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!

Since Orfeo’s been doing his ‘What Not To Do‘ series, I thought it might be an idea to counter it with the exact opposite: some tips on how to go about running a mod. However, I basically have no idea how to do that. The only mods I’ve ever run that haven’t been solo projects have basically collapsed. So my idea was pretty much broken from the start. But! I realised I know some people who have been successful in this area. So I decided to talk to a handful of them. I’m hoping to get more responses, but for now, here’s three expert modders telling you how they think you should go about creating one of your own.

Robert Yang (Radiator): Start small and then go smaller. If you’re having trouble implementing a feature, design around it. For example, I can’t code worth a damn, but my solution isn’t to find a coder; my solution is to tweak my mechanics so I don’t need custom code. Don’t get fixated on an idea if it’s not working, just drop it and move on. (But don’t delete it either. It might be useful a month later.)

Don’t plan media releases every week — commercial games need to advertise because people actually buy them. (Do you know why mods show weapon renders? It’s because they don’t actually have a game to show you yet. It only testifies to the weakness of their design.)

But my main advice is nothing that hasn’t been said before: no, literally, Daniel Benmergui said it: “If you don’t feel personally exposed when publishing the game, you did not make art.”

Take a risk. Make yourself vulnerable. Experiment. Build games that you KNOW some people won’t like. In contrast, re-creating your favorite game (“Call of Duty on the Source engine!!”) is the equivalent of turtling in an RTS; you’re giving up a lot of map control for a vague, long-shot victory that any competent opponent will exploit and prevent.

What’s the worst that can happen if you do something different? Some dude says, “I won’t download this.” Oh no! End of the world, right? Some assholes will say you’re being pretentious. But tomorrow you’ll design something absolutely amazing that people will love — meanwhile, they’ll still be assholes.

Dan Pinchbeck (Dear Esther): I love shooters as much as the next gamer, but for me mods give us a chance to really work out where the line is drawn and do our best to blur, break and ignore it. We don’t have to sell these things, so why not blast out some really left-field ideas and see where we end up. Mods are never finished products, they feed into each other, grow, develop, so for me a polished, finished product is less important than spewing ideas out there and seeing what sparks they make when they collide with other things. So I guess my first thought about this is “why not – go for it”

Having said that, it’s really frustrating to see a good idea wrecked by bad implementation – and it tends to obscure the great idea as well – so getting a good team on it is essential. Know your limitations, exceed them slightly, but don’t bite off more than you can chew. The best lesson I ever learned was recognising that I am a truly bad coder. And mapper. Work to your strengths and find the people whose strengths are your weaknesses and let them shine in the areas they are great at. And they will think of things you didn’t, spot mistakes you haven’t, and make you questions all the assumptions you inevitably have.

And have fun. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Jonas Wæver (The Nameless Mod): The advice I always give is to keep your ambitions in check and do something small – it’s better to aim low and release something than to aim high and fail, etc. But I think Yang and Pinchbeck would be better at covering that angle, so since I’m the one with the super over-ambitious mod, how about I give you a piece of advice in case you completely abandon your common sense and embark on an enormous total conversion like I did?

Whatever you do, you need to be determined and able to finish everything yourself if all else fails and just release whatever you can get done. No matter how awesome your ideas are, nobody else will ever be as passionate about them as you are, so if you have no actual game development skills and you’re not genuinely prepared to learn, you are much less likely to succeed. Having a content creation skill (such as programming, level design, or 3D art) is also critical in assembling a team, because why would anybody worth their salt want to make your game if you have nothing other than the idea to contribute to the development process? If you can put together some art or a level, or prototype some game features before you start asking around for help, people can see that you know what you’re doing.

The good news is that if you actually get a mod team up and running, you will learn so much about every aspect of game development even if you fail to release a finished mod, and that’s a pretty good payoff in my opinion.

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