With the falling player numbers are Mods going to carry on making mods?

[SweetDaggerfall]

With the falling player numbers are Modders going to carry on making mods? - the correct title!

 

It really has been something, the NMS story. I followed the development closely, sticking with the sources (Sean and Hello Games info releases) rather than following what people were saying on Kotaku etc. So in general i was not as outraged as much of the wider internet has been.

 

However seeing the reported massive drop in active players (something like 90% of Steam gamers etc), it got me a little concerned. Do modders focus on that kind of thing or is modding all about expanding the potential of a game?

 

I'm still a few weeks away from getting the game, but go in eyes wide open and know that mods will be the life blood of this game going forward (unless Helllo Games somehow can dig out that version of the PC game we all saw getting developed from the husk we ended up with), but will modders still be interested in a game that may very well generate small downloads of their work by then?

 

I plan to make some mods myself, it just feels like a perfect game for that, but i wonder if the professional mod makers will be moving onto other more high profile and popular games?

Edited September 9, 2016 by SweetDaggerfall

[fxeconomist]

It took about 9 years to kill Freelancer. Played that like a manic. Probably the most influential game in my life aside The Elder Scrolls games. After 3-4 years since release, there were hundreds of players online playing mindblowing mods. Aside from Discovery, Crossfire, Underverse, Tekagi's Revenge (new name of Tekagi's Treasure) which still exist, there were Tekagi's Treasure (mod with cool ships, weapons and universe map - at mid 2006...), Asgard (mod with very hard and long fights), WTS World (a collection of several scifi universes, like Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Freespace), Solurus Systems (basically based on Star Trek), BSG (Battlestar Galactica, made to resemble the new series), Frontierspace (the Elite universe, interesting factions)... and others that I don't remember. So there were a lot of mods, each modding team was working on mods for very small player communities.

 

No Man's Sky has problems, indeed. A more loneliness feeling than Freelancer, which basically had a human universe, with human factions, with foes yelling at you "When I'll be done with you there won't be anything left to ID", and a plethora of ship comms that made it human. A human touch NMS is missing. Take it, NMS is more a feature than a game. Space combat is quite poor done - going thru inventory to recharge shield or beams is a seriously let down - but it's improvable. They could add a localized online aspect to it - such as servers rather than a unique world, features for players to find each other, base building in space or on ground. Fair fights like in Freelancer, no goddamn ewar like in Eve Online. So there is a lot of potential and a lot of reason to mod it. Space tourism is what NMS is good at it right now.

 

For me the first things that I'd like to see in NMS would be to have a distinction between ships - at least between the 3 classes, in terms of base stats, such as more firepower for scientist class, better shielding for trader class, better turn rate for fighter class and also keys to recharge shield and phase beam. And then a system of unique upgrades, hard to get, and available only from certain factions - like in Freelancer.

Edited September 10, 2016 by fxeconomist