Modding - Game Immortality, Done Cheap

So, here's the part where I ramble on about something really quite nerdy but very close to my heart - game modification, or generally shortened, modding.

Modding has a really rich history, one that if I got into in full could make up a book - pretty sure it already has - and so I won't get into here. Some of the big players in modding generally are ID Software with the original DOOM and Quake, Valve with their Goldsrc, Source, and Source 2 engines, and Blizzard (until recently, anyway) with their world editors for their various RTS franchises. This blog post isn't gonna be a history of modding - instead, it's gonna be my thoughts on why modding, especially in this day and age, is essential, and my thoughts on the general trend away from modding in the industry.

A brief run-down of my history of modding is in order, though - I've been mostly doing stuff on the Source Engine since 2014, where I started making playermodels (some of which you can see biographies I wrote for when I was bored earlier on this blog) for Garry's Mod. Ironically, Garry's Mod is actually a mod (it's in the name) of Half-Life 2, the actual template for most Source Engine modding efforts. It got so big - and Valve liked the concept so - that it got commercialised and has made its maker a lot of money. Around 2017 - in the aftermath of Marc Laidlaw posting the long-awaited sort-of script-form finale to Half-Life 2's episodic trilogy - I began to get a little more serious. I joined a few teams committed to following through and trying to make a serious game based on this script. I won't get into those - those could be whole blog posts of their own, but it'd be drudging up unpleasant history, so we'll have to see. After being disappointed with how those went I started my own mod team in January 2018, and went public in February 2018 - a modding project aiming at remaking Half-Life 2 using concepts, story beats, and characters cut during development. That particular project has seen great success - well over 13,000 downloads and three awards under its belt - and is my ongoing focus in my spare time to this day.

Besides that, I take part in a smattering of other projects. I have a personal project about a time travelling detective set in the Half-Life universe as a bit of a Max Payne spoof that might get done in 2021, but might also bleed through to 2022. I'm on another project where you play as the bad guys in Half-Life, the Combine, and then I also set some records (I s'pose?) by making the first fleshed-out mods on the internet for Pathologic Classic HD and Bionicle Heroes. Both were sort of overhaul mods, aiming to be a very simple but relatively comprehensive touch-up of their respective games - both flawed but interesting in their own way. Doing so revitalised, a little bit, a community around Bionicle Heroes, and I got at least a few comments on the Pathologic one. Out of this little microcosm emerges my point: Modding makes games, sort of, functionally immortal.

When you complete a relatively linear, story-focused game - or even a densely packed RPG open world - you've usually seen most, if not all, that game has to offer. Some people do repeat playthroughs - I've replayed some of my favourite games four or five times just to experience a smidgen of that initial thrill - but many people simply move on. The game, and what it offered, has been experienced; and even a repeat playthrough will never hit the same highs. Players move on to new experiences, and that usually means new games; but it doesn't have to. Half-Life 2 is a game that has received hundreds of mods, varying in quality from "kiddy's first mod thing" to "got the person hired at professional studios". Half-Life 2's legacy persists seventeen-ish years since it launched. DOOM - the original, here - survives with mods on that version of Idtech being released to this day, just shy of thirty years on. Modding allows a game to persist, and to create a community that remains fans of the work. It's a bit like fanfiction, I suppose, only it'll give you actually useful skills (sorry not sorry). Modding is a great way to experiment with learning industry-specific skillsets since a lot of the groundwork is already done for you.

The sad thing, then, is that the industry is generally trending away from modding. Neither Pathologic nor Bionicle Heroes had anything resembling official mod support - modding either of those two was incredibly difficult and technically complex - but they weren't locked so tight that nothing could be done. I was able to add new music, new sound effects, change how some characters and 3D models looked, and even fix some small bugs in the game. I was able to change the game, usually, in a meaningful way, even if it was difficult to figure out how. Modern day games are locked exceptionally tightly - being practically impenetrable to all but a concerted effort by technical experts. Those efforts are usually shut down by protective suits with scary legal paperwork aimed at people mostly looking for harmless fun on their lunch break.

There's two issues with this - one is that it is becoming increasingly hard to cultivate talent for the industry and creativity, and two being that there's not a lot, right now, that can be done about it. Firstly, if you want to understand modern pipelines for modelling, level design, and etc in a productive way, you sort of have to jump in at the deep end and go right into a game engine like Unity or Unreal to do it. Source is still an open book, but it's using technology nearly two decades old. It's a starting point, but it won't give someone a full understanding of the work pipeline with more modern tech. This means the bar for entry for casual developers and creatives is just too high - and some don't make it over that first hurdle.

The second issue is the concept of always-online games. Games that feed into central servers, are multiplayer-centric, and form direct connections with people's PCs simply cannot support modding in the same way other games can. Doing so lightly would open up the door to malicious software, and doing it correctly is an almost insurmountable amount of resources that some studios simply cannot afford to spend on game projects that already stretch into the triple million digits.

The question is, then - where next? Some games like Doom 2016 tried to make superficial modding tools - in its case, SnapMap - in an effort to drive user-generated content. Tools that basic, however, don't usually interest the more hardcore fans - AKA, the ones that will actually be modding your game. Some high-profile mods - Black Mesa, for example - have their own modding tools specifically for that mod. Meanwhile, other game franchises like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout have begun using consumer-made mods as a way to alleviate post-launch issues like glitches and more. The sentiment, these days, is "the modders will fix it." For some games - your big server-based online shooters - modding will probably always be out of reach. Others, though, get a lease of life later in their cycle - as the Halo games are getting now, with the Master Chief Collection.

Ultimately, so long as there are games with dedicated enough fans, people will find a way. I only hope there continue to be Valves and Id Softwares willing to provide tools that allow people to get into the concept a little more easily. I wouldn't be where I am today without it.