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 the last part of my little series.

All things… (a.k.a: closure)

It has taken me a little too long to start the final part of this weekly ramble. Somewhat perplexingly I’d planned out the first few parts of this series but never really got around to planning how I’d conclude things.

My bad.

Anyway, after quite a long pause (replete with myriad cups of tea) I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I should start at the end. To be honest so should you. I recently played a NWN2 module, which (for reasons I have outlined before) shall remain nameless, that somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls I have previously delineated. The story was well paced, there were just enough twists and turns to hold my interest and – somehow – it managed to include great characters. In fact, I was quite ready to name it one of my favourite fan made modules. Then I suddenly (and quite unexpectedly) reached the conclusion of the story. Abrupt endings are all very well but they must conform to two basic rules: first they must make sense and second they must grant the gamer closure.  These two rules are absolutely paramount if you are writing a story, but they also apply to those amongst you who might decide to dream up a new game mode.

Nothing is worse than not knowing why you lost, or how you got from a position of strength to one of weakness. Team Fortress 2, the paragon of team games, is sometimes guilty of breaking that rule – a single spy cap can leave the losing team feeling deflated, confused and usually angry – but the same might be said of most multiplayer shooters. If you are going to create something competitive, which we will no doubt end up playing at some point, then you have to be sure to always keep your players in the loop. Whilst your game mechanics might be faultless, the art direction perfect and the actual act of playing fun no game will survive if people continually rage at the end of a match. Much as finishing my module left a bitter aftertaste, so will a match that is lost for no obvious reason; no one will be happy with losing, so no one will want to play.

To be honest there is no set way to avoid this. Like I said, this is something that even the greats are sometimes guilty of, but it is something that will come up as you test your game. Always keep aware that very few people play games to feel powerless, they play because they can control what is going on, and any random element should be minimised. Clarity and transparency are your friends in this endeavour.

Anyway, I guess I’ve annoyed you enough for this week. I’ll be back next Wednesday with a new series, feel free to leave a comment if there is anything you’d like to read. I was planning a tour of Fallout 3 mods, but that might wait up a bit because my EVE corp is currently grabbing sov so I’m not sure I’ll have the time to do justice to such a mighty endeavour. Perhaps you’d like to read a review? Or hear me rant about a topic particularly far from your heart? This site is dedicated to what the community can achieve so feel free to pitch in guys!

Till next time!

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 three of my little series.

Say What? (a.k.a: Immersion is good)

I’m actually impressed: you have an idea and it is actually pretty awesome.  Unfortunately for you there are still a variety of ways that you can balls this up.

The first, almost rookie, mistake is to forget that you don’t have access to high calibre voice actors. As an RPG gamer, with access to games like Dragon Age and Fallout 3 which both have a semi-decent and celebrity studded voice cast, bad voice acting can really get to me. Once again my self-imposed policy for this column comes into effect: I won’t be naming and shaming those who have decided to go down the path of a decidedly mediocre audio experience, instead I’ll rely upon putting up an example of the kind of mod where having voice acting actually seems like it might work. Black Mesa Source is probably the mod I most want to play, the complete reconstruction of Half Life in Source is such a task that it has taken the team years (looking at the trailer on the website I can see why). Hype aside, it takes a project of this magnitude to convince me that they might actually be able to pull off their own voice work.

The other major problem with most mods is pacing. Forgive me if this sounds mildly preachy, but for the love of all that you hold good and holy don’t write a story which takes half an hour to take off the ground. The problem with mods, as opposed to full games, is that you aren’t making someone pay for it. It is somewhat ironic that people are more likely to forgive your poor pacing if your game cost £30, probably because you rationalise a slow start with high budgets and the promise that there will be action later on (not to mention the fact that you paid money so you are going to push through it no matter how dull it starts). If I, or indeed most people, have just installed your mod for free we are much more likely to have an attention span which is comparable to a gnat’s. Deviating slightly from the subject I’ll use the example of the Wheel of Time series. It is probably one of my top fantasy series’, but my god does it start slowly. It took something like five attempts before I could get into the first book, annoyed as I was at the thirty pages that preceded any real action.

Anyway, enough is enough for this week. I’ll no doubt be de retour next week with all new comments and criticism. Hate mail to the usual address?

P.S: I’ve just got Fallout 3. Anyone know any good mods? Preferably one with a whole new radio station because I’m kinda getting sick of the in game music.

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.

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.