What not to do Part 2: Failure to Launch

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 two of my little series.

Failure to Launch (a.k.a: Innovation is the foundation of success)

Is it too demanding to at once criticise those who would attempt too much whilst simultaneously writing a piece lambasting those who have no vision? You may remember that I wrote a short piece last week on mods which fail due to a surplus of both ideas and ambition; this week I am aiming to balance it out with a look at why it is impossible to make it without (at the very least) something to make you stand out from the crowd.

Nothing is more ruthless that the modding community. In many ways it is actually crueller than the great capitalist states, pushing forward those ideas which have genuine promise whilst letting the vast mass of content sink below the surface. For every Team Fortress there are innumerable ideas that never got off the ground, or worse, which came out and proved to be nothing more than a bland copy of another’s idea. It is the constant drive for new ideas which pushes the entire industry forward and failure to understand this will lead to your modification towards a stillbirth.

The key thing to understand about mods is that they must provide something unique, or at the very least, something sufficiently different for us to go to the sometimes ridiculous lengths in order to experience it. Simply put: some games are a pain in the arse to install mods for so if I install one I don’t want to find that I could simply have installed another game – which would have been a hundred times easier and would have given me the same experience. Particularly to blame here are FPS mods. All too often they don’t actually add anything to the game, instead they tend to simply re-skin it and possibly add a few puzzles along the way. Perhaps it is just me, but I am very rarely uplifted by modifications which purport to “continue the story” or “expand on the universe”. Instead I prefer to play games where there is genuinely something new to explore – be it a new game mode, or a unique tale that I can’t find anywhere else. A case in point would be Neotokyo, a mod which creates a new multiplayer game mode unlike anything I’ve ever played. I won’t go into depth here, because I know that a colleague will be looking to put something up about it in the near future.

Equally, it isn’t enough to have a great idea: you have  to be able to put pen to paper (so to speak). There is no point releasing something innovative if it fails to be either fun or functional. Whilst over ambition is as much a killer as under ambition, you need to find a balance. The biggest names in the industry realise that a game has to be fun (something that I was recently minded of when I left my long time corp in EVE – but that is another story).

Anyway, this has gotten a little long so I’ll sign off for now. I’ll be returning to my normal schedule of Wednesday updates next week. Till then: have fun folks.