Why Modding Is So Important...

[Makizver123]

Hi everyone, in todays video i will be showing you why modding is so important:

[Halluinoid]

nice history of Modding, great video and echoes what happened to me back in 2012 when I was playing Legend of Grimrock - a couple of days into playing the main game I suddenly saw "Level editor" in the game menu and thought "What is that?" :ohmy: basically after just a couple of days I stopped playing the main game entirely and just went full throttle into the modding world, I never ever came close to finishing the main game even to this day :laugh:

[streetyson]

LMAO at millennials - modding was popular enough before Valve!! Firstly, modding goes way back and at least in wargaming and sports started well before we even had computers! Ah, I remember in the 1960s and 1970s modding all my Airfix soldiers to make renaissance (pike & shot) troops. And I remember repainting my subbuteo figures into my favourite teams. By the 1980s I was even making my own white-metal molds - happy days, but I digress.. Even in computer gaming, modding was underway from the get-go, 1980s at least (I remember buying game mags and typing anything from cheat codes to whole games into my ZX Spectrum). And computer game modding was fairly established by the end of the 1990s for titles like Doom, Wing Commander, Wolfenstein and Red Baron etc. And in the early noughties modding was big for other flight sims and say for example the original Total War and Combat Mission entries. And for example, before Valve took modders on-board in the early noughties, the publishers of Combat Mission (2000) sold a gold edition of their game in 2001 with an extra CD containing the best fan-made mods they'd acquired.

 

This was the hey-day of my publishing mods (under various names) and back then I'd never even heard of Half-Life, the modding for which, though (arguably) began in 1999 with the inital Counter Strike game, didn't really take off as a modding community until a few years later - by which time I was already semi-retired as a mod publisher. You see, back in the late 1990s we weren't waiting for Valve to do something groundbreaking with Half-Life, or for Le and Cliffe to show us how to make mods. Because for many games back then, often all anyone with a PC had to do was simply find their game's textures folder and open the bitmaps therein just using MS Paint, do a litle tweak, draw, swap etc, save and see their modified skin in action!

 

But young-uns today, especially steam-heads and console gamers, all seem to think it's thanks to some revolutionary act by Le & Cliffe, and some paradigm shift by Valve and Half-Life - which is total codswallop promulgated not least by the likes of Valve themselves. Think for yourselves, reject their very ripe BS.

Edited February 22, 2022 by streetyson

[ScytheBearer]

In 1979 I made a mod for a game called Colossal Cave Adventure, the game considered to be the grandparent of modern Adventure/RPG games. Colossal Cave Adventure is a player driven text based game which required either a typewriter type console or a CRT. I created my mod on an IBM Mainframe, using Fortran. The mod existed only in my libraries on the mainframe until it was deleted when I left the company a year later.

 

Colossal Cave Adventure is still around. You can find a variant of the Woods version for PC or Android.

 

My point, making mods for computer based games has been around longer than Valve/Steam.

 

EDIT: For Fallout 3 players, there is a text based mini game in the basement of Hubris Comics, the Reign of Grelok. Find it and try it to see what Colossal Cave Adventure was like.

Edited February 23, 2022 by ScytheBearer

[Beehaving]

I think your main point would have came across better if you talked about the gaming company monopolization of content (that would otherwise have been made by modders) instead of talking about the origin of modding.

 

Also like people say here there has always been a world of modding without Valve:

Moddb = Zero Hour

GTAinside = GTA

Modthesims & Paladins place = Sims 2-3

Tumblr = Sims 4

(+All the horrendously beautiful game specific modding websites out there)

 

But I don't think its all bad, I much rather have a gaming company or workshops make stable DLC's + content than going to shady websites and downloading plugins and exstentions that God knows what... So I don't see your point other than "its paid things"? Is that it? :ermm: ...and I don't think you should have a "its free" attitude just because it's not a big company, give some Patreon money to the creator if the mod is really good.

 

Other than that I agree with you but that has more to do with the pre-launcher era of gaming (R*Social-club, Uplay, Steam, Origin, Epic etc) than with mods/modding.

[Darkironsworn]

Honestly mods are the foundation of most games if you think about it, take team fortress (the og one not 2 or classic) it was a quake mod. and now its *one* of the most popular games.

Edited August 28, 2022 by Darkironsworn

[Darkironsworn]

In 1979 I made a mod for a game called Colossal Cave Adventure, the game considered to be the grandparent of modern Adventure/RPG games. Colossal Cave Adventure is a player driven text based game which required either a typewriter type console or a CRT. I created my mod on an IBM Mainframe, using Fortran. The mod existed only in my libraries on the mainframe until it was deleted when I left the company a year later.

 

Colossal Cave Adventure is still around. You can find a variant of the Woods version for PC or Android.

 

My point, making mods for computer based games has been around longer than Valve/Steam.

 

EDIT: For Fallout 3 players, there is a text based mini game in the basement of Hubris Comics, the Reign of Grelok. Find it and try it to see what Colossal Cave Adventure was like.

 

thats very cool too, just saying

[H3llBaron]

Mods are the expression of love for our favorite games, to extend their longevity, to make them better, to fix them, to exploit the best.

I personally modify the graphic of some fps since 2013, but I know modding scene from 20 years, when it was promoted on several pc magazines (paper magazines, not online XD).

Of course back then mod scenes was ruled by Half Life, other than Morrowind.