This was supposed to be a post on Grand Theft Auto 4, then I realized that there’s not much in the ways of mods for it. So, here’s ENBSeries a mod for a whole mess of games with the sole purpose of giving you more graphics. Not simply better graphics, but more graphics in general.

I’ve never quite understood the ceaseless quest for better and better graphics, especially when applied to Grand Theft Auto 4, which chews up and spits out computers before it begrudgingly runs. I’m playing it on all medium with no anti-aliasing and I’m enjoying it, gosh darn it. But for those of you who feel that GTA 4′s graphics are so last year (which they are, if you possess the vision broken enough to believe that graphics become outdated in a short year’s worth of time), here’s ENBSeries. Again.

What ENBSeries does is add a whole mess of acronyms specially designed to make your game look better.  GTA 4 in particular gets–but is not limited to–better anti-aliasing, a better blur filter (as seen from the above screenshot), better reflections, post-processing effects and possibly SSAO. I do love me some SSAO, especially in my Minecrafts. Of course, GTA4 is not the only game with ENBSeries support, and older games like Serious Sam, San Andreas and Deus Ex get the handy-dandy feature of actually running on DirectX 9, instead of DirectX less than 9.

A word to the wise (and not-so-wise): ENBSeries needs quite a handful of tweaking to get it looking just right. I’d recommend digging around for  config files, especially for GTA4. If you think yourself adventurous enough, the power is yours.

ENBSeries’s homepage. It’s a little sparse, but the download page has most everything.

Also, to those of you that sent in applications. Our editor, a Mr. Lewis Denby of PCGamer, is on a business trip in Holland. Once he comes back, I’ll start setting up worthy writers with wondrous writing accounts.

Welcome back to another edition of Mod Our Comments! For those of you who missed out on last episode of our mad epopee to comment heaven, Mod Our Comments is our not-at-all-regular feature where we ask you, our ever dwindling but ever so awesome readerbase, what you think.

So, what is it this week?  This week, we want to know what games you really, really wish had more mods – either because there was never an SDK, or because nobody realised how awesome the game was, or for any number of depressing reasons.   So, tell us!  Tell us of the opportunities lost, the mods left unfinished, and the hopes dashed against the harsh rocks of the internet waves.  We want to know!

The internet is a fabulous place.  Even filled with the most repugnant of the crazies, the scariest of the mad, and the most disturbing of the loonies, browsing our world wide web is somewhat akin to watching a car crash – it’s horrifying, and faintly traumatising, but you can’t help but stop and stare.

It’s also most definitely a place.  If you’re talking about Planet Deus Ex, the Deus Ex fansite that spawned The Nameless Mod, and its attached forum – affectionately named Forum City – then it’s in fact so much of a place, that it’s been entirely recreated, a long with all its twisted denizens.

But something is rotten in the Moderator-dom of Forum City.  Deus Diablo, one of the near godlike moderators, seems to have been kidnapped in mysterious circumstances – cue “OOOOOO” noises.  In their desperation, the remaining moderators call upon a retired special agent, who disappeared years ago for reasons nobody knew or understood.  His name is Trestkon, and he kicks serious amount of ass.

As Trestkon, you’re tasked with wandering the pixellated walls of this crazed cyberspace forum, unravelling conspiracies, shooting madmen in the face, and avoiding throwing sporks.  It’s a mad, mad world out there.

You’d be forgiven for not taking TNM very seriously – after all, it did start as little more than an over-ambitious fan project – but the truth is, it’s grown into so much more than that.  Forum City is now buzzing with life, from the scary to the comical, and the strands of crazy are expertly weaved into a tale of kidnappings, conspiracies, mysterious cults, and  goats.

You should never underestimate the dedication of people on the internet – after all, apparently 8 million monkeys can write Shakespeare.  In this case though, it’s a few really, really clever monkeys, making a very, very clever mod, with a great story, beautiful vistas, believable voice acting, and sporks – and if it doesn’t make you chuckle, you’ve never been on a forum before.

Forum City is a dangerous place – so watch your back.  And the Llamas.

Why is it on our list?

It’s the most polished Deus Ex mod out there, and nearly rivals the original.  It’s also quite funny, which is nice.

Get it from?

http://thenamelessmod.com/downloads/

Easy to install?

Run the executable – it doesn’t get any more straightforward than that.

Also, check out our interview with the team behind TNM!

I’ll admit, of all the mods I championed while sitting around planning this list – all the crazy leftfield experimental stuff, and all the flawed beauties of the modding scene – this was the most difficult inclusion to justify. It went in and out of the list a few times when we were trying to free up some space at the end, but eventually I threw a bit of a petulant strop and demanded it make our Unmissable Mods feature. It’s not that the others think Cassandra’s bad, or anything. Clearly it’s not. It’s just that, y’know, it was never properly released. It was never finished.

The Cassandra Project is a fourth of a sixth of a very clever and just totally, astonishingly, obviously over-ambitious mod for Deus Ex. The plan, masterminded by games journo and comics writer Kieron Gillen, was to release an episodic single-player mod, with each larger mission split into four short chapters. In the end, the team only ever got as far as the intro. When you factor in that it alone lasted for up to two hours and featured 30,000 unique lines words of dialogue… well, you start to realise why releasing the whole thing was basically never going to happen.

What makes this such a tremendous shame is that The Cassandra Project, more than – ooh, go on – any other mod I can think of, was obviously going to be wonderful. Gillen’s writing, as anyone who knows him or knows of him will know, has always been embarrassingly good, and his nack for telling subtle, nuanced character stories is a real strength of his. Cassandra’s exquisitely penned plot is a suitably conspiracy-laden journey that begins in Birmingham and was set to galavant all over the bloody shop, all the while with tongue firmly in cheek but clever brains very much engaged. It’s hilarious and ridiculous, but it’s also touching and, occasionally, even properly thought-provoking.

Cassandra’s only released episode – essentially the longest and most complex introductory sequence ever – features a host of bizarre and amazing characters in a multitude of somewhat obscure situations. But the best bit, perhaps the best bit in anything, is the word “OHFUCKINGCOCKCHRIST,” which, in Cassandra, makes what could well prove to be its only public appearance ever. It’s more than enough to justify calling the opening episode a truly unmissable mod.

Why is it on our list?
Read again. “OHFUCKINGCOCKCHRIST”. Also, because it’s beautifully written and totally worth playing, even though the story never even got started before the team drifted apart.

Get it from
ModDB (although that’s not an official page)

Easy to install?
It’s a very straight-forward installer job, but you will need to have Deus Ex patched to the latest multiplayer version.

More Unmissable Mods…

With Off Topic Productions’ ever-persistent plugging-for-votes in this year’s ModDB Mod of the Year awards, I realised I’d never actually spoken to them about their exceptional Deus Ex project, The Nameless Mod.  First released ten months ago and reaching its final version in November, it’s a sprawling, dual-campaigned and completely mammoth piece of work that spawned from a piece of Internet fan fiction into a game that took seven years to complete.

Far from being just a huge mod, it’s also a highly intelligent one too.  It takes Deus Ex’s conspiracy soup and pours it into a big bowl of geek-culture, casting various real-life forum members as characters in the game world, who quip and bond and war like the members of just about every forum you might care to mention.

So, as the team begins its brave venture into the world of commercial game development, I caught up with producer Lawrence Laxdal and project director Jonas Wæver to talk about their work. Lots of words are below.

UC: So. Seven years. Christ. Have you recovered yet?

Lawrence Laxdal: Not really, and I doubt we ever will. After seven years, The Nameless Mod and Deus Ex are pretty well seared into our collective consciousness. We spent that time not only creating The Nameless Mod, but also building a community for Off Topic Productions, one that is now full to bursting with rabid Deus Ex fans. Of course, we’re rather happy having such a solid launching point into our future projects, so I suppose we don’t really want to recover!

Jonas Wæver: Yeah, we want to keep the mod and our community alive. After all this time, it would be a shame to just release the mod and then act like nothing happened. We still have things to do in terms of promoting or supporting the mod while we gear up for new projects.

UC: So it’s not a case of “The Nameless Mod is done, let’s crack on with something else,” then? Because I know you have a new project in the works…

Jonas: We’re definitely excited to work on something else, but we’re very proud of The Nameless Mod, so it’s not like we just wish we didn’t have to think about it ever again, no.

Lawrence: We are, however, done with patches at this point.  When The Nameless Mod released – what was it, ten months ago now? – we definitely weren’t happy with the state of it.  Four patches later we’re satisfied that it delivers the polished experience that we always wanted, and now we’re mostly focusing our energy on PR.

UC: I wasn’t around at the start of The Nameless Mod’s development. Well, I mean, I was alive. Just not around on that scene. So I don’t know all the details behind its conception, but I’m assuming it began as a quaint in-joke and just spiraled out of control?

Lawrence: That basically sums it up.  Although, technically, I guess it spiraled out of control, and then somewhere around the four-year mark we managed to make it spiral back into control, and eventually compress it down into the much more coherent, accessible thing it is today.

Jonas: It started as a single mission, but once the team grew from just Lawrence to around 20 people, the scope of the mod grew as well. I remember there was a point when we sort of stopped the brainstorm to ask if people would prefer a small mission created quickly or a large mod that would take a few years to finish, and most contributors and hangers-on preferred to see the concept used for something larger. I don’t think we disappointed them.

UC: And, of course, that allowed you to really capitalize on the ideas of the setting. But you always seemed a little apologetic about it, and I fail to see why. It starts as that quaint in-joke, but expands into this proper, convincing place, using internet fan communities as a sort of metaphor for wider society. It’s clever stuff, y’know? Yet I’m sure I’ve seen you publically call it “lame”…

Jonas: We’ve always been very unsure of how The Nameless Mod would be received, because it was originally meant for a very small audience. And you have to understand it used to be much more exclusive than it ended up by the time we released – we really did a lot of work in the end to invite people into our setting and introduce our characters properly. Being in on it all along, we had no idea if we’d succeeded in opening it up to a broader audience, and though most people seem to settle into the mod pretty quickly, we’ve had a lot of negative responses as well, especially from people who haven’t played the mod and aren’t inclined to do it because they think our concept is stupid.

Lawrence: It’s also one of those things where you get so close to the project that it’s hard to see it from the outside.  We did try, but it was always hard to be sure.

Jonas: Personally, I think a lot of it is down to the stigma of community fan fiction. Many large Internet communities have these stories created by the members, for the members, and starring the members, and usually they’re really bad because they don’t have to be good – the appeal is the chance to be part of a narrative, even if it’s a terrible narrative. That’s what TNM started as, and it’s what we’re still associated with, though we’ve worked hard to break out of that.

UC: Modding for Deux Ex. Very few have touched it. It’s a bugger to work with, right?

Jonas: It can be quite a mess, yeah.

There are multiple reasons for that. One is that the game is very complicated, with many game systems interacting with each other, and that’s really difficult to juggle – to balance those systems correctly against each other. I think most Deus Ex modders want to make mods that resemble Deus Ex, otherwise it’s easier to start with a more straight-forward game like Half-Life so you can just build your own systems on top of those bare-bones FPS mechanics.

Lawrence: The tools are old and fairly buggy, which is a pain, but one that you learn to work with.  The bigger issue is that when you make something with the Deus Ex tools, people expect Deus Ex quality and freedom.  Most people realize that and either start projects that are too ambitious to complete, or end up getting frustrated by how much work it actually takes to create a Deus Ex style environment.

UC: Well, that’s what I was going to bounce into. Very few professional teams attempt anything like this, even. There’s Deus Ex, its sequel, Bloodlines, and… well, no, that’s it.

Jonas: I think that’s a large part of why some players do decide to give it a shot – because games like Deus Ex don’t come along very often, and if you’re part of a niche you feel is underserved, it makes sense to try and serve yourself, so to speak.

Lawrence: There are so few of these games because it’s not the easy money maker, I think.  Any time you create an open-world environment and enable huge amounts of freedom for the player, you’re going to have to spend an insane amount of time creating content that most players will never see.  Thankfully, we weren’t worried about overtime or project budgets!

Jonas: Having actually released something in this genre, I don’t blame professional studios for not making more games like this. It’s a ludicrous amount of work, and you’ll tend to spend so much effort designing and balancing all your complicated game systems that you won’t be able to deliver as polished a product as your competitors who make more directed experiences.

If you’re making a linear game, you know what the player should be doing, so you can spend your time making sure the player does that and that nothing breaks when the player does it. If you’re making a more open game, and especially if you’re trying to develop emergent gameplay, the amount of possible actions you have to predict and test and debug can become unmanageable very quickly.

UC: The Nameless Mod was announced as finished in November. You’ve obviously fixed a lot of things in the meantime, but if you had infinite time and resources, is there anything you’d go back and completely change?  Me?  I’d tweak the space station ending to be less shooty…

Lawrence: That would certainly be one of the things we’d change.

Jonas: I would redesign the Downtown and Corporate city hub levels to be significantly smaller.

It was a hard balance for us to strike because we originally tried to make it a single level, but the engine couldn’t handle a level that large, so we split it into three maps. I think that may have been too much for the amount of content we managed to produce, however. There’s not enough empty space to be embarrassing, I think, but there’s just a lot of walking around involved. Maybe we would just have to redesign those maps so the locations you visit a lot (the faction headquarters, the bar, etc.) were closer to each other and to the metro stations.

I think the space station is fine though – it’s hard to handle it with stealth, but it should be possible, especially if you have the cloak aug – and at that point in the game, why wouldn’t you have the cloak aug if you’re going for a stealthy play style? The enemies in the space station have the same AI as everyone else. They just don’t speak their mind all the time.

But then I’m biased.

UC: I think my problem with the space station was that it was suddenly all-out action, and while you could play it stealthily, it was this huge, vast thing structurally, and I found that unless I was just ploughing through with a gun, I was getting lost. But that’s probably just me being terrible at games.

Jonas: Ah that’s interesting, I think that’s the first actual explanation I’ve read of why the space station is more shooty. I’ll take that up for consideration!

Oh, one more thing, actually. I would sit down and figure out exactly how the internal logic of the setting works. We never did that, and it really shows once in a while, there are some weird holes in the consistency.

Lawrence: Wizards did it.

UC: Where do you think modding’s at generally, across all games? A lot of people seem to be going for smaller-scale stuff, which is about as far away from where TNM is pitched as it’s possible to be.

Jonas: I think going for something smaller-scale is a supremely good idea.

Lawrence: The modding scene right now it absolutely on fire, and getting hotter all the time.  Most mods are indeed on a smaller scale than The Nameless Mod, but it’s the ideas that are being thrown about that make things so interesting.  I really love all the experimental mods we’re starting to see, and with the mainstream game media now giving top mods so much coverage it really encourages people to churn out their outside-the-box ideas.

Jonas: I get the impression a lot of modders these days are aspiring game designers and students who need portfolio pieces, whereas it seemed like there were more pure hobbyist modders back when we started – possibly because the learning curve was easier when the games were a bit less technologically advanced.

The Nameless Mod is a lot like a proper game, and its gameplay and aesthetics are pretty close to Deus Ex, but I think it’s more interesting, and better for your portfolio, to make something completely new – and you don’t need to create anything big to do that.

UC: And in terms of mods like your own, do you think there’s a future in that?   Deus Ex is a decade old now.  Soon it’ll feel like an engine that’s just not workable in the modern gaming climate.  Is that part of the reason you’re going into standalone development? Or do you just fancy a slice of the big bucks…?

Lawrence: We plan to be millionaires within six months, and own our own islands within the year. That’s how the indie gaming scene works, right?

Jonas: I must admit, it’s a bit of a bummer to release something as huge as The Nameless Mod and get all that great feedback and make a pretty good splash, and then to be completely unable to make money off of it.  It’s just as much a motivation to just move up to the next level creatively though, now that we’re accomplished modders, it’ll be a whole new challenge to make a game from scratch, something which is completely our own creation rather than piggy-backing on one of the great classics.

Lawrence: I do think there’s a future for mods like The Nameless Mod, but they’ll just be few and far between.  It requires an incredible amount of dedication from a lot of people.  Plus a lot of luck.

Jonas: Yeah, I don’t know about Deus Ex mods specifically. I don’t want to discourage Deus Ex modding too much, especially because I know of several that are still alive, and some even seem to be fairly close to complete, and I don’t want to sit here and tell them they should quit because Deus Ex’s time is up. I think we’re approaching the point where it doesn’t really pay off to start a new Deus Ex mod anymore though, because by the time you’re done, people will have to play your mod in an emulator and you’ll only get the players who are absolutely serious about being okay with ancient graphics.

There are other, newer games with better editing tools to work with, and if you have good enough programmers and enough time on your hands, you may be able to make something out of a straight FPS game that tickles the same bones as Deus Ex did.

They’re pushing for votes in ModDB’s annual Mod of the Year awards, is why. And, to be honest, they probably deserve some plaudits more than any other team in the past 12 months. Not that the others don’t work hard, but this is an amateur team using up seven years of their lives to create the most astonishingly detailed, intricate and lengthy Deus Ex mod, which, if you play through everything, might even take longer than the original game did to complete.

If you fancy giving them a vote, head on over to ModDB. You’ll need to be a member, but registration costs nothing. The Nameless Mod’s latest promo video is beneath the jump.

Videos & Audio – The Nameless Mod Mod for Deus Ex – Mod DB