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Are Mods that Good or are Games that Bad?


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Posted

I've been thinking about this for awhile while downloading mods to fix technical issues, game-play mechanics, shitty models or textures without much variety, "special" items/armors/weapons that are special only in name and stats maybe, almost non-existent plots or stories so cliche as to make a gamer cringe, etc. How many times have you downloaded or made a mod and thought

 

"Huh, this should have been fixed or in the game all along!"?

 

The more I learn about modding, the more I see in some games what I can only describe as laziness on the part of the devs or impatience on the part of the publisher and their failure to make as good a game as they possibly can (I'm looking at you, Beth/Zen). It's not they can't make a better game, it's that they don't want to do as well as they can or aren't allowed the time they need that really bothers me. I can forgive a few lingering technical issues or flaws in game-play mechanics so long as the rest of the game is conceptually sound and was well tested. And damn, would it really kill them to hire some good writers and (more) voice actors? What do you think? Which games did it right and which did it wrong?

Posted

This is a fun topic. I've thought about this before. I imagine that it's a very complex soup of reasons. I think time and personal investment are some key factors in polish. I look at modders who (usually) aren't paid and go "why did they do better for free what the developers didn't whose job it is?" They devote the time and they care a lot about it. You know what doesn't lead to polish? Compromise. That's what businesses do. It varies case by case but typically they set aside a certain amount of labor hours and make the most out of it. They have deadlines and wildly varying talent for each position. A modder will sit on something until it's perfected, a company will sit on something until it's profitable.

 

For technical things, modern companies will push it out the door as soon as it's functional and release bugfix patches after the fact. "We can always fix it later."

Artistic flaws are more generally baked in and you get what you get until a remake occurs or a major content overhaul or expansion.

 

I'm not a professional so I don't have an inside perspective; anyone not under the iron fist of an NDA feel free to fill us in. These are just some musings I've picked up along the way.

Posted
13 minutes ago, Glaurung26 said:

wildly varying talent for each position

How much do you think programmers and artist make? Perhaps some studios don't pay enough to attract more/better talent. You're right that one or a few people sitting and working on a mod project with as much time as they need can make some great mods, but is their extra time the difference? or is it their passion?

Posted

There are two broad ways you can approach this issue:

 

1) Problems in the design and creativity aspect.

2) Problems in the technical and functionality aspect.

 

 

(1) Problems in creativity and designing, as in, not having enough voice actors, boring level designs and puzzles, outdated textures and game system, quest designs that can range from kinda stupid to "what in the absolute horse's ass is this shit?", items and repeating textures and so on. Keep in mind that these fall well within the subjective area as some people are more forgiving than others. I listed all those things as a reference, because Bethesda isn't guilty of all of those at the exact same rate. I'm much more forgiving in many ways so i tend to go "ehhh" when i see some problems in this regard.

 

(2) Problems in the functioning of the game. This is the problem that is more frustrating in my opinion. Game breaking bugs, optimisation issues, stability and so on which lets be honest, Bethesda is... infamous for to say the very least. It's unbelievable how unstable their games can be, and these aren't just indie games, these are classed as triple A games and are at triple A prices. The USLEEP should be at least 10% of it's original size. The amount of bugs that modders have fixed on behalf of the devs is unreal. This however couldn't carry forward to Fallout 76 because of it's always online multiplayer nature, making the whole thing that much more apparent.

(Yes i know it was a c team down in austin that is responisble but it nevertheless shows how lost these devs are without the modding community's help. And then they have the fucking gull to turn around and make people write essays to get their accounts back? lmao)

Posted

Prestige and pay may very well be a large impact. I'm curious where the industry vets go. From what I'm hearing, mega-publishers chew up and spit out talent. It seems to be quantity over quality. Hence why indie studios can put out games with more heart despite not having all the shinies that big developers have.

Posted (edited)

I think the trouble is that Beth are hugely ambitious in what they try and achieve, and invariably they run out of time for some things that they wanted.

 

It's not as simple as saying "just give them more time", either. There are two constraints on the development time for a game: money and technology. Paying all the people to make a triple-A game eats a lot of cash, and if that goes on for too long, the company isn't going to sell enough games to make the money back. Granted a good game will sell more copies, but there's a finite number of gamers interested, and it's not like they can sell the game for $20,000 a licence to recoup the investment.

 

The other constraint is technology. Take too long, and the State of the Art moves on and the cutting edge graphics you started out with ends up looking clunky and dated when the game releases. Nor can you easily change the rendering engine and keep everything else unchanged. Assets need to be made to make optimal use of the technology and the game may have features that depended on technology that won't work with a different renderer. Chanmge those things to work with the new render, and you find they have knock-on effects elsewhere and you end up rewriting a significant portion of the game, which in turn delays release further, and again the state of the art marches on. This is supposedly the trap the Duke Nukem Forever fall into.

 

And sometimes, I'm sure a modder will have a good idea that either wasn't thought of, or that management didn't think would work. There a lots of modders who can take risks that would never be allowed in a wage-paying environment, simply because it doesn't matter if a mod project fails. I mean it's no fun for the modder, but they still have the day job. And a lot of projects do fail. For every "why wasn't this in the game from the start" project, there's probably a couple of dozen that never got beyond v0.01, or that did but which no one used because the idea didn't work well in practice. Modders can afford to take these risks, game companies need to manage their risks rather more carefully.

 

So really, as long as there's a decent amount of content, I'm happy to cut them some slack when it comes to cut content. Just don't talk to me about recent Fallout games :)

Edited by DocClox
Posted
5 minutes ago, Glaurung26 said:

I'm curious where the industry vets go

As am I. Do they fall off the fucking earth or something? I would think some of them moved on to indie like you say, but where are the games? Steam(ing pile)?

Posted

Development schedules also affect things. Indie studies honestly CAN take the route of "when it's done" and some of them can even pull it off (rust, 7 days to die, to name a few. Far more failed than worked, but some of them do pull it off.), but the big houses aren't willing to keep spending money on one title. Bethesda is especially guilty of this from their current stance of monetizing their games at all costs. It's part of why there's almost always a day 1 patch on the triple A titles. When the publisher has a hard release date, the game either makes it or not. If not: they launch anyway and fix things on the fly, unless it fails outright and they just abandon the title.

 

Devs will take a lot of shit to work on titles they're passionate about it, but from the rising indie business model and the success of "garage built" games, we can pretty squarely put the blame on the publishers and not the developers. Give the experts a reasonable schedule and budget and you will get good quality.

Posted

Some very good points have been made. The industry is changing very rapidly and it does pressure studios to try and keep up. What would you say the time frame would be for making a good, technically sound and tested title nowadays? Around 3-4 yrs? I suggested this as a lark in another thread, but what if devs stopped trying to make entire games and just released assets and tools for modding- sort of like Lego sets or something?:classic_laugh:  I mean we already kind of do this with Beth titles. But, many would want to be paid for their work if it's going to contribute to sales for the company- which it already has. It's gotten to the point that modders know the games better than the devs ever could.

Posted

I think that mods are a great way to keep alive games that don't get updates anymore or for just add some gameplay features that developers will never add into their games (adult mods, for example), for other things too, like to improve game performance, customization...

 

For me, games will always be incomplete... Even if they're amazing or/and fun. Mods are between the reasons why I've chosen PC platform for gaming and not others.

 

Here's my point: No matter how many content an untouched game can deliver to you, always will have more and more to be added and the company/developer will never go so deep at keeping their game updated for ever or so.

Posted

I don't think the devs are lazy but you kinda need to work in a timeframe that allows you to make a profit. Bethesda's games, as shallow and buggy as they are, are still huge and complicated. There's a lot of technical things under the hood which even allow for modding in the first place which are obviously invisible to the player.

Posted
16 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

There's a lot of technical things under the hood which even allow for modding in the first place which are obviously invisible to the player.

Well, yeah the casual player. Some coders have pulled these games apart and know them quite intimately. I don't know how malleable game code is, but they find out.

Posted

For my experience it is mostly about the money, like said before. For example the game Gothic (don't know if it's known worldwide or just in Germany) the publisher pushes the game forward, because the develepment-time was about 4 years and the publisher has run out of patience. They published the 3rd tilte of the game, without the dev-team to get the money and it was crap. It was not playable, the devs quited their cooperation with the publisher, because they wanted to work the game out to the very last, which they did for the first two titles of the game (i don't know any bug in the game and it never crashed for me, but that could be luck either). For that third title, the publisher gave the code completely to the community to finish it, because they weren't able to fix any bug, and therefor a mod is absolutely needed. Most known thing about Gothic 3: The undefeatable boar. You could choose any boar in the game, attack it, and it's keeping up to you. No way to stop it, no way that it looses interest in you, and the boar could kill every single NPC in the whole game, if it crosses the way of the boar.

 

For Bethesda Games: I never experienced games as unstable as that. I don't know if they don't care or that they know, the people would buy it anyway. Most storys are not as good as I would expect from a studio as "big" as Bethesda, and therefor I prefer mods to make it more interesting.

 

In general: Mods can provide a big amount of new content, that the developers would not think about. I like modding my games, that make me last with a game even longer and I don't buy as much new games as without modding.

Posted
57 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Well, yeah the casual player. Some coders have pulled these games apart and know them quite intimately. I don't know how malleable game code is, but they find out.

Seemingly simple things like NPCs having an actual inventory which can be manipulated is actually huge. Almost no game does this because it's easier to  build an entire model instead of making it modular one like Bethesda's games do. Think about how limiting that is if you want to change anything. Other open world games like The Witcher 3 or Ubisoft games don't have this kind of feature, it's pre-built models for each and every NPC, only the player has an inventory. I think one big thing that holds Bethesda back are consoles, without starting to want a discussion about which platform is superior, but Skyrim chokes under its own weight for the simple reason you need to add a lot of constraints and shortcuts on the engine for it being able to be handled by consoles. So I'm actually okay with them waiting for the new console generation for the next Elder Scrolls because this will mean that the technical limitations aren't as severe at the time the game gets released.

 

Of course, all that's left is that they:

1. Create an actual fun game with interesting gameplay, which is the most important thing in any sandbox game yet they've failed to deliver. It's either a fundamental problem (like in Skyrim) or the core gameplay is solid but they fuck up the balance (Fallout 4). They need to move away from the scaling a tad and most importantly need to get it out of their head that infinite leveling is something desirable. It's not. Leveling is a means to an end, not the end goal in itself. Have a power fantasy and stick to it instead of being afraid to ask the player to start anew if they want to play differently.

 

2. Not fuck it up with excessive microtransactions, paid modding and things like that. But given Bethesda's recent track record, I don't think they won't fuck it up somehow.

 

3. That one is outside Bethesda's control, but if the modding community spirals even further down the 'get rich with patreon bucks quick' rabbit hole, there will be hell to pay and modding will be dead in the water.

 

Tbh I wouldn't get may hopes up, the industry itself as well as the communities are in dire need for a crash. Let the passionate people back in and let the parasites throw themselves out. I'm looking forward to Bannerlord, I don't think TES6 will be a game that's worth waiting for. Neither for being an actual fun game nor the modding community being there to save it.

Posted
1 hour ago, GrimReaper said:

Bethesda's games, as shallow and buggy as they are, are still huge and complicated

 

Yeah. I often think that in some ways, Bethesda are a victim of their own success. Their games are, in vary many respects, incredibly immersive and intuitive. Perversely enough, that encourages us to think that they can't be all that complicated; part of our brain reasons that if it's easy to use it must be easy to make.

 

That was something that was brought home hard when I first started modding. Things that at first glance looked simple enough turned out to be insanely complicated to try and implement, not because the game is badly written, but because that's just how complex some real world behaviors are. 

 

Posted

To answer the question posed in the posts title, a little of both I think. However that being said there are a great number or reasons that some games are lack luster. First off development companies are businesses, meaning their goal is to turn a profit. Secondly they are often under severe time constraints (often self imposed). This creates the need for trade offs a little less polish here and there to remain within the time and budgetary guide lines. This however does not excuse lazy writing and crappy storytelling or as was pointed out already repetitive low poly textures and completely non-unique unique items.

 

Hell when Skyrim came out I had to wait a year and a half to play until I built a PC with good enough specs to run the game. So I load the game check for updates the installer tells me I can run on ULTRA setting, great. I fire that B**** up and am met with a buggy mess of a game that has mediocre textures and potato head people.

 

Now none of those problems had anything to do with money or time, it was a clear case of "well that's good enough". After the Unofficial patch and a couple of texture mods it was a much nicer game still had potato heads for a while but got that sorted as well. Many of these companies have become complacent knowing that the "fans" will except whatever crap they decide to shovel out the door.

Posted
3 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

 

"Huh, this should have been fixed or in the game all along!"?

 

 

Yes... most games I have played... If I install a mod.. it is usually because of some fuck up in the game the game. There are bugs that the company that created the game call a "feature" or just was too lazy or incompetent to fix.

 

Or

Yes... (or statement ;) ) :P

Yes.. there are some features and such that I think should have been in the game. Like Witcher where Witchers are suppose to be able to see in the night... they got cat eyes for christ sakes.. but .. you have to use a potion.. not the same... This and some small fixes that I believe should have been there but was removed or done differently.

 

 

 

Bonus...  I have also  used mods to improve the game through textures and such that I can't expect the creator to do Adding features or quest and other things (with regards to LL... perverted things.. you know what I am talking about ;) ) to the game that wouldn't ever be present in the game and I can't blame the company for that ... um... shortcumming.. lol. As a result a game that would have given me 100~300 hours of play, now can give me hundreds more. It becomes a new game (to a point) where things can be experienced differently and things can be done that would never have happened before.

Posted

 So in Beth's defense, it is much harder to make a game that is as moddable as possible while still trying to make a good game? Since most mods here and on other sites are for Beth games, I would assume they have that part down. We will see what less time constraints have done for them with their release of Starfield on the next gen of consoles. That gives them about 5 or 6 yrs. I still think Starfield is the game they are pouring their best into since it will be a brand new game and they are saying absolutely nothing to anyone about it.

Posted

Mods/games depends on the company.  I played all of the original Mass Effects and the only mod I used was the one to fixed the stupid ending of #3.  Witcher3, the only mod I used was a console command unlocker; it didn't need mods.  GTA5 and I didn't use any mods; it didn't need them either.  Transversely Sims4 is unplayable without mods to turn off or change the 'features' the devs keep breaking gameplay with.  A Bethesda game without mods; what's the point?  Imagine Skyrim and the ONLY way to play it is the way they shipped it; their interface, their chargen sliders, their meshes, their textures, no overhauls to fix broken quests.  How may play-throughs could you do before you just throw up your hands and say 'fuckit'?

 

Mods and the modding 'community' are Bethesda's saving grace but they're too greedy and stupid to realize it.

Posted
45 minutes ago, Kendo 2 said:

 Imagine Skyrim and the ONLY way to play it is the way they shipped it; their interface, their chargen sliders, their meshes, their textures, no overhauls to fix broken quests.  How may play-throughs could you do before you just throw up your hands and say 'fuckit'?

THE HORROR!!!!  Holy crap, just thinking about that is enough to give me nightmares!!!!!!

SourMeaslyBarnacle-size_restricted.gif

Posted

A game that's great without mods can be made even better with them. A game that can't stand on its own merits will never be good even with mods. I still play Morrowind even after seventeen years because it's a great game on its own and mods just make it even more fun. Skyrim...well, it's okay on its own but mods are the only thing that's kept it relevant for nearly eight years. Even then I doubt people other than modders and mod reviewers would have put thousands of hours into it if not for sites like this.

 

2 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

We will see what less time constraints have done for them with their release of Starfield on the next gen of consoles.

That's actually their biggest problem: Bugthesda makes their games on consoles first and then ports them to PC without even trying to make the ports capable of taking advantage of capabilities that PCs offer. They likely aren't even doing any technical work on it because next-gen consoles aren't out yet. They've already confirmed there will be no news regarding Starfield at this year's E3.

Posted

Honestly I've always noticed that the better the game the less mods there are for it. However if the game is good and does have a lot of mods, those mods just act like an extention of the game, by adding new stuff to it rather than fixing stuff. Skyrim and any other Bethesda game studios game is a perfect example of the first one. But Mount and Blade Warband is more an example of the second one. And then you have games like Battle Brothers that don't have a lot of mods but the mods they do havem ake certain things either easier to or better represented.

Posted
7 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

I can only describe as laziness on the part of the devs or impatience on the part of the publisher

As some one who has invested in and visited some game studios. I can you the environment game developers work in is exhausting. Most of the issues with games aren't due to lazy or untalented people but people who are working outrageous hours and trying to cut as many corners as they can to meet impossible deadlines cause if they don't meet those deadlines they could be out of a job. Creativity dies in those environments. Anything I've created is because I felt like it at the time and was able to see it through to my final vision. I can't imagine being forced to mindlessly code things you don't really care about... and having to utterly slaughter anything you do care about because deadlines won't let you perfect it.

Posted
1 hour ago, namaradus said:

the environment game developers work in is exhausting. Most of the issues with games aren't due to lazy or untalented people but people who are working outrageous hours and trying to cut as many corners as they can to meet impossible deadlines cause if they don't meet those deadlines they could be out of a job

I read about that years ago and yeah, it doesn't leave much room for creativity or polishing. Not sure why I thought it was any different from any other job where you have to meet a deadline. Evidently publishers don't know shit about the creative process and more importantly they don't fuckin' care. Even if that's the case, some really good games have been made and continue to be made. Maybe some publishers take a more relaxed approach letting the devs take more time if they need to because they realize that a better quality product equals more sales? Maybe some devs are smarter about what they can realistically accomplish in a given time frame?

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