Long War 2 (Whatever it's actual name)

[UhuruNUru]

Long War 2 will not come from the Long War Team, they have there own game to make.

The only advice I have is about crowdfunding their game.

• Get a professional developer on the team, Johnny Lump only means something to us who play Long War. Modders alone carry less weight than a known developer.
• I won't back projects through Kickstarter or Early Access. Give me a means of direct funding, if I back your game, you get all my money that way, I'm not paying Valve or the Kickstarter Company. I don't mind those methods being used as long as I have a direct option.

 

So the successor to Long War must come from another source, but whatever it's name, it's what many of us want, and are looking for.

This is more about following the broad aims of the Long War mod than simply recreating it in XCOM 2.

 

One of the biggest achievements of the Long War Mod, in my opinion was in replacing EW as the base game on the XCOM Nexus.

Most XCOM mods are made for Long War first and the biggest honour for any XCOM mod, is to become part of Long War and made obsolete.

That is unique in my experience and in a large part it has been due to the difficulties modding XCOM used to have, fostering a tight knit community

That it's much easier to mod XCOm today is because we mod Long War and like XCOM 2, Long War's designed to be easily modded.

Today using the XCOM-LWMM (What other mod has it's own Mod Manager) makes modding Long War easier than ever.

 

So what can be brought from Long War to it's successor is it's communal efforts to improve one good single mod.

Long War wasn't the only XCOM overall, but the others stopped being developed and all the best ideas were added to Long War

 

Someones posted a thread worried the Steam Workshop will ruin XCOM 2 modding here. I detest Steams meddling in Modding, which I believe requires full user control of all files, to be full and open modding.

Steam offers simplified modding, by restricting what mods are allowed, Skyrim and XCOM 2 are developer controlled and better than most. Valve has total control of many games and modding these games can be much more restricted than this one appears to be.

Skyrim's experience is likely to be repeated here, the Workshops clientelle will mostly be casual modders and the Workshop certainly attracts people to modding with such a system.

The ones actively creating and supporting the mods will mostly use the Nexus or another site, anywhere except the Workshop.

 

I consider the Workshop generally good for modding, though I detest all online client requirement for a single player game or mode. I will never use it, I never subcribe, except temporarily, just long enough to get files, and make them into an archive.

It does attract more new mod users and the simplified system encourages more to try for the first time, but most who catch the modding bug, quickly reach the same conclusion, modding is nothing to do with the stores selling games and client controlled updating make modding harder.

The more games you mod the less likely you are to use Steam Workshop. It's on sites like the Nexus where mods will be mostly created and supported, and it's here where we collectively chose Long War as the base game to mod, it's successor can be the same.

Long War wasn't necessarily the best overhaul or the worst, it became good by adding the best features of many other mods.

We've done it once and can do so again, we just need to pick one core overhaul as the base game we all use, however good it is at the start, it will get better all the time.

I think Johnny Lump started Long War on his own and the Long War Team grew over time, but many more mods are included in Long War, that were created as separate mods.

 

Using the same base game mod method, is I think, the best way to try to repeat the same type of success, Long War is truly a communal effort, because it's become the base game we start modding from.

So though it's too early for any real candidate to be chosen, we should be looking for one to arrive, we just need to decide which has the best foundation and al use that as the base improve on it.

How hard can it be to get all of us to agree, well exceptions will always exist, but most of us, that's achievable. This community is the most likely to achive another great game changing mod.

If we all pick one base game mod with the best features added from every other great Nexus Mod, it's a large reason for Long War's success.

[Deleted32045420User]

i suggest "Long Live The Resistance" LLR.

 

I've been doing that "Second Wave Reborn" as a future contribution to any big mod

Edited February 19, 2016 by Guest

[davidlallen]

What is the timeline of LW creation? That is, from the time the base game was released, how many months before LW 1.0? And how many months before it was a victory condition to be absorbed into LW? I'm thinking that took several years.

 

It may be that at one point in the future, we will all get behind a single mega-mod. But most other modding communities I have been involved with have not reduced to a single mega-mod. Civ IV (a little old I realize) had upwards of 20 TC mods, and there was no way somebody could unify them into one mod. Same for FNV and other smaller games I modded for.

 

Regarding download sites, I showed some statistics here:

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3812975-i-hope-the-workshop-isnt-more-popular-the-nexus-for-mods/

 

While nexus appears to have the best technical modding forum, the download counts at steam are 8-10x higher, which means a larger audience.

[TeamDragonpunk]

Agreed with David. I think there was only one Mega LW because of how hard EU was to mod. Dragonpunk is (and I expect will be) the largest XCOM 2 Mod Team, but we're breaking our mods down into standalone mods to be used by the community, because we know not everyone will want magic or mythical creatures.

[hairlessorphan]

1) Steam Workshop is a great avenue for people to enjoy mods. "REAL" modding is not when users can personally control files, it's when users can install a mod.

 

2) Trying to forcibly recreate the Long War phenomenon seems overly constraining and also personally weird.

[jgbaxter]

1) Steam Workshop is a great avenue for people to enjoy mods. "REAL" modding is not when users can personally control files, it's when users can install a mod.

 

2) Trying to forcibly recreate the Long War phenomenon seems overly constraining and also personally weird.

 

2) Interesting...

 

I'd much rather have a core mod and add ons then 100 mini-mods where just one of them messing up means hassles.

 

 

My 2 pennies. :)

[Deleted32045420User]

I think we should strive towards developing a base mod which has a lot of utilities for other mods to build on easily rather than go and do a second long war mod

Edited February 19, 2016 by Guest

[hairlessorphan]

 

1) Steam Workshop is a great avenue for people to enjoy mods. "REAL" modding is not when users can personally control files, it's when users can install a mod.

 

2) Trying to forcibly recreate the Long War phenomenon seems overly constraining and also personally weird.

 

2) Interesting...

 

I'd much rather have a core mod and add ons then 100 mini-mods where just one of them messing up means hassles.

 

 

My 2 pennies. :smile:

 

 

You have that. The core mod is the base game.

 

My point is that "add-ons" and "100 mini-mods" face the same problems. The only real difference between the two is that one of them forces everyone to take on the changes made by the so-called core mod.

 

EDIT: a few key reasons why this happened to work with Long War:

 

1) Long War came out long after the base game was finalized, so everyone was ready for a big overhaul.

2) Long War was that good, and its adoption as "the core mod" came as a consequence of that. Trying to pre-emptively decide we're gonna have a core mod is putting the cart before the horse.

3) XCOM didn't come with an SDK, so the modding community was smaller. Trying to impress enough of a community to become "THE core mod" gets harder the larger the community gets.

4) Could probably keep going. Won't.

Edited February 19, 2016 by hairlessorphan

[hairlessorphan]

I think we should strive towards developing a base mod which has a lot of utilities for other mods to build on easily rather than go and do a second long war mod

 

I would totally get behind this, but this won't happen until after the base game is stable. We have confirmation that they're going to be updating the SDK to help us out, so we at least have to wait for that, even if we don't need to wait for expansions to sift out.

[Amineri]

 

EDIT: a few key reasons why this happened to work with Long War:

 

1) Long War came out long after the base game was finalized, so everyone was ready for a big overhaul.

2) Long War was that good, and its adoption as "the core mod" came as a consequence of that. Trying to pre-emptively decide we're gonna have a core mod is putting the cart before the horse.

3) XCOM didn't come with an SDK, so the modding community was smaller. Trying to impress enough of a community to become "THE core mod" gets harder the larger the community gets.

4) Could probably keep going. Won't.

 

 

I'll just add that one other factor (in my opinion) is that we spent extra time to make the LW EW mod expose more things to be configurable / moddable, compared to the base EW game. The stock LW balance wasn't for everyone, but it was easier to mod LW to get different difficulties (and there were a lot of mods like that).

 

Another thing I'd like to point out is that LW came out after a lot of playtesting/reviewing by gamers, which XCOM 2 has just barely started.