So, you are a budding modder. You have an idea and a basic understanding of how the tools you will be using work. That’s great, but before you begin upon what you will consider your magnum opus, why don’t we step back a bit and focus upon a few of the mistakes we, at UserCreated , don’t want to see.
Skip on past the break to read part one of my little series.
The Tower of Babel (a.k.a. too much ambition)
Let me be clear before I begin to rage on those mods that are going to fall prey to their creator’s hubris: if you have no ambition you will never make it as a big name in the tough arena that is user generated content. What I’ll be talking about are those people who have big plans but don’t give themselves a realistic chance of success. Attempts such as these fall into two main categories: those that are never finished and those that don’t deliver what they promise.
In many ways this is merely a parallel of what happens in the wider games industry (after all, user generated content follows the same rules as that of the wider games industry), particularly when you deal with games like Spore which promise something which is clearly impossible – how on earth could Maxis seriously think they would promise the serious simulation of evolution and the creation of life in the way they promised?
It is all very well to want to make a total remake of your favourite game in the Source engine, but more often than not you will realise the staggering size of most games (not to mention the time and energy it takes to recreate it in a more advanced engine) precludes them from ever realistically being remade. Too often do I see, hidden away somewhere on the internet, plans to redo an old game in a new engine. Well publicised projects such as Black Mesa, which aims to recreate Half Life 1 in the Source engine, do much to add fuel to the fire of many a modder’s heart, but even this project has taken years of time from a large team. If you are working alone it would rapidly prove to be an impossible task.
Next, you must consider those who modify existing games in a major way. Here I’m thinking of what Team Fortress was to Quake, or as a more recent example, the Stargate modification for Oblivion that I reported on. Whilst this holds my interest more than most games might, I nevertheless doubt that it will fulfil my wildest dreams. It is an enormous project, requiring a vast degree of new content just to be workable. The problem there is not so much with the size of the project, but with the practicalities of needing to create hundreds of new textures and models. My favourite mod of all time (which was the focus of a recent indulgence) used the original setting and a very small number of “new” items, yet managed to stand out from the others.
That pretty much wraps it up for this short introduction into what not to do. In a somewhat ironic twist given my last paragraph, next time I’ll be focusing upon mods which fail due to a lack of either innovation or (shock!) ambition.
Incidentally, please feel free to leave a comment if you have opinions of your own. I’d love to hear about your experiences: did you play a huge mod that was AWESOME? Or was it FAIL? Either way, share your experiences here.
Knights of the force always come to mind first. ~6 years of work by one man, years of build up, and the release was a dozen maps and about 60 player models. I still appreciate the work he put into it, but it falls far short of the claims of what it was to be. And yet, deceptively simple mods like Less Generic NPC (LGNPC) for Morrowind have a huge impact on my game.
Yeah, I know what you mean about smaller mods having a huge impact. Personally I find it harder to bother with the huge mods, possibly because so few are really great.