume that there where a few reasons why this happened.

One) Starcraft2 did not give the map creator the freedom to simply share his map on his website. It was expected that the creator would upload his map to the Starcraft server and players would download it from there.
This made the map maker feel that they had less control over their map and may have pushed away people from the mod scene. Why would I spend time creating something if I don't even get the social reward of a community around my project?

Two) Compared to warcraft3 Starcraft2 did not have a variety of art assets. In Warcraft you had art such as wood pick ups, giant rock monsters, icons, trees, gold mines and many many other lore elements that allowed the map maker to create something that was expressive of their idea. In Starcraft the lore elements where much more limited due to the game being an "e-sport" and lacking gameplay elements in favor of simple, easy to understand gameplay

Three) Android Store came out in 2008, two years before Starcraft2. All of the people who wanted to both make games and make money on their simple games moved over to android and started making their video games for phones

Four) Unity was release in 2005 it became an engine for indie developers and drove more people away from the modding scene


Because modders these days will not work for peanuts. Blizzard has essentially given up on the modding community to add value to their games and instead use youtube lets players to help them add value.

Lets compare a youtube lets player to a modder:

To start modding you need at least a four years of schooling in programming and at least three months of learning the modding tools.
To start a youtube channel you need to have a likeable personality, know how to record your gameplay and upload videos.

What group do you think will be willing to work for peanuts?

Other urls found in this thread:

makemehost.com/games.php
moddb.com/mods/red-alter
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

And nothing of value was lost. Modding on other games is still fine.

explain

I think this is more because SC is hyper futuristic and lacks simple mundane stuff from the present. It was the same with BW, modders having to convince you that some weird pterodactyl is a bird because the game's setting couldn't call for a real bird sprite
hold the fucking phone

Kill yourself underage.

What is there to explain? Try clicking on the 'Workshop' button on Steam, there's a fucking ocean of moddable games and an ocean of mods for those games

Blizzard shut down modding because Dota2 made a ton of money for someone that wasn't Blizzard.

Is this a joke? Are you pretending to be retarded?

Wow OP you have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about. You're not wrong though that modding is heading out. It seems like since 2008 less and less games support modding.

you make a good point.
lets playing gives the viewer a direct advertisement of the game while the video you posted is not clear as to what game is being shown.

A new user has no experience of the actual game and leaves not knowing that they watched a video from a game

What are you even talking about. Are you a bot?

Otherwise, I'm completely sure you're not just talking out of your ass.

Interesting point about youtube shills vs real content producers.

Are you retarded?

You make a very general statement about modding but you only talk about it in the context of Blizzard. The modding community seems healthy to me.

those are just words, mind sharing examples of a community?

No, they're examples of modern mods to VIDEO GAMES

If you brought up half those games are fucking ancient you might have had an argument, but you literally could just google "Stalker Mod" and see people are literally rebuilding different versions of the game with mods. Call of Chernobyl for example. Is English not your first language?

the modding community is no doubt booming, it's just being struck harder and harder with jewish business models a la paid mods

Try Valves hat market or the fact there are hardly any new popular games with a good engines to mod for.

paid mods are a reaction to android and unity providing an easy way to create games and make money

I fear it's going to become standard now that Microshaft is pushing it.

If M$ is pushing it on the xbone then it'll fail for sure. They cut so many fucking corners on those things it's ridiculous. A lot of mods get away with their crap code, awful optimization and abuse of engine limitations, because most people with PCs are head and shoulders above the game's requirements by the time good mods come out. I mean shit. Modding for one of Bethesda's games bricked some systems.

Anyone know any good sourcemods? I don't really see anything worthwhile in the moddb page and I don't feel like playing Minerva again.

The skill floor got higher as games became more complex. How much 3D modeling know-how does it take to create a fully new Doom map? And how much does it take for a modern game?

FTFY
Now kill yerself

Underhell nigger
Smod in general
Try to vote for Zombie Master in the next gamenight, shits baller.

Man, that salt rejuvenated me
Everything about Fallout and Bethesda nowadays is irredemeable cancer and I hope the faggots here defending the shitstain that is this new "Prey" get fucked hard.

RIP ARKANE

this. also too many (mostly shit) games in general, current gen cant in to mods, and a lot of mods to chose from spreading the player pool thin.

If you think it was easy in the past then do the following. Disconnect from the internet and don't come back until you have made a mod/map.

The golden age of modding died because of DLC making most devs not release their tools to the public anymore. It's still alive but not as good as the old days when you got a new total conversion every week.

They weren't any dlcs before Steam. I remember when i could mod Counter Strike freely and host on my own computer. I blame, again, VALVE. To think CS was an Half Life's mod, it makes your blood boil.

Do you know what DOTA is

You claim "modding has died", while giving hte example of one game, from one company, and ignoring games of other companies.
Modding is fine, elsewhere.

WC3 map editor is fun to play with but damn the triggers are confusing. Some scripting language would've been more easy to understand. I think there's some 3rd party tools to make it easier but I never bothered to try them out.

This is something you can still do, CS:GO is a pile of esports-focused garbage.

this shit bait thread is still going?

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You're straight up wrong, there's nothing to explain.

Looks like op didnt knew that there are games besides warcraft and starcraft.

SC2's map making had 2 big issues. You touched on one of them, but even that you didn't get the real core of.

First, it's too much. To big, too complicated. Features are nice and all but the simpler and more limited editors of earlier games brought out more creativity and were more accessible to more people.

The second, you mentioned that creators couldn't publish to websites. The real issue though is the way Battle.Net 2.0 was laid out for people to find maps. In short, only the most popular maps were able to be played at all. It didn't help either that creators had a size limit across all maps they uploaded, completely preventing anyone from becoming prolific with their mapmaking skills.

Basically only the best of the best were able to make maps that people would play at all, and even they were limited to basically 1 map per creator. I use the term "best" rather loosely, because we all know that being popular doesn't make something good.

There's JASS

I made a few Marathon maps back in the day, although I doubt anyone ever downloaded them.

one day this game will have minimal bugs when you play as japan. guy making the mod to fix all the bullshit is still releasing updates

makemehost.com/games.php

Do you have brain damage?

Most of the players there are hostile foreigners and elitists who will kick you if you aren't the master of the map. It's just not the same.

Dota 2 was released in 2013 but everyone and their mother has had beta keys for two years before that. Valve bought the license well before that and the success of LoL in 2009 was the only proof Blizzard needed that modding could hurt their profits since now LoL was the new esport instead of Starcraft.

Of course this was just their fault since at any time they could have started to capitalize on the ASSFAGGOTS scene, specifically the numerous times they were approached about making a standalone Dota by Icefrog himself.

Do you?

Sauce on the first one.

moddb.com/mods/red-alter

It's dead, unfortunately. I mostly posted it because their concept art is top-tier.

I wuold say that besides a handful of cases where mods are supported as per the developers will, real modding has been on a decline because games are simply more locked down and complex to edit every year.

Modding died like everything else, when it stopped being for autistic nerds by autistic nerds and became mainstream. Devs these days use the fact that you can mod their game as a selling point. It's interesting that OP brings up youtubers because the modern modding scene attracts the same kind of people: creatively bankrupt talentless hacks trying to get popular on the internet with cheap laughs; and the two work together. There's youtubers that make videos about mods and most of the time those mods are silly le randumb or completely shallow.
Modding stopped being a weird obsession for autists and started being "community contribution", essentially marketing, and is yet another piece of the special snowflake everyone-gets-to-have-a-voice attitude that the current internet is all about. It's the autists that create mods with depth and effort, but the environment has changed so much that I doubt many people will bother to make something truly complex and interesting when it'll get buried by a mod that turns the dragons in Skyrim into Thomas the tank engine.

I recall it being uniquely terrible trying to play UMS in sc2. Starcraft 2 custom maps died because it didn't have the same b.net lobby system.

Doom has more players now than it did in 2007.

Explain.

I think people need to be humbled about mods, some are cool, very few are great, and they can only do so much or redeem a game so much. Part of the package is accepting its not going to be as polished for one reason or another, but this does mean that more often than not the actual quality of mods is notably lower than other games. It's a fun way to get a bit more juice out of a base game. It's a shame there hasn't been any serious modding tools for some time now. Devs just don't release their SDKs any more, and some have even been lying about that shit. It's grating if you actually like playing mods for more than just fucking doom and quake and half-life for 30 years.

(checked)
Those pics are an example of modders making things look worse.

its surprisingly a common thing across a lot of games

I think another big reason is that there are so many more games coming out lately so the communities are naturally more split.

Also, games nowadays are meant to be played and finished briefly and the replay value of old RTS games is gone.
Also I dunno, last generation might've been more hard working than millenialss

CRTL + F 'walled garden'
Holla Forums knows as much about economics like Holla Forums knows about technology (they don't)
>inb4 ">they"

No? They had multiple events where people would gather to compete in the game and they'd have places for mod showcasing there. Of particular note is that DOTA never had a space there, interestingly enough.

They had a problem with the map maker for Warcraft 3 coming from Starcraft since their idea was to make smaller scale battles focused on heroes and the map maker reflected this decision, it was never about "limiting the rights of map makers".


And anyway, this is only for Blizzard games. Modding scene died because multiplayer Warcraft3 was a never ending list of DOTA, Starcraft is just "le ebin competitive gaem" for gookclickers and those are RTS, a genre quickly dying (for it's own reasons).

Modding for other games still works quite well for people passionate about that game. It might not be the same as it was before since it's hard to be passionate about recent games and it's true that several people realize they are talented enough and use the experience they got to move onto Unity or some other engine to make their own game. But it's a bit far fetched to say it's dead.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Empires, nigga. It's free, on steam, and the closest we will ever come to a proper imperial guard game. You can play as a foot soldier/tanker/what have you in a variety of classes for first person action or you can play a commander in RTS style autism with a top down view. The community is very tight nit and the game gets 40+ players (on one server!) almost every night around 9:00 or 10:00 PM Atlantic time.

dystopia and neotyoko

You're over complicating things, the SC2 editor is much more complex to learn. Simple user friendly tools leads to more modding, although it could potentially die out on it's own i.e. Dungeon Siege.

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Dystopia is just a better Neotokyo.

Reminds me of dionn the autistic furry.

While not exactly a mod, The Ship is a fantastic multiplayer game. though If you buy a copy on steam, you get two extra copies to give to friends, and each of them get an extra copy as well. Though, I'm pretty sure multiplayer works even with pirated versions.

The two biggest factors IMHO are
1. Games are held to much higher standards of realism and detail these days. It was pretty easy to make levels and other content that was up to par with official content in older games, and nearly impossible for an amateur to match the polish of a modern AAA game.
2. You couldn't really make money as an amateur game dev back in the day, but with modern digital platforms around today, why go to the effort of designing maps or making a total conversion when you could just make a legit standalone game and make a business out of it?

my cock is a better your cock

Blame Modern Warfare 2 (both Reddit and some people on Holla Forums call it the best cod). MW2 is the game that added paid dlc and removed mod support + free dlc and everybody supported them back then.

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I don't think this flies, the quality has dropped too sharply. The same games that were modded are still modded and worth modding, even more impressive ways the older they get. The rest of those are cheap whores looking for a quick buck.

don't forget the removal of dedicated servers which meant playing on servers with custom maps or modes was no longer an option

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People are filling their creative desires through building games instead of building stuff in map-makers. Instant gratification, where building maps that no one might play takes longer and requires testing, and modding requires coding.

you're right, too many multiplayer games, communities are diluted and die off too quickly for anyone to decide to take on a mod project

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Majority of those studios were just amateur game devs "back in the day", in fact before the game crash there was some serious kikery with how little manpower was put into making those games ET for Atari was only one man after all. After the crash companies had an average of 10-20 people for development Blizzard, when it was Chaos Studios, for example had 25 people and it slowly expanded over the course of it's successes as Blizzard with games like Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft. Now with WoW it's dev team is well over a hundred people. So don't feed me any of that shit about how it was harder to be an amateur, if anything it was difficult to be an amateur purely because of the requirements for dev equipment that wasn't readily available during that time.

Before the current year modding seems to have a labor of love. Now I don't know what the fug goes on. Steam wants to charge for mods, but that's just because their greed is obvious. They don't make any new games or programs, they just sit in their asses raking in money from every single little transaction that happens on Steam.

Good christ, those look awful