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Do modders prefer sword&sorcery over sci-fi?


zzz72w3r

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Interesting how in skimming over the thread, it got to be about which genre offers more opportunities.  I'd say they both offer equal but different opportunities depending upon how advanced the tech gets and if psionics are a factor.

 

I think the main reason that fantasy gets more heavily modded is that the tools are more readily there.  Skyrim's CK has been acknowledged to be a bit more versatile for example.  It's kind of easy to come up with new armors and swords too due to all the historical and fantasy examples out there.

 

 

Oh and Princessity...  Next time somebody pulls that on you, point out that there were Muskets and cannons in Redguard, which was set in the late Second Era.  Technology apparently took a step backwards since then, LOL.

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Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever genre it doesn't matter to me as a player so long as it has something compelling about it whether it be storyline or setting so long as it has something to pull me into it same as a book, movie or tv show.

 

As a modder genre doesn't matter to me but there are some things that need to be there to get me interested in making a mod for a game:

1 - same as with being a player, it has to have something compelling in it to make me want to do something within that world.

2 - I need something to inspire me, a spark that ignites my creativity in wanting to add to that story.

3 - There has to be space within that world to fit my mod into since I prefer to do quest / story based things. Can I fit a bunch of little things in various places or is there room to create something larger.

 

As for the 'rules' of the genre / world both sci-fi and fantasy have their own rules you are bound, most have to do with the setting and lore than anything else. Sci-fi can have its equivalent of 'magic' and fantasy can have 'technology' but all of that is determined by the world's lore, you can stretch it a bit but it can be easy to go too far with things.

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I don't think it's anything like one setting being better than another, but more about world-building and ease of modding. You need a credible world to attract the players and a somewhat accessible system to attract the modders. Skyrim had both. The Beth Fallout games are significantly easier to mod than, say... Dead Island or some other comparable game, but they lack the grounded world that the ES series have built over the decade or so that the franchise has been truly mod-friendly.

 

Do I even need to say anything else about modding? It's fairly obvious which titles are easier to mod, and Skyrim is on top just now.

 

To put it another way, the ES games have a thorough backstory for world-building. Everything from the way the world was created to its history and the species that live in it is well fleshed out. That's attractive to anyone, and players like it whether they realize it or not. The Fallout series is absurd and over-the-top in many ways, not the least of which is its forever bleak and survivalist setting, none of which makes any sense. It's backstory is ridiculous, and it bleeds through into the game worlds that get created for it. Thus, you either like it or you don't, and it's certainly not newbie-friendly. Now, compare to Mass Effect. It's a brilliantly realized world with every bit as much depth as the ES games, and that's part of the popularity of the series, despite Bioware's ever-present One Annoying Feature problem which surfaces in every game they've ever made. World-building is important.

 

The reason most sci-fi or post-apoc games lose out on players is their inability to create that all-important logical back-story. I'll use Fallout as an example:

1. So the general idea is the world gets turned into an irradiated desert after a general nuclear exchange, and most of the stories are centered on people coming out of the vaults 200 years or so after the end of the world. That would be fine, except you'd have to have about 1,000x the number of weapons detonated to get the result you get in the games. People sort of intuitively know this because we've set off hundreds over the last 60 years. The world would still be green. In fact, the world would actually be far more likely to be coming out of a mini-ice age.

2. Technology would vary from iron age to early industrial, except for what special groups would be taking out of the vaults. Again, people sort of intuitively know this. When industrial infrastructure just stops, how long before you run out of razor blades? Toothpaste? Antiseptics? How long can you keep your car running on scavenged fuel or batteries? How about tires or just rubber products in general? How long do buildings last if they're not built out of concrete? How many components exist in your basic toaster oven, and how long could you keep it running? How long would warehoused items remain usable until discovered if not maintained in a temperature-controlled and managed environment? Again, people intuitively know this even if they don't really think about it or can't articulate it.

3. Tied to point 2, scarcity compounds when there is no new supply. After 200 years, there'd be nothing left from the old world that hadn't been meticulously preserved.

4. The people who did  manage to survive on the surface would've eventually built fortified communities, and those communities wouldn't look all that different from medieval to early industrial towns. Fallout settlements look like what you'd find 20 years after the bombs fell, but it's supposed to be 10 times that long after the end.

5. Tied to point 1, radiation would be elevated, but almost never deadly outside geological basins with poor drainage. There would also be no radscorpions, bloat flies, death claws, etc.

 

Because the world wasn't really built to run in series as a franchise, the devs were able to put the cart before the horse. That works for one or two games and possibly some directly related spin-offs, but your world ends up full of hand-waving and outright inconsistencies which become glaring when you expand the setting and lore. That's inevitably going to turn away players because they're either going to feel alienated by those inconsistencies, or they don't at all care in which case they'll probably love it anyway. Thus: you're offering a love/hate relationship to a potential player.

 

Fantasy has magic. Because magic by its very nature is  fantasy, you get the automatic gate-keeping (players who don't like or don't tolerate magic won't even bother) and get to hand-wave a ton of things that post-apoc and sci-fi can't, or at least shouldn't. It's all about world-building, and there are precious few people who can manage that well. Again, look at Mass Effect. Whatever the gameplay, the series was astonishingly well built on top of a single conceit: exotic matter in the form of a single element.

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