I make New Vegas mods, and arguably it has changed my life. The community is fantastic and very supportive. It's given me an outlet for my creativity and art assets without having to actually release an entire game. I've been a part of too many projects that never saw the light of day unfortunately. But with New Vegas (and most games with an active modding scene) I have an audience I can immediately get feedback from and more importantly, see them enjoy my work!
I wish we'd get OpenMW support for Fallout: New Vegas already, that sort of fine-grained control and increased engine stability would really increase the potential of the modding scene.
I feel like the biggest hurdle for modding games is less the actual difficulty of modding the game/engine and more whether there are people willing to put in the time to build the tools and make the modding scene grow. People often tend to confuse the idea of a game being highly moddable, with it just having a large modding scene. Take STALKER for example, people love to say the x-ray engine is very moddable, when the reality is that came more down to the extremely dedicated community and the fact the engine code leaked online. Then you look at games built on engines like Unreal, and they can have insignificant tiny modding scenes, simply because people dont care to mod it, nor put in the time to show it IS moddable. It leads to this confusion of not really understanding what makes a game "moddable", if im being understandable. That, and a lot of people are under the impression that if no official modding tools exist, then a game can't be moddable. I think more people should really just give modding a game a go of their choice, cause they might be surprised.
I woudl say it's both. The higher the hill, the less people want to climb it. Native moddability certainly can make wonders. I doubt very much nobody wants to mod any of the inumerous Unreal games, it's just that the work necessary to build a mod framework is too expensive to justify the energy spent. Most people with the technical skill prefer to build something from the ground up in Unreal than taking god knows how long to crack an UE game. Diminishing returns
If Xedit never existed I’d never have started modding Fallout 4. Even the Creation Kit is not user friendly enough for me and gives infinite headaches. I use it a little but it’s grating.
@@JPChereb I'm no expert on DRM and Denuvo but with closed-source games, what I would say is that someone who knows what they're doing in reverse engineering games for the sake of modding could easily use their skills for more malicious purposes. In fact, while working on projects to test RTX Remix, I've actually had to break disc checks a few times to get older games working on Windows 11 and get legacy games off of their old CDs. There are people doing way more complicated operations than I am, including someone who's done some magic to strip the renderer of CoD 4 and 5 to their bare minimum. This takes an intimate knowledge of the game engine that [speculating] came about through community documentation and disassembly across the internet, as Infinity Ward never released their engine to the public. I'd imagine with Anti-Tamper, what you'll typically see is a massive cutback on how much you can _debug_ a commercial game. This is nothing new, older Steam games do this too. You'll also hit a big wall on certain tasks you try to do taking apart a game since they're protected-- even if your actual intent is something more mundane like finding out where the camera info and FOV is stored in memory.
I'm a modder myself, more specifically I mod Fallout: New Vegas. Thankfully Bethesda makes their games easy to mod with the GECK or Creation Kit depending on what game you're dealing with. Even if it is a bit dated and janky. But I appreciate that you like mods.
@@wesss9353 its in his UA-cam bio he has some pretty cool mods like allowing you to side with a faction and not have to destroy another faction you like. Having to genocide the fiends or destroy the brotherhood always annoyed me.
@@Kyle-lv7swLoads of people mod new games. The problem is most companies hate it and will actively try remove them. Look at Capcom recently claimed "Modding is piracy".
As a Level Designer that's created mods for Fallout 4 & Skyrim, can 1000% say that the amount of dev knowledge you learn is substantial. I genuinely think this is one of the best ways to study AAA/AA/Indie level design, especially when you can actually work with those assets and toolsets firsthand. Want to know how a level is made? With 2-clicks can open up a fully built level shipped for the actual vanilla product, write down notes and study how the assets were configured. How is this trigger setup and what is its function? Can look at a multitude of online tutorials or can look at the directories on that script to check its functionality. Especially if you don't have the income to go to a college that can teach game design (like it was in my case), it's one of the best self-teaching tools available. Whether it is Half-life, Fallout, Skyrim, etc. There's a plethora of moddable games to learn from, it just requires a little initiative to start studying and playing with the engine. I would have never gotten into the industry without modding, and I will always advocate it is one of the best free courses available to learn Game / Level design for anyone trying to get into the industry.
Modding maps for Battlezone II, and then StarCraft and Total Annihilation, then finally the GECK, is also how I got most of my experience before taking jobs in AAA as a level designer and environment artist, and producing our own games. Cracking open any editor for the first time feels a little bit like showing up late to the party at the Boeing Cockpit Designer's Union. All these tools represent millions of decisions made in why they are the way they are, and it can be overwhelming figuring out why they ended up that way for you to discover today. There's really no real tutorial that anyone can say helps for sure -- you just have to explore the tools and learn how to learn.
I can appreciate your comment as I learned quite a bit just doing some minor fooling around with the constructor kit I got with Morrowind GOTY pack back in the day. It was fun to learn to assemble the existing pieces into my own dungeon and populate it with spawns, play with the terrain, and especially, add stuff to Balmora that would make replaying the game less tedious.
Modding at an early age helped me develop an understanding of how games and software work, and im glad you were able to provide it in some of your games, because Arcanum was one of the first I modded. In fact doing so (along with heavy usage of GameShark) helped me learn hexidecimal at a time when my peers were still struggling with regular plain old decimal. That foundation is what allowed me to start down the indie route after college failed me, so thanks for pushing for it! I only wish I had been able to finish my grand Arcanum mod, which added a whole new hand-crafted island. I'm sure you would've enjoyed it.
The Inigo mod is a Skyrim mod that adds a new follower, which sounds simple enough, but this NPC changed the way I look at all other NPCs. He is SO responsive, to your race, skills, locations. He sometimes namedrops SPECIFIC dungeons. I sometimes play Skyrim just to spend time with such a reactive and engaging follower. Hands down the best follower in any game I've ever played in terms of responsiveness and aware dialogue. If you haven't yet, I'd recommend checking it out!
Hello Tim, I'm a casual gamer who love playing games that supporting modding because for me modding in some capacity does increase the longevity of a games existence.
Yea only a few devs have figured that out. Bethesda, of course, figured it out a long time ago, and Blizzard knew it at one point but has since forgotten. A moddable game will almost always have incredible replay value, not to mention the joy of making them yourself!
Good one Tim, I couldn't imagine Fallout 4, New Vegas or Skyrim without mods. So much quality of life and fidelity. Mods enhance every game and extend their playtime and enjoyment. I have 3000 hours on fallout 4, i probably would have stopped completely after one 35 hour run.
I love mods as well! Though I enjoy keeping games clean to get the original feel. Much like you, the first time I play I go vanilla. Most of the time I will grab a couple to focus on, and then remove them when they have run their course. Same with you, I go for mods that add maps or quests, not mods that change how the game is played. Great video!
Even if you don't talk about them in these videos, I'd really love if you looked at Fallout Sonora and Fallout Nevada. Entirely new games modded ontop of Fallout 2, with lots of new artwork and animations perfectly aligning with the original assets. Alexander Berezin and his team made some amazing stuff, and he himself is now working on a Fallout game in Doom which is so exciting!
Mods are great to diversify a game and allow many players to enjoy it. For many people there are some deal breakers in games. The example i find most convincing is arachnophobia. while i do not suffer from a fear of spiders others cant even play games with spiders in them. And for many games , for example skyrim, there exists mods that replace the spiders. For me personally i hate most inventory limitations and if i able i remove them.
Great video Tim. I love when devs like yourself actively encourage your audience to make mods and even provide them with the tools to do so. Very cool.
Fascinating to hear your thoughts about modding, I really agree with the point about playing mods that don't alter the base game mechanics overall but only add areas, npc's, new mechanics, I really love that you play mods, and I'm going to be making mods myself for games that I love both for fun and to show in job interviews, Its really nice to hear from you that you consider mods when hiring, gives me a lot of hope since I also heard it from other industry veterans. Thanks for everything Tim and have a good one!
Hey Tim! I know you don't want to review games or modifications however, I would love to hear about some mods you found interesting. Even a small list of mods you frequently use, or the types of mods you engage with as a player. Thank you for these uploads!
I think kids nowadays don't understand just how many major games started with mods that people did for the fun of it. Fortnite, DayZ, TF2, DOTA2, all came from passion projects to other games. I also believe that now voice, images and models can be AI generated we're entering an exciting times for new mods. Especially voices, that always put me off modding questlines in New Vegas because it was all text reading.
I don't think that's true. Maybe console gamers who as a whole have scant access to modding in the first place, but for the relevant PC audience I think they're very aware of games coming from successful mods. Gaming history videos are very popular in that regard.
What a legendary take on mods from the man, himself. I always play games naked the first time through. Put that original vision directly in my veins. After that, I treat video games the same way I treat music: I DIY the hell out of it. "The internet is full of people who say things," indeed. Cheers, Tim!
Almost any mod in the top twenty most downloaded on Nexus that changes the vanilla games' mechanics are a huge improvement over it with very few exceptions.
@@mattcat83 -- You do have to remember what Tim said though, because it is true -- making a game moddable is a whole philosophy from beginning to end. It's a philosophy that informs the architecture of the engine and all your methods. It can be extremely hard to tell your seniors and managers and executives why you need more time to make a feature readily public for mods, incurring weird serialization techniques and slower memory and loading performance, to leave that exposed and public. It's a good idea that has to survive practical application. And in practice, it's a veteran move, something not a lot of beginners will appreciate, and a lot of managers will say, "we're making our game, we're not making software for other developers who aren't working on this game." And it can be very hard to argue why you are making software for other people who aren't in the building, and you'll never meet. :p It's extremely aspirational.
For example, Bethesda should patch the bugs that have been in the Gamebryo/Creation engine since Oblivion, that people had to once again patch in Starfield, lol.
@@pyrotentacle I think what they are saying is, if for example, Bethesda took a look at the top most downloaded mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. And then they saw which ones were in all 3 games. They could take out the stuff that just improves visuals, as that's a given for a new game, and then consider adding those features to the next title. Because the popularity of those mods, is showing them the weak spots in their design. What the players want that they currently aren't delivering.
I have a huge amount of respect for the devs and modders that make mods possible as its really just an expression of passion for the artform. I am particularly impressed with the modding scenes for games that are really not well suited to being modded but people find a way to do it anyway. Like the Mass Effect games have a pretty sizable modding scene even though, as i understand it, Unreal Engine 3 games are very tricky to modify.
l loved nwn, the amount of mods and modules provided by that game was incomparable. Thinking the witcher was done with an improved version of that aurora engine...wow The devs of deadfire were open to the accessibility of functions. I remember there was a section in the forum where users could ask what they needed for modding and Bmac delivered many of the requests! Thanks!
I'd love to see Obsidian's string tool. When I made Fallout: New California, I had to just raw dog narrative dialogue copy/pasting between Excel and GECK, which was PAINFUL. The conversation editor didn't work, constantly broke, crashed the GECK, lipsync we just borrowed from Sykrim, all the audio files were cut by hand and their fileID manually copy/pasted from the exported txt to audacity to file->save 14,000 times... Even after we scripted a python script in a 3rd party tool, xEdit, to copy Excel texts into empty TopicIDs and save as a plugin GECK could read -- it was just a manual nightmare. I love the GECK -- but I also hate the GECK. I definitely agree that modding is the ultimate form of, "I do, I don't say." And now that we are making our own games from scratch, those lessons learned making mods, have informed why we are making our game so mod friendly, with so many exposed methods that are public and available for hooks and scripts. It's an open world game with emergent storytelling though, which is fully okay with jank. Which is perfect for modding, whereas a game that isn't open ended, and has to be perfectly balanced not as a sandbox but a linear rail -- that isn't a good fit.
That was a great video Tim thank you. I'm quite similar to yourself. I like to play the vanilla game made by the devs. I want to see their vision from start to finish and then once I've had one playthrough will start modding.
I've always imagined that some games don't ship with tools because tools that developers use are all duct taped together in a hurry and are not "consumer ready".
For modern games that always require internet connection(for some f reason) it's all about network safety. And there isn't a lot of players nowadays that would like to mess around in editors and create content themselves.
I knew this was going to be a great video just from the title alone. Some of my favorite videos to watch are from your channel Tim - Thank you for sharing
No dlc no mods for a first playthrough is absolutely the right way to go, I’ve made the mistake of trying to follow mod guides for games that I haven’t played vanilla, and I feel like I’ve missed out on an experience to compare with mods eventually.
Learning that Fallout 3 had mods that were easily installed, and even came with its own modding tool was part of what made me get a gaming pc for the first time, played it on 360 originally and to this day I still like to play it as vanilla as possible, but I can’t deny how much I enjoy being able to play the game and say “hey, I wish this thing worked slightly differently” and knowing I can use a tool to create an esp file that will just do that. I remember the joy I felt when I could turn make my minigun in fo3 shoot baseballs, there was no reason for it, but the fact that I could make something so random and it would work just amazed me to no end. The only issue for me is I do sometimes tend to use it to suit my own ends too much lol, like in Morrowind I would often add extra items to vendors in Balmorra that I wanted to buy without traveling to other towns, such as ingredients for potions I wanna make. Being so easy to make does make it very easy to abuse, so some self control on my end is needed lol.
Thanks for making this, such a cool perspective on the topic! I hadn't considered issues like such granular parts of the game (e.g. strings) having proprietary software involved and how this affects mod support, really interesting
As one of those who asked you about mods, thank you! I also believe modding adds to the lifetime of a game since some games would not have nearly as much playtime as they do if they were not ?mod-able? :D
This is going to make people feel super old, but when I was a kid playing Fallout 3 and I saw that mods were a thing I was so enthralled. It fascinated me seeing entire new armors and quests made by people like me. It’s only gotten better over the years and modding continues to be a huge part of my life.
I've got a mod for FNV that I'm looking forward to doing, it's quite a large one & it's at a writing stage, as in I'm writing it up on Microsoft word. I plan to get all the dialogue, quests & location maps done all in Word & then taking it to the NV modding community. Really hoping it goes well.
Made gameplay balance mods for all my favorite games (f1, f2, f3, fnv, f4, arcanum and wh2) Huge kudos to any developer that makes it easy and releases tools for modding! I havr had so much fun modding my loved games and then playing them over and over and over....
Great talk. I personally would love a follow up on the technical aspects of making games mod friendly. With modding as an early design objective, how are interfaces made or what are the considerations to connect a modder to the content? How are mod friendly games updated without ruining the communities work? And what is the scope of work; should a team or consultant be recruited or is it practical for lil old Indie? Thanks!
9:36 there is also the part when developers/publishers are trying to limit users from modding the game either because they are competing with Phil Fish or is simply money (like e.g. selling a simple DLC for 5$ that can be easily a mod). E.g. Underrail developer has a very anti modding stance as the game "should be played only as developer intended" and as an example until recently game had a developer console but developer removed it because "is a developer tool which was available by mistake and people can use it to cheat", to put it in perspective game was released in 2015. Another example for an UE game is Bard's Tale 4, for some reason Director's Cut version has encrypted files which is not that hard to break, but why game files were encrypted in the first place when they weren't in first release.
wow, guess there's a game (underrail) i was going to get eventually that i will remove from my wishlist. its not the lack of mod support, its that attitude that's just...eeugh. rubs me the wrong way and makes me not want to play on principle.
@@monkeybtm6 because of developer's attitude the game also has a very toxic elitist fanbase that will weed out anyone who doesn't agree with the developer view on the game, so even mentioning modding or "cheating" in the forums will put one in the "naughty" list. If you want to play it just stay away from community and it will be fine experience
Hi I'm a mod author of many games, fallout in particular. I'm even featured sometimes in fallout 4, if you could believe that! I just wanted to say, thanks for fallout. The impact you a stranger to me has had on my life time through this one IP is astronomical. Anyways I'll be modding your future and past titles (Edit: oh I guess I should include my most common MA tag in this comment people know me as Alkazare in the mod space)
You made an interesting point about playing a game without DLC first. After considering a bit if I would want to try that, I came to the conclusion, and I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this, that games nowadays are just too often "undercooked" in one fashion or another. And it's not necessarily the worst thing in and of itself depending on the project, or the degree may not be too egregious or too noticeable, however, today most DLCs feel to me not like something that is built upon a complete game to expand on it, but something that should've been in the game in first place. I'd pretty much wait for the so called "GotY Edition" every time if I was capable of exercising the principle of delayed gratification every time (sadly, I can't, like most of us =))
If I'm hyped, I play vanilla version shortly after release. If not, I wait for the final/complete/GOTY version and then play it. If vanilla was good enough, I play the game second time with all DLCs. As for DLCs, there are two kinds (beside cosmetics). One is the full and more approach - you make a complete game and then release huge addons like in old-school games (think StarCraft + Broodwar or Cyberpunk + Phantom Liberty). Then there's the cut to pieces approach - you design a game and then release it in pieces, where vanilla is just a base, a framework for the full game, with very few functionality and content. After that come DLCs making the game whole after a year. The former is great, the latter I despise.
Usually there's no reason you can't finish the main game, then add the DLCs afterwards and keep playing. I think the reason Tim does it - and I'm drawing from my own experience here - is that DLCs often do things that trivialise the main game. There are games that just straight up give you game breaking items immediately, others bump the level cap so you can reach absurd heights, and some have the DLC reward you with extremely powerful abilities and items that completely destroy the base game's power curve. Some are also just really annoying about it, e.g. consider how Fallout New Vegas makes you dismiss a half-dozen prompts the moment you step outside Doc Mitchell's residence.
I'm not gonna disagree with your larger point, just a thing came to mind - I played FNV on Hardcore for some reason and without Doctor's Bags from Honest Hearts I'm not sure I would have finished it :D I hope they weren't planning to lock this feature behind a paywall from the beginning
What a great way to start my day! A fresh cup of coffee, some chill code work, and a fresh video from Tim! Have a great day Tim and everyone who sees this! *cheers*
Tim! I'd love to see some videos where you sit down with RPGs and dissect their UX from a game design lead's perspective. I know there's a lot of subjective stuff in there, and guessing the creator's intent, but it's really useful to see how designers see games while playing them, and what they may or may not look for.
Mods are probably the single greatest market research tool game developers have at their disposal. They're better than focus groups or game reviews. If you analyze the mods, you can see what players liked, and what they don't like, which NPCs and areas people formed a connection to, etc. If someone takes the time to mod something, it's because they felt strongly enough about it; if it rapidly jumps up to being a Top-10 mod, then you know a lot of people agree with the modder. All of which is just my verbose way of saying, "Those were definitely two bears high-fiving."
Hah, i remember once that i applied to a company that had previously hired modders. I've also had quite an extensive modding portfolio for their game and some involvement in the community toolkit creation. I remember being absolutely crushed when that subject was merely a footnote during the interview with no further acknowledgement. On one side i felt like it was a strong argument in a way of "i'm your guy, i know your proprietary engine and i require less time getting acquainted with the engine and lots of its pipelines". On the other it felt like nobody cared. By now it's all water under the bridge but the experience left me feeling like my entire portfolio for the game was meaningless, at least until i got over it.
9:31 it's awesome that games are being made on common engines nowadays because mods are so easy to implement and this makers easier to make bigger projects. Kingdom hearts 3 mods I've found particularly crazy where modders are actively making their own version of kh4 inside of 3 based on trailers for kh4. It's amazing.
I think Volition deserves mad respect for releasing the source code to FreeSpace 2's engine, that move made FreeSpace 2 one of them most modded games out there with a still thriving modding community that's been doing very creative stuff with the game's engine and assets which is vital considering that the Space Combat Sim genre is barely hanging in there these days.
I played New Vegas without mods for the first ending and then added mods for the next 3 playthroughs. One playthrough, I had a Barrett style sniper rifle that shot tank rounds with the bloody mess perk. So much guts!
Ever since being introduced to NWN and NWN2, I have spent more time modding these kind of RPGs than playing them. I get so much satisfaction from the creative outlet that they provide. Regardless of how much finished content I release, it makes the cost of the games negligible compared to the number of hours of enjoyment. Thank you to all you developers that invest the time to make this possible!
Xcom 2 was the first game I ever got properly into back in 2017 and I don't think I've played it vanilla since 2018, such an incredible community. I also have to shout out the EAWX team who, imo, have kept Star Wars: Empire at War alive almost 2 decades after release.
I like mods because yes, there are those that add to the game somehow, but as others have said, some popular and beloved games started as or with mods. Me, I don't make them, but some older games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 when it wants to run, and New Vegas, which Bethesda actively encourages modding but can't stop breaking them when they want to update Skyrim, I got my enjoyment out of in vanilla and some of the really good mods have some genuine talent behind them. It could be the models, textures, and other such visuals, maybe they're voice acted well, maybe they have a fascinating story, the list for what could make a mod good is long indeed. And then there's the fact that modding encourages replaying. Like, yeah, the near unlimited freedom of choice in Bethesda games, or the endearing qualities of other studios' games, they lend themselves to replays, but modding breathes new life into them. New character options, new NPCs or companions to meet at work with, new quests to go on, and when integrated into the games they're made for well, the play time extends and you might want to experience that again. I know I like keeping several games which can be modded on my computer rather than uninstalling after I've played my full because I know the more active communities for such games keep making and updating mods and I know I'll want to go back and play again and experience the new mods that interest me.
That was very interesting! I used to mod half-life back in the day. Never knew Arcanum had modding tools. That's a shame as would have loved to poke around in there back then.
QuakeWorld Team Fortress :) Wish people still played. I bet if they added it to the Quake Remaster they would, but i assume Valve would take issue with it.
I wish I had the time to learn to mod/start modding. I've spent hours and hours and hours in Halo 3's forge, learning every exploit and making tons of maps, not only to fight in, but that had their own little stories. Same for Far Cry. I even made 5 or so maps that were supposed to be an expansion of the game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. There's little that's more fun than the thought of expanding on a universe you're in love with. I'd love to do it for Oblivion, especially expanding on the Knights of the Nine questline. Or just adding more quests in general. Sadly, I think that ship has sailed for me. I hope my kids (when I have them) will be able to mod!
I do it the same exact way Tim does: show the game I can whoop its butt without anything but patches (or a mod that fixes a game-breaking bug) the first time. After I’ve proven myself, it’s the Wild West. It’s basically a fan-made New Game Plus.
I am quite the contrary. If I go for a mod, or mod a game myself, I always go for mechanics changes. With new art content I am always in a state where I believe it is good or even better than the base game, but it is not equal. Even some DLCs, FO3 included, are all over the place in terms of art direction. Sound is also one of the achiles heels of the modding community usually. Full conversion mods are good though.
Marathon is a great example of early mod tools. More devs need to give their tools to the community, even more streamlined ones like bungies later Halo games with Theatre, forge and custom games.
As a mod lover I do like the system change ones especially in Dark Souls 3 where you can get some amazing move sets. Skyrim is great modded I wish Bethesda would stop patching it though.
If you're on PC you don't have to worry about the patches if you use the downgrade patcher to play on 1.5.97 and use Mod Organizer 2 to run the game on a portable instance. Anyone who isn't already doing that really should. Definitely sucks for console players, though.
Yea I accidentally let it update and it ruined a long-term playthrough and now nothing works They're not even significant updates, it's just a headache for the players.
Modding adds so much lifetime to a game. Especially if it gets to the point where people can make entire modpacks that follow various themes (like Minecraft)
One of the best instances of mods IMO is restored content. The most substantial and successful example I can think of is the KoTOR 2 Restored Content Mod.
Thanks, Tim. I know you mentioned not being here to review the mods but it would be awesome if you could share your opinion on Fallout Nevada and Sonora that made a massive effort to stay true to the original world and tone of Fallout 1. They added new mechanics, sprites, locations, characters, weapons etc - you name it, they got it. I’m sure they’d amazed to find out your opinion and maybe critique of their work because they keep translating all your videos for the massive ex-USSR Russian-speaking fan community.
I would go so far as to say that good mod support is one of the most important aspects of a game, at least one that i want to play a ton. A lot of the (re)play value comes from mods, in games that support it well. Games like Factorio or KSP would still be good games on their own that you can enjoy for a good while, but mods take it to a completely different level to the point where even after thousands of hours you won't run out of things to do, new styles of playing to explore etc. Factorio in particular is so easy to mod, and when you can have a silly idea and it's easy enough to just go and implement it because why not, which i've done before with literally an idea i read on reddit and i thought it'd be fun...that's when you get a great mod ecosystem.
I like mods that add new content, restore cut content, and smooth out gameplay hiccups (i.e. moving potential companions in Baldur's Gate 1 so you get more choices early without hamstringing your team on XP).
Hey Tim! Have you ever covered or played Fallout 2 with Restoration Patch mod? It brings so much cut content it's unbelievable. There's new locations (Abbey - that one should interest you, Sulik's Tribe, Environmental Protection Agency building, ...), restored unused/unimplemented NPCs, quests (like finding Sulik's sister), ways to complete vanilla quests (during exchange between Salvatores and Enclave you can sneak into the Vertibird and fly with the Enclave to the Oil Rig to be questioned by the base commander - basically a hidden way to access the Oil Rig) and many, many more.
Also, it fixes numerous bugs you guys didn't have time to fix, like scripting errors in ending slides for Vault City-Gecko after optimizing the power plant or being able to save the Vault 13 citizens (I know your team implemented it that way to always get a bad ending for Vault 13, but hey - creative freedom)
I urge everyone to play Chronicles of Myrtana - Archolos, that "mod" is better than most AAA games today and is a constant contender for my #1 game of all time only because I'm a sucker for nostalgia and love the original Gothic II to death.
I don’t know if you answered this before but I am curious about what you think about mods like Fallout London. By extension, what do you think about Fallout outside of the US?
Would've liked a comment on Fallout Fixt and the Restoration Project for Fallout 2 specifically, since they are often recommended to first-time players over the vanilla versions.
I'm hanging around in the Fallout 2 modding scene and it's really messed up and many people are rude but I love to contribute to the scene and watching what others are creating.
It's even fun to add a mod that doesn't work sometimes. You add a feature you thought would be great, but you discover why the devs didn't implement it because of everything else it breaks.
From my hobbyist perspective I like modding because its helps to practice gamedev, in my case level design and environment art, without needing to do boring projects with no purpose except for portfolio / just learning or have to make ue 4 game prototypes.
hah true, im machinist and i can say theres way too many talkers and not enough doers. We always say "if someone makes transmission from mouth to hands you could make the world" :D
To me modding is important to fix glitches and implement patches after the developers are done with the game. For example Persona 3 reload has weird behavior with reflections if you have a GPU that supports RTX but can't do it performantly (like the 1000 series). There is already a mod out to fix these reflections and keep the game at a stable framerate, using it my first playthrough and loving it.
have you ever played fan games of your own titles?im talking about standalone games with new quest chains mechanics and ending slides its especially interesting because fallout 1&2 despite being so hard to program have plenty of high quality fan games (fallout 1.5 fallout Nevada etc etc) that were made mostly by Russian devs
One of the easiest games to make new levels for at this point is probably Neverwinter Nights. You can make whole entire campaigns for single or multiplayer just with the included stuff, and there's so much more that other people have made.
We are currently making a MOD for Elder Scrolls Online where we are adding lore friendly directions for each and every quest, 1K quest down another 1k quests to go :D it's called "Immersive Quests"
You also hit the point on dlcs, I don't know why games push the dlcs content into the player face, like let me complete the game first, instead you get a popup saying hey do this mission and get leveled up to finish level of main story automatically and it's not some niche small studio disc game, but big live service games like division 2 till to this day when I go to hq house to shop or upgrade the chopped waiting outside starts spinning and lady shouts me to play Warlords and automatically level up to 30 and disregard the main game.
I would be interested in a follow-up video that is a little more technical about the process of making your game moddable. I know you said you don't want to do a lot of coding videos, but it doesn't need to be that low level
Ive modded Skyrim to death over the years, admittedly mostly on Xbox. Its crazy what people manage to do specifically within the limits allowed by Microsoft (Originally a 150 mod limit and no more than 5gb total, also no third party programs like SKSE). The way people combine mods to make mod packs or change the mechanics so that animation packs that shouldn't work work brilliantly). Obviously its much easier on PC but i found the limits ended up making each game unique because you can't just throw everything at the game every time. Creating a functioning modlist is almost an art form because you can't use third party tools to organise them for you.
I made a very small mod once for fun and I ended up tweaking some systems and progression stuff. I realized if a game is made to take place over a 40 hour experience but the mod is going to be much shorter, then it might make sense to tweak leveling and item distribution so players can get the full game experience curve in a shorter time frame. It also made sense because this supported styles of play that might normally be considered as 'late game' through the whole (shorter) experience. So how do you try to create and map out power-spikes in games and how do you try to organize where/when they should be? What do you take into consideration when forming these jumps in power to show the interesting configurations you have found in the game systems you have made? (or am I asking the wrong questions and what questions should I be asking instead?)
Fnv or fixit mods for fallout are awesome, I mean, fallout new Vegas mods can bring back scrapped ideas like where you could play the game after you went through the end game and see how the world was affected by your decisions
A few years ago I bought a VR game which had a time limit and highscore, I enjoyed the gameplay but I didn't care about the highscore and didn't like the time limit. I just wanted to "relax" while enjoying the gameplay, so I modded the game and removed the time limit. But I forgot to remove the highscore, so I bascially cheated and uploaded absurd highscores to the games top player list. I modded the game again to remove the code to upload the highscore and sent the developers an email, asked them to remove my cheated highscore and explained them why I modded the game. They liked my idea and a few weeks later the added my idea as official game mode and called it "Zen mode"
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts on some game studios’ hostility towards mods and modders. This happens mostly with Japanese developers (Capcom, Nintendo, etc.) who view their games as proprietary and I guess mods somehow violate that in their eyes. I think. I’m not entirely sure but it’s definitely an issue I see a lot.
@@lrinfi Capcom is a straight up dev studio though (and publisher). Nintendo is too, but they do function more broadly as a publisher/platform with dev studios under their employ. They’re both.
I mod to create realism where I think there should be (like removing radscorpion eggs from Fallout 4 because... Scorpions don't lay eggs). But I also mod to make a game more little the original IP (modding stuff that make it more like classic fallout like adding back skills and so on). Sometimes, it's as simple as updating the graphics or making animations smoother, etc.
Mods for me really depend on the quality of the original game most of the time. For example, last year I finally played through Deus Ex again after so many years, and I got the most basic community update mod that would allow me to run it at higher resolutions than the game natively supports, and fix a few other visual things that get broken by putting it in widescreen resolutions. But I didn't need or want to change the gameplay, because despite being 24 years old, it still holds up really well. Meanwhile I've tried a lot of gameplay mods for Doom 2 because they take a source port like GZDoom and create a new experience. There are other mods I've played that are fun because they take an engine and run wild with some possibilities. I mean that's part of why I enjoyed Half-Life so much. The only time I haven't really gotten into heavily modding a game is with Elder Scrolls games. Oblivion and Skyrim both have such terrible base experiences, that I really don't want to download a ton of mods just to make those games less bland.
I'm typically the opposite. While I tend to keep my game very vanilla too I'll mostly only get gameplay mechanic mods to fix design decisions I don't like while I tend to not like new content, map or quest mods.
I make New Vegas mods, and arguably it has changed my life. The community is fantastic and very supportive. It's given me an outlet for my creativity and art assets without having to actually release an entire game. I've been a part of too many projects that never saw the light of day unfortunately. But with New Vegas (and most games with an active modding scene) I have an audience I can immediately get feedback from and more importantly, see them enjoy my work!
I wish we'd get OpenMW support for Fallout: New Vegas already, that sort of fine-grained control and increased engine stability would really increase the potential of the modding scene.
@zealotlee ZL Armaments Remastered is a such a great mod. Love it
@@kristianweinstock2941 Thanks, I appreciate the kind words!
@@zealotlee
Yeah, guns look pretty good, keep it up.
zeal pepesmile.
I feel like the biggest hurdle for modding games is less the actual difficulty of modding the game/engine and more whether there are people willing to put in the time to build the tools and make the modding scene grow.
People often tend to confuse the idea of a game being highly moddable, with it just having a large modding scene. Take STALKER for example, people love to say the x-ray engine is very moddable, when the reality is that came more down to the extremely dedicated community and the fact the engine code leaked online. Then you look at games built on engines like Unreal, and they can have insignificant tiny modding scenes, simply because people dont care to mod it, nor put in the time to show it IS moddable.
It leads to this confusion of not really understanding what makes a game "moddable", if im being understandable. That, and a lot of people are under the impression that if no official modding tools exist, then a game can't be moddable. I think more people should really just give modding a game a go of their choice, cause they might be surprised.
Isn't Denuvo incompatible with modding? If so, I'd say that's the biggest hurdle.
I woudl say it's both. The higher the hill, the less people want to climb it. Native moddability certainly can make wonders. I doubt very much nobody wants to mod any of the inumerous Unreal games, it's just that the work necessary to build a mod framework is too expensive to justify the energy spent. Most people with the technical skill prefer to build something from the ground up in Unreal than taking god knows how long to crack an UE game. Diminishing returns
If Xedit never existed I’d never have started modding Fallout 4. Even the Creation Kit is not user friendly enough for me and gives infinite headaches. I use it a little but it’s grating.
@@JPChereb Not at all, Denuvo is anti-piracy, not anti-modding.
@@JPChereb I'm no expert on DRM and Denuvo but with closed-source games, what I would say is that someone who knows what they're doing in reverse engineering games for the sake of modding could easily use their skills for more malicious purposes. In fact, while working on projects to test RTX Remix, I've actually had to break disc checks a few times to get older games working on Windows 11 and get legacy games off of their old CDs.
There are people doing way more complicated operations than I am, including someone who's done some magic to strip the renderer of CoD 4 and 5 to their bare minimum. This takes an intimate knowledge of the game engine that [speculating] came about through community documentation and disassembly across the internet, as Infinity Ward never released their engine to the public.
I'd imagine with Anti-Tamper, what you'll typically see is a massive cutback on how much you can _debug_ a commercial game. This is nothing new, older Steam games do this too. You'll also hit a big wall on certain tasks you try to do taking apart a game since they're protected-- even if your actual intent is something more mundane like finding out where the camera info and FOV is stored in memory.
I'm a modder myself, more specifically I mod Fallout: New Vegas. Thankfully Bethesda makes their games easy to mod with the GECK or Creation Kit depending on what game you're dealing with. Even if it is a bit dated and janky. But I appreciate that you like mods.
yea too bad no ones modding new games bc they suck so hard
What's your user name of the nexusmods?
I want to download them all, unless I already have
@@wesss9353 its in his UA-cam bio he has some pretty cool mods like allowing you to side with a faction and not have to destroy another faction you like. Having to genocide the fiends or destroy the brotherhood always annoyed me.
@@Kyle-lv7swLoads of people mod new games. The problem is most companies hate it and will actively try remove them. Look at Capcom recently claimed "Modding is piracy".
@@Jaekylll thanks, I'm used to people not actually having stuff in the UA-cam about section
As a Level Designer that's created mods for Fallout 4 & Skyrim, can 1000% say that the amount of dev knowledge you learn is substantial. I genuinely think this is one of the best ways to study AAA/AA/Indie level design, especially when you can actually work with those assets and toolsets firsthand.
Want to know how a level is made? With 2-clicks can open up a fully built level shipped for the actual vanilla product, write down notes and study how the assets were configured. How is this trigger setup and what is its function? Can look at a multitude of online tutorials or can look at the directories on that script to check its functionality. Especially if you don't have the income to go to a college that can teach game design (like it was in my case), it's one of the best self-teaching tools available. Whether it is Half-life, Fallout, Skyrim, etc. There's a plethora of moddable games to learn from, it just requires a little initiative to start studying and playing with the engine.
I would have never gotten into the industry without modding, and I will always advocate it is one of the best free courses available to learn Game / Level design for anyone trying to get into the industry.
Any tutorials you recommend?
Now we even have AAAA games to mod, so we can learn twice as much as we can from an indie game.
Modding maps for Battlezone II, and then StarCraft and Total Annihilation, then finally the GECK, is also how I got most of my experience before taking jobs in AAA as a level designer and environment artist, and producing our own games.
Cracking open any editor for the first time feels a little bit like showing up late to the party at the Boeing Cockpit Designer's Union. All these tools represent millions of decisions made in why they are the way they are, and it can be overwhelming figuring out why they ended up that way for you to discover today. There's really no real tutorial that anyone can say helps for sure -- you just have to explore the tools and learn how to learn.
@@astralandreid Hey mine story is similar to RoKMOdder. I recommend to dive in to Creation Kit for Skyrim. ua-cam.com/video/HTS0CMS0u00/v-deo.html .
I can appreciate your comment as I learned quite a bit just doing some minor fooling around with the constructor kit I got with Morrowind GOTY pack back in the day. It was fun to learn to assemble the existing pieces into my own dungeon and populate it with spawns, play with the terrain, and especially, add stuff to Balmora that would make replaying the game less tedious.
Modding at an early age helped me develop an understanding of how games and software work, and im glad you were able to provide it in some of your games, because Arcanum was one of the first I modded.
In fact doing so (along with heavy usage of GameShark) helped me learn hexidecimal at a time when my peers were still struggling with regular plain old decimal. That foundation is what allowed me to start down the indie route after college failed me, so thanks for pushing for it!
I only wish I had been able to finish my grand Arcanum mod, which added a whole new hand-crafted island. I'm sure you would've enjoyed it.
The Inigo mod is a Skyrim mod that adds a new follower, which sounds simple enough, but this NPC changed the way I look at all other NPCs. He is SO responsive, to your race, skills, locations. He sometimes namedrops SPECIFIC dungeons. I sometimes play Skyrim just to spend time with such a reactive and engaging follower. Hands down the best follower in any game I've ever played in terms of responsiveness and aware dialogue. If you haven't yet, I'd recommend checking it out!
Hello Tim, I'm a casual gamer who love playing games that supporting modding because for me modding in some capacity does increase the longevity of a games existence.
Yea only a few devs have figured that out. Bethesda, of course, figured it out a long time ago, and Blizzard knew it at one point but has since forgotten.
A moddable game will almost always have incredible replay value, not to mention the joy of making them yourself!
Good one Tim, I couldn't imagine Fallout 4, New Vegas or Skyrim without mods. So much quality of life and fidelity. Mods enhance every game and extend their playtime and enjoyment. I have 3000 hours on fallout 4, i probably would have stopped completely after one 35 hour run.
i really wish the outer worlds had more modding capability. there was so much potential there. hopefully we get, the chance for outer worlds 2
Yeah, I was hoping for the player to travel to the inaccessible planets, like Hephaestus & Typhon, oh well 🙁
And its even worse in spacer’s choice edition, I couldn’t even add a flashlight mod after they redid the lighting making certain areas way too dark
I love mods as well! Though I enjoy keeping games clean to get the original feel. Much like you, the first time I play I go vanilla.
Most of the time I will grab a couple to focus on, and then remove them when they have run their course.
Same with you, I go for mods that add maps or quests, not mods that change how the game is played.
Great video!
Thanks for the interview with Uncle Tim.
Now I can have a cup of coffee in the morning with uncle Tim.
My 4yr old saw the thumbnail for this video and said, "I like him..." 😂
So do we, darling, so do we.
I was just thinking the other day: He reminds me of Happy from Disney's Snow White. 😂
Even if you don't talk about them in these videos, I'd really love if you looked at Fallout Sonora and Fallout Nevada. Entirely new games modded ontop of Fallout 2, with lots of new artwork and animations perfectly aligning with the original assets. Alexander Berezin and his team made some amazing stuff, and he himself is now working on a Fallout game in Doom which is so exciting!
Mods are great to diversify a game and allow many players to enjoy it. For many people there are some deal breakers in games. The example i find most convincing is arachnophobia. while i do not suffer from a fear of spiders others cant even play games with spiders in them. And for many games , for example skyrim, there exists mods that replace the spiders. For me personally i hate most inventory limitations and if i able i remove them.
I need these 300 swords in case I encounter an incredibly specific combat scenario that most likely does not exist anywhere in the game
@@LadislausMarguspa nah you don't understand, i just need to loot all this heavy ass Dwemer shit in one trip, that's all.
Great video Tim. I love when devs like yourself actively encourage your audience to make mods and even provide them with the tools to do so. Very cool.
Fascinating to hear your thoughts about modding, I really agree with the point about playing mods that don't alter the base game mechanics overall but only add areas, npc's, new mechanics, I really love that you play mods, and I'm going to be making mods myself for games that I love both for fun and to show in job interviews, Its really nice to hear from you that you consider mods when hiring, gives me a lot of hope since I also heard it from other industry veterans. Thanks for everything Tim and have a good one!
Hey Tim! I know you don't want to review games or modifications however, I would love to hear about some mods you found interesting. Even a small list of mods you frequently use, or the types of mods you engage with as a player. Thank you for these uploads!
I think kids nowadays don't understand just how many major games started with mods that people did for the fun of it. Fortnite, DayZ, TF2, DOTA2, all came from passion projects to other games. I also believe that now voice, images and models can be AI generated we're entering an exciting times for new mods. Especially voices, that always put me off modding questlines in New Vegas because it was all text reading.
Can you elaborate more about Fortnite? Never heard about that game starting as a mod. Maybe you mean PUBG?
counterstrike
Even more so, Left 4 Dead was a mod for CS: Source, which in turn was a mod for the first Half Life game.
remember those halycon days of yore when you would spend all weekend playing dota allstars with a bunch of lunatics
I don't think that's true. Maybe console gamers who as a whole have scant access to modding in the first place, but for the relevant PC audience I think they're very aware of games coming from successful mods. Gaming history videos are very popular in that regard.
What a legendary take on mods from the man, himself. I always play games naked the first time through. Put that original vision directly in my veins. After that, I treat video games the same way I treat music: I DIY the hell out of it. "The internet is full of people who say things," indeed. Cheers, Tim!
More developers should not only make mods possible but pay attention to how they improve the design philosophy.
Almost any mod in the top twenty most downloaded on Nexus that changes the vanilla games' mechanics are a huge improvement over it with very few exceptions.
@@mattcat83 -- You do have to remember what Tim said though, because it is true -- making a game moddable is a whole philosophy from beginning to end. It's a philosophy that informs the architecture of the engine and all your methods. It can be extremely hard to tell your seniors and managers and executives why you need more time to make a feature readily public for mods, incurring weird serialization techniques and slower memory and loading performance, to leave that exposed and public.
It's a good idea that has to survive practical application. And in practice, it's a veteran move, something not a lot of beginners will appreciate, and a lot of managers will say, "we're making our game, we're not making software for other developers who aren't working on this game."
And it can be very hard to argue why you are making software for other people who aren't in the building, and you'll never meet. :p It's extremely aspirational.
For example, Bethesda should patch the bugs that have been in the Gamebryo/Creation engine since Oblivion, that people had to once again patch in Starfield, lol.
More developers should play the game first most aren't even doing it nowadays
@@pyrotentacle I think what they are saying is, if for example, Bethesda took a look at the top most downloaded mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. And then they saw which ones were in all 3 games. They could take out the stuff that just improves visuals, as that's a given for a new game, and then consider adding those features to the next title. Because the popularity of those mods, is showing them the weak spots in their design. What the players want that they currently aren't delivering.
I have a huge amount of respect for the devs and modders that make mods possible as its really just an expression of passion for the artform.
I am particularly impressed with the modding scenes for games that are really not well suited to being modded but people find a way to do it anyway. Like the Mass Effect games have a pretty sizable modding scene even though, as i understand it, Unreal Engine 3 games are very tricky to modify.
l loved nwn, the amount of mods and modules provided by that game was incomparable. Thinking the witcher was done with an improved version of that aurora engine...wow
The devs of deadfire were open to the accessibility of functions. I remember there was a section in the forum where users could ask what they needed for modding and Bmac delivered many of the requests! Thanks!
I'd love to see Obsidian's string tool. When I made Fallout: New California, I had to just raw dog narrative dialogue copy/pasting between Excel and GECK, which was PAINFUL. The conversation editor didn't work, constantly broke, crashed the GECK, lipsync we just borrowed from Sykrim, all the audio files were cut by hand and their fileID manually copy/pasted from the exported txt to audacity to file->save 14,000 times...
Even after we scripted a python script in a 3rd party tool, xEdit, to copy Excel texts into empty TopicIDs and save as a plugin GECK could read -- it was just a manual nightmare.
I love the GECK -- but I also hate the GECK.
I definitely agree that modding is the ultimate form of, "I do, I don't say."
And now that we are making our own games from scratch, those lessons learned making mods, have informed why we are making our game so mod friendly, with so many exposed methods that are public and available for hooks and scripts. It's an open world game with emergent storytelling though, which is fully okay with jank. Which is perfect for modding, whereas a game that isn't open ended, and has to be perfectly balanced not as a sandbox but a linear rail -- that isn't a good fit.
Thank you very much for this great addition to the world of Fallout!
That was a great video Tim thank you. I'm quite similar to yourself. I like to play the vanilla game made by the devs. I want to see their vision from start to finish and then once I've had one playthrough will start modding.
I've always imagined that some games don't ship with tools because tools that developers use are all duct taped together in a hurry and are not "consumer ready".
For modern games that always require internet connection(for some f reason) it's all about network safety. And there isn't a lot of players nowadays that would like to mess around in editors and create content themselves.
This si typically why most games require an SDK to be made for them. Lets modders make new things without compromising the foundations of the game
I knew this was going to be a great video just from the title alone.
Some of my favorite videos to watch are from your channel Tim - Thank you for sharing
No dlc no mods for a first playthrough is absolutely the right way to go, I’ve made the mistake of trying to follow mod guides for games that I haven’t played vanilla, and I feel like I’ve missed out on an experience to compare with mods eventually.
Learning that Fallout 3 had mods that were easily installed, and even came with its own modding tool was part of what made me get a gaming pc for the first time, played it on 360 originally and to this day I still like to play it as vanilla as possible, but I can’t deny how much I enjoy being able to play the game and say “hey, I wish this thing worked slightly differently” and knowing I can use a tool to create an esp file that will just do that. I remember the joy I felt when I could turn make my minigun in fo3 shoot baseballs, there was no reason for it, but the fact that I could make something so random and it would work just amazed me to no end.
The only issue for me is I do sometimes tend to use it to suit my own ends too much lol, like in Morrowind I would often add extra items to vendors in Balmorra that I wanted to buy without traveling to other towns, such as ingredients for potions I wanna make. Being so easy to make does make it very easy to abuse, so some self control on my end is needed lol.
Thanks for making this, such a cool perspective on the topic! I hadn't considered issues like such granular parts of the game (e.g. strings) having proprietary software involved and how this affects mod support, really interesting
As one of those who asked you about mods, thank you! I also believe modding adds to the lifetime of a game since some games would not have nearly as much playtime as they do if they were not ?mod-able? :D
This is going to make people feel super old, but when I was a kid playing Fallout 3 and I saw that mods were a thing I was so enthralled. It fascinated me seeing entire new armors and quests made by people like me. It’s only gotten better over the years and modding continues to be a huge part of my life.
I've got a mod for FNV that I'm looking forward to doing, it's quite a large one & it's at a writing stage, as in I'm writing it up on Microsoft word. I plan to get all the dialogue, quests & location maps done all in Word & then taking it to the NV modding community.
Really hoping it goes well.
Made gameplay balance mods for all my favorite games (f1, f2, f3, fnv, f4, arcanum and wh2)
Huge kudos to any developer that makes it easy and releases tools for modding!
I havr had so much fun modding my loved games and then playing them over and over and over....
Great talk. I personally would love a follow up on the technical aspects of making games mod friendly.
With modding as an early design objective, how are interfaces made or what are the considerations to connect a modder to the content? How are mod friendly games updated without ruining the communities work? And what is the scope of work; should a team or consultant be recruited or is it practical for lil old Indie? Thanks!
9:36 there is also the part when developers/publishers are trying to limit users from modding the game either because they are competing with Phil Fish or is simply money (like e.g. selling a simple DLC for 5$ that can be easily a mod). E.g. Underrail developer has a very anti modding stance as the game "should be played only as developer intended" and as an example until recently game had a developer console but developer removed it because "is a developer tool which was available by mistake and people can use it to cheat", to put it in perspective game was released in 2015. Another example for an UE game is Bard's Tale 4, for some reason Director's Cut version has encrypted files which is not that hard to break, but why game files were encrypted in the first place when they weren't in first release.
wow, guess there's a game (underrail) i was going to get eventually that i will remove from my wishlist.
its not the lack of mod support, its that attitude that's just...eeugh. rubs me the wrong way and makes me not want to play on principle.
@@monkeybtm6 because of developer's attitude the game also has a very toxic elitist fanbase that will weed out anyone who doesn't agree with the developer view on the game, so even mentioning modding or "cheating" in the forums will put one in the "naughty" list. If you want to play it just stay away from community and it will be fine experience
Not entirely sure why "cheating" should even be a concern in a single-player game.
@@monkeybtm6 Underrail is in my top 10 games ever released, give it a go, it is very deep game.
Hi I'm a mod author of many games, fallout in particular. I'm even featured sometimes in fallout 4, if you could believe that! I just wanted to say, thanks for fallout. The impact you a stranger to me has had on my life time through this one IP is astronomical. Anyways I'll be modding your future and past titles (Edit: oh I guess I should include my most common MA tag in this comment people know me as Alkazare in the mod space)
You made an interesting point about playing a game without DLC first. After considering a bit if I would want to try that, I came to the conclusion, and I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this, that games nowadays are just too often "undercooked" in one fashion or another. And it's not necessarily the worst thing in and of itself depending on the project, or the degree may not be too egregious or too noticeable, however, today most DLCs feel to me not like something that is built upon a complete game to expand on it, but something that should've been in the game in first place. I'd pretty much wait for the so called "GotY Edition" every time if I was capable of exercising the principle of delayed gratification every time (sadly, I can't, like most of us =))
If I'm hyped, I play vanilla version shortly after release. If not, I wait for the final/complete/GOTY version and then play it. If vanilla was good enough, I play the game second time with all DLCs. As for DLCs, there are two kinds (beside cosmetics). One is the full and more approach - you make a complete game and then release huge addons like in old-school games (think StarCraft + Broodwar or Cyberpunk + Phantom Liberty). Then there's the cut to pieces approach - you design a game and then release it in pieces, where vanilla is just a base, a framework for the full game, with very few functionality and content. After that come DLCs making the game whole after a year. The former is great, the latter I despise.
Usually there's no reason you can't finish the main game, then add the DLCs afterwards and keep playing.
I think the reason Tim does it - and I'm drawing from my own experience here - is that DLCs often do things that trivialise the main game.
There are games that just straight up give you game breaking items immediately, others bump the level cap so you can reach absurd heights, and some have the DLC reward you with extremely powerful abilities and items that completely destroy the base game's power curve.
Some are also just really annoying about it, e.g. consider how Fallout New Vegas makes you dismiss a half-dozen prompts the moment you step outside Doc Mitchell's residence.
I'm not gonna disagree with your larger point, just a thing came to mind - I played FNV on Hardcore for some reason and without Doctor's Bags from Honest Hearts I'm not sure I would have finished it :D I hope they weren't planning to lock this feature behind a paywall from the beginning
What a great way to start my day! A fresh cup of coffee, some chill code work, and a fresh video from Tim! Have a great day Tim and everyone who sees this! *cheers*
Tim! I'd love to see some videos where you sit down with RPGs and dissect their UX from a game design lead's perspective. I know there's a lot of subjective stuff in there, and guessing the creator's intent, but it's really useful to see how designers see games while playing them, and what they may or may not look for.
Making maps for fallout 2 defined what i wanted to do for living
Modding helped inspire me to pursue an education in computer science. Great video as always.
Mods are probably the single greatest market research tool game developers have at their disposal. They're better than focus groups or game reviews. If you analyze the mods, you can see what players liked, and what they don't like, which NPCs and areas people formed a connection to, etc. If someone takes the time to mod something, it's because they felt strongly enough about it; if it rapidly jumps up to being a Top-10 mod, then you know a lot of people agree with the modder. All of which is just my verbose way of saying, "Those were definitely two bears high-fiving."
Hah, i remember once that i applied to a company that had previously hired modders. I've also had quite an extensive modding portfolio for their game and some involvement in the community toolkit creation.
I remember being absolutely crushed when that subject was merely a footnote during the interview with no further acknowledgement.
On one side i felt like it was a strong argument in a way of "i'm your guy, i know your proprietary engine and i require less time getting acquainted with the engine and lots of its pipelines".
On the other it felt like nobody cared.
By now it's all water under the bridge but the experience left me feeling like my entire portfolio for the game was meaningless, at least until i got over it.
9:31 it's awesome that games are being made on common engines nowadays because mods are so easy to implement and this makers easier to make bigger projects. Kingdom hearts 3 mods I've found particularly crazy where modders are actively making their own version of kh4 inside of 3 based on trailers for kh4. It's amazing.
I think Volition deserves mad respect for releasing the source code to FreeSpace 2's engine, that move made FreeSpace 2 one of them most modded games out there with a still thriving modding community that's been doing very creative stuff with the game's engine and assets which is vital considering that the Space Combat Sim genre is barely hanging in there these days.
I modded Fallout Tactic back in the day. Never thought I could point that out during any of my interviews.
And what did thoese mods do ? When comes to classic fallouts, F2 seems to eat all comunity love for mods and fan projects :D .
I have the highest respect to the modding community out there. shoutout
I played New Vegas without mods for the first ending and then added mods for the next 3 playthroughs. One playthrough, I had a Barrett style sniper rifle that shot tank rounds with the bloody mess perk. So much guts!
Ever since being introduced to NWN and NWN2, I have spent more time modding these kind of RPGs than playing them. I get so much satisfaction from the creative outlet that they provide. Regardless of how much finished content I release, it makes the cost of the games negligible compared to the number of hours of enjoyment. Thank you to all you developers that invest the time to make this possible!
Xcom 2 was the first game I ever got properly into back in 2017 and I don't think I've played it vanilla since 2018, such an incredible community. I also have to shout out the EAWX team who, imo, have kept Star Wars: Empire at War alive almost 2 decades after release.
I like mods because yes, there are those that add to the game somehow, but as others have said, some popular and beloved games started as or with mods. Me, I don't make them, but some older games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 when it wants to run, and New Vegas, which Bethesda actively encourages modding but can't stop breaking them when they want to update Skyrim, I got my enjoyment out of in vanilla and some of the really good mods have some genuine talent behind them. It could be the models, textures, and other such visuals, maybe they're voice acted well, maybe they have a fascinating story, the list for what could make a mod good is long indeed. And then there's the fact that modding encourages replaying. Like, yeah, the near unlimited freedom of choice in Bethesda games, or the endearing qualities of other studios' games, they lend themselves to replays, but modding breathes new life into them. New character options, new NPCs or companions to meet at work with, new quests to go on, and when integrated into the games they're made for well, the play time extends and you might want to experience that again. I know I like keeping several games which can be modded on my computer rather than uninstalling after I've played my full because I know the more active communities for such games keep making and updating mods and I know I'll want to go back and play again and experience the new mods that interest me.
That was very interesting! I used to mod half-life back in the day. Never knew Arcanum had modding tools. That's a shame as would have loved to poke around in there back then.
Almost every game that I play started as a mod. One cannot overstate the importance of mods for games. Team Fortress is a great example.
almost every mod that I play started as a game
QuakeWorld Team Fortress :) Wish people still played. I bet if they added it to the Quake Remaster they would, but i assume Valve would take issue with it.
I wish I had the time to learn to mod/start modding. I've spent hours and hours and hours in Halo 3's forge, learning every exploit and making tons of maps, not only to fight in, but that had their own little stories. Same for Far Cry. I even made 5 or so maps that were supposed to be an expansion of the game series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. There's little that's more fun than the thought of expanding on a universe you're in love with. I'd love to do it for Oblivion, especially expanding on the Knights of the Nine questline. Or just adding more quests in general. Sadly, I think that ship has sailed for me. I hope my kids (when I have them) will be able to mod!
I do it the same exact way Tim does: show the game I can whoop its butt without anything but patches (or a mod that fixes a game-breaking bug) the first time. After I’ve proven myself, it’s the Wild West. It’s basically a fan-made New Game Plus.
I am quite the contrary. If I go for a mod, or mod a game myself, I always go for mechanics changes. With new art content I am always in a state where I believe it is good or even better than the base game, but it is not equal. Even some DLCs, FO3 included, are all over the place in terms of art direction. Sound is also one of the achiles heels of the modding community usually. Full conversion mods are good though.
I mean, if mods alter game mechanics, It's usually (if not almost always) for good reasons.
@@ComissarYarrick For me its usually to alter the gameplay to more immersive/realistic/non OCD damaging style.
Marathon is a great example of early mod tools. More devs need to give their tools to the community, even more streamlined ones like bungies later Halo games with Theatre, forge and custom games.
As a mod lover I do like the system change ones especially in Dark Souls 3 where you can get some amazing move sets. Skyrim is great modded I wish Bethesda would stop patching it though.
what? why?
@@iampfaffBecause every time they do, it breaks mods and kills load orders.
If you're on PC you don't have to worry about the patches if you use the downgrade patcher to play on 1.5.97 and use Mod Organizer 2 to run the game on a portable instance. Anyone who isn't already doing that really should. Definitely sucks for console players, though.
Yea I accidentally let it update and it ruined a long-term playthrough and now nothing works
They're not even significant updates, it's just a headache for the players.
Modding adds so much lifetime to a game. Especially if it gets to the point where people can make entire modpacks that follow various themes (like Minecraft)
This is pretty heartening. Thanks for being great
One of the best instances of mods IMO is restored content. The most substantial and successful example I can think of is the KoTOR 2 Restored Content Mod.
I really like graphics mods mostly. I try to keep the system mechanics vanilla as possible, but upgrading graphics is always a must for me.
Thanks, Tim. I know you mentioned not being here to review the mods but it would be awesome if you could share your opinion on Fallout Nevada and Sonora that made a massive effort to stay true to the original world and tone of Fallout 1. They added new mechanics, sprites, locations, characters, weapons etc - you name it, they got it. I’m sure they’d amazed to find out your opinion and maybe critique of their work because they keep translating all your videos for the massive ex-USSR Russian-speaking fan community.
I would go so far as to say that good mod support is one of the most important aspects of a game, at least one that i want to play a ton. A lot of the (re)play value comes from mods, in games that support it well. Games like Factorio or KSP would still be good games on their own that you can enjoy for a good while, but mods take it to a completely different level to the point where even after thousands of hours you won't run out of things to do, new styles of playing to explore etc. Factorio in particular is so easy to mod, and when you can have a silly idea and it's easy enough to just go and implement it because why not, which i've done before with literally an idea i read on reddit and i thought it'd be fun...that's when you get a great mod ecosystem.
I like mods that add new content, restore cut content, and smooth out gameplay hiccups (i.e. moving potential companions in Baldur's Gate 1 so you get more choices early without hamstringing your team on XP).
Hey Tim! Have you ever covered or played Fallout 2 with Restoration Patch mod? It brings so much cut content it's unbelievable. There's new locations (Abbey - that one should interest you, Sulik's Tribe, Environmental Protection Agency building, ...), restored unused/unimplemented NPCs, quests (like finding Sulik's sister), ways to complete vanilla quests (during exchange between Salvatores and Enclave you can sneak into the Vertibird and fly with the Enclave to the Oil Rig to be questioned by the base commander - basically a hidden way to access the Oil Rig) and many, many more.
Also, it fixes numerous bugs you guys didn't have time to fix, like scripting errors in ending slides for Vault City-Gecko after optimizing the power plant or being able to save the Vault 13 citizens (I know your team implemented it that way to always get a bad ending for Vault 13, but hey - creative freedom)
I urge everyone to play Chronicles of Myrtana - Archolos, that "mod" is better than most AAA games today and is a constant contender for my #1 game of all time only because I'm a sucker for nostalgia and love the original Gothic II to death.
Thanks for going over this topic. 👍 I myself am an amateur when it comes to modding Fallout New Vegas.
I've done a few small mods for New Vegas, Fallout 4, and some maps for Quake (1996). I've never considered adding these feats to my IT resume.
Well. We now have the 11th commandment: Thou shall love mods
Thanks Tim!
I don’t know if you answered this before but I am curious about what you think about mods like Fallout London. By extension, what do you think about Fallout outside of the US?
fallout et tu has really delivered your masterpiece well
I friggin loved Project New Vegas. They added so much fun. Including making the helmets have HUD.
Would've liked a comment on Fallout Fixt and the Restoration Project for Fallout 2 specifically, since they are often recommended to first-time players over the vanilla versions.
I'm hanging around in the Fallout 2 modding scene and it's really messed up and many people are rude but I love to contribute to the scene and watching what others are creating.
It's even fun to add a mod that doesn't work sometimes. You add a feature you thought would be great, but you discover why the devs didn't implement it because of everything else it breaks.
Yes! The video that I was waiting for! Have you ever played the fan made Fallout games like Nevada, Sonora or Resurrection?
From my hobbyist perspective I like modding because its helps to practice gamedev, in my case level design and environment art, without needing to do boring projects with no purpose except for portfolio / just learning or have to make ue 4 game prototypes.
hah true, im machinist and i can say theres way too many talkers and not enough doers. We always say "if someone makes transmission from mouth to hands you could make the world" :D
I would love to hear your thoughts on big mod projects like Fallout: London and Skyrim: Enderal.
I've been using mods since I started playing PC games, many years ago, with Valve games, and then Bethesda games. It's and integral feature for me.
I'll never not have the Garbage Day sound mod for my crits in Fallout 4.
To me modding is important to fix glitches and implement patches after the developers are done with the game. For example Persona 3 reload has weird behavior with reflections if you have a GPU that supports RTX but can't do it performantly (like the 1000 series). There is already a mod out to fix these reflections and keep the game at a stable framerate, using it my first playthrough and loving it.
have you ever played fan games of your own titles?im talking about standalone games with new quest chains mechanics and ending slides its especially interesting because fallout 1&2 despite being so hard to program have plenty of high quality fan games (fallout 1.5 fallout Nevada etc etc) that were made mostly by Russian devs
One of the easiest games to make new levels for at this point is probably Neverwinter Nights. You can make whole entire campaigns for single or multiplayer just with the included stuff, and there's so much more that other people have made.
My first experience playing a mod was Wilford Brimley Battle, a ROMhack of River City Ransom for NES.
We are currently making a MOD for Elder Scrolls Online where we are adding lore friendly directions for each and every quest, 1K quest down another 1k quests to go :D it's called "Immersive Quests"
You also hit the point on dlcs, I don't know why games push the dlcs content into the player face, like let me complete the game first, instead you get a popup saying hey do this mission and get leveled up to finish level of main story automatically and it's not some niche small studio disc game, but big live service games like division 2 till to this day when I go to hq house to shop or upgrade the chopped waiting outside starts spinning and lady shouts me to play Warlords and automatically level up to 30 and disregard the main game.
I would be interested in a follow-up video that is a little more technical about the process of making your game moddable. I know you said you don't want to do a lot of coding videos, but it doesn't need to be that low level
Ive modded Skyrim to death over the years, admittedly mostly on Xbox. Its crazy what people manage to do specifically within the limits allowed by Microsoft (Originally a 150 mod limit and no more than 5gb total, also no third party programs like SKSE). The way people combine mods to make mod packs or change the mechanics so that animation packs that shouldn't work work brilliantly). Obviously its much easier on PC but i found the limits ended up making each game unique because you can't just throw everything at the game every time. Creating a functioning modlist is almost an art form because you can't use third party tools to organise them for you.
I play the same way. Vanilla then dlc, then after I’ll add mods. I also stay away from overhaul mods. I tend to like mods that add weapons or armor
I made a very small mod once for fun and I ended up tweaking some systems and progression stuff. I realized if a game is made to take place over a 40 hour experience but the mod is going to be much shorter, then it might make sense to tweak leveling and item distribution so players can get the full game experience curve in a shorter time frame. It also made sense because this supported styles of play that might normally be considered as 'late game' through the whole (shorter) experience.
So how do you try to create and map out power-spikes in games and how do you try to organize where/when they should be? What do you take into consideration when forming these jumps in power to show the interesting configurations you have found in the game systems you have made? (or am I asking the wrong questions and what questions should I be asking instead?)
Fnv or fixit mods for fallout are awesome, I mean, fallout new Vegas mods can bring back scrapped ideas like where you could play the game after you went through the end game and see how the world was affected by your decisions
mods are what keeps games alive
Piracy keeps some games alive as well
A few years ago I bought a VR game which had a time limit and highscore, I enjoyed the gameplay but I didn't care about the highscore and didn't like the time limit. I just wanted to "relax" while enjoying the gameplay, so I modded the game and removed the time limit. But I forgot to remove the highscore, so I bascially cheated and uploaded absurd highscores to the games top player list. I modded the game again to remove the code to upload the highscore and sent the developers an email, asked them to remove my cheated highscore and explained them why I modded the game. They liked my idea and a few weeks later the added my idea as official game mode and called it "Zen mode"
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts on some game studios’ hostility towards mods and modders. This happens mostly with Japanese developers (Capcom, Nintendo, etc.) who view their games as proprietary and I guess mods somehow violate that in their eyes. I think. I’m not entirely sure but it’s definitely an issue I see a lot.
@@lrinfi Capcom is a straight up dev studio though (and publisher). Nintendo is too, but they do function more broadly as a publisher/platform with dev studios under their employ. They’re both.
Have you heard about Fallout London, its going to be an entire fallout game in the fallout 4 engine
I mod to create realism where I think there should be (like removing radscorpion eggs from Fallout 4 because... Scorpions don't lay eggs).
But I also mod to make a game more little the original IP (modding stuff that make it more like classic fallout like adding back skills and so on).
Sometimes, it's as simple as updating the graphics or making animations smoother, etc.
About to buy and dive into arcanum need that og fallout experience again
Mods for me really depend on the quality of the original game most of the time. For example, last year I finally played through Deus Ex again after so many years, and I got the most basic community update mod that would allow me to run it at higher resolutions than the game natively supports, and fix a few other visual things that get broken by putting it in widescreen resolutions. But I didn't need or want to change the gameplay, because despite being 24 years old, it still holds up really well.
Meanwhile I've tried a lot of gameplay mods for Doom 2 because they take a source port like GZDoom and create a new experience. There are other mods I've played that are fun because they take an engine and run wild with some possibilities. I mean that's part of why I enjoyed Half-Life so much.
The only time I haven't really gotten into heavily modding a game is with Elder Scrolls games. Oblivion and Skyrim both have such terrible base experiences, that I really don't want to download a ton of mods just to make those games less bland.
I'm typically the opposite. While I tend to keep my game very vanilla too I'll mostly only get gameplay mechanic mods to fix design decisions I don't like while I tend to not like new content, map or quest mods.