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Jannak

Games today lack modding and cheat codes

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Have you ever noticed that games today are lacking modding and cheat codes? What's up with this bizarre trend?

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Initially I don't think any game company wants their product modified, but it has been a key element to the survival of old games.

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I think that trend will only increase exponentially with games going under DRM or whatever that thing is that means you'll need to be signed up on the internet to play a single player game.

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Jannak said:

That games today are lacking modding and cheat codes? What's up with this bizarre trend?


Probably too much hassle to make games moddable (or modding tools polished enough for a public relase, with further headaches for the developers).

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Technician said:

Initially I don't think any game company wants their product modified, but it has been a key element to the survival of old games.


Yep just look at the Doom community today. It's sad that most game companies are blind to see this (or maybe they only care about the money which is where the main problem lies).

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Technician said:

Initially I don't think any game company wants their product modified, but it has been a key element to the survival of old games.

Publishers don't want old games to survive. If everyone was playing old games that can be modded there wouldn't be anyone to buy new games.

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They're really full of themselves if they are really convinced the titles they are making are going to last very long anyway.

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I've suspected for a while that the lack of cheats is to avoid the extra little step of disabling achievements when they're activated. That, and avoiding the expectation issues with some n00b who things he should get the achievement despite cheating.

Red Faction: Guerrilla does exactly the opposite and hands you cheats for getting achievements. It's kind of neat that way.

Most games were never moddable. Historically, this has been I think largely due to issues of game architecture and possibly also a distinct lack of the internet in many places. Control might be an issue for some companies, but I really think most of them see it as a support issue that's not worth the time.

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They don't want their titles to have a long shelf life, that's bad for business. Games are consumable media these days and therefore they want you to drop the old game as soon as the sequel hits. One of the ways they do this is by shutting down the multiplayer servers for older games. Another way is by making the game as shallow as possible so you never want to replay it.

Edit:
Also what Aliotroph says is very true, games like Doom and Half-Life are the exceptions rather than the rule.

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Jannak said:

cheat codes?


I was contemplating this the other day. There are no more "button input" cheat codes in games any more. There are still cheat codes but they mostly come in the form "beat the game once to unlock the cheat menu". Which I am on the fence for because sometimes I like to put in a cheat code to get past a particularly difficult section, at the same time I like the idea of having to earn the right to mess around with the game. I have played Doom and its derivatives both ways and have fun regardless.

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I think they're well aware the titles aren't going to last long. That's why they keep churning out games that follow the same formula over and over again.

No cheat codes might be partially related to the fact many games are multi-platform and consoles don't have the cheatablility as PC or something. Unlike the old days where you could use cheat codes by pressing crazy strings of controller buttons.

I don't necessarily agree about the modding claim. There's still plenty of modding going on even for newer games - see ModDB, for example. Some games have more moddability than others, but that was also the case back then. Maybe there're proportionally fewer games today that allow for heavy modding, like drastically changing the code/gameplay vs. only making cosmetic changes, but it's still possible. And keep in mind that the more complex modern games and technology become, the harder it is to create proper custom content, which may be another reason there's less modding going on for them.
Perhaps one could argue the ~1990-2000 era made it easiest for people to modify the games by 'regular' means, because companies had a different mindset and the industry wasn't as big as totalitarian as it is today. Before that, people had to hack the games/executables to change stuff, after that period the amount of work and knowledge required often outweighs the benefits. Or something...

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Jodwin said:

Publishers don't want old games to survive. If everyone was playing old games that can be modded there wouldn't be anyone to buy new games.

Snarboo said:

They don't want their titles to have a long shelf life, that's bad for business. Games are consumable media these days and therefore they want you to drop the old game as soon as the sequel hits. One of the ways they do this is by shutting down the multiplayer servers for older games. Another way is by making the game as shallow as possible so you never want to replay it.


This. There's no other reason they don't want people to mod games or set up their own multiplayer servers or play without logging onto an authentication server. While it is harder to make mods now cos games are more complex etc. it's still all about control and profiteering through planned obsolesence.

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There's a few games that openly encourage custom content. Titles like Little Big Planet and any of those racing games like Trackmania come to mind. But yeah, aside from that, there's not much that puts the public's creativity to good use.

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DooMAD said:

But yeah, aside from that, there's not much that puts the public's creativity to good use.


Starcraft 2 is a game the instantly comes to mind.

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Aliotroph? said:

Most games were never moddable. Historically, this has been I think largely due to issues of game architecture and possibly also a distinct lack of the internet in many places. Control might be an issue for some companies, but I really think most of them see it as a support issue that's not worth the time.


What Alio said. There's been olde games I wanted to make levels for but there were no tools or in the case of a game like Blade of Darkness, the editor was so horrid, it was like trying to fly an alien ship. heh.

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Sort of related to this conversation, I was watching the keynotes speech from PAX the other day that David Jaffe did and he said some interesting things. He said that even though he made the God of War games and thought they were great looking games with an awesome story, he came to the conclusion that they would never stand the test of time due to the simple gameplay and lack of replayability. He stated that people are still watching films that are 50, 70, even 100 years old because they had elements in them that would really stand the test of time, despite the movies looking very dated and being full of sometimes confusing anachronistic references.

Anyway, it's a bit of an interesting (if profanity-laden) speech, and if you have an hour to kill, you might want to watch it. Or you could just watch the abridged version:


Use3D said:

Down with this sort of thing.

Careful now.

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Marnetmar said:

That's why I like id and Valve, their games can be modded.


Don't forget about Epic Games.

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A game doesn't need official tools to be modified. The companies that do release them are far, and few, between. DOOM never had any official modding tools.

Off the top of my limited game-playing head, all that comes to mind concerning official game modding tools are the Bethesda ones. (ie - The TES: Construction Set, and the G.E.C.K.)

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Mr. Chris said:

Don't forget about Epic Games.


If I remember correctly, Bulletstorm can't be modded.

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E.J. said:

A game doesn't need official tools to be modified. The companies that do release them are far, and few, between. DOOM never had any official modding tools.

Off the top of my limited game-playing head, all that comes to mind concerning official game modding tools are the Bethesda ones. (ie - The TES: Construction Set, and the G.E.C.K.)


Id didn't release editing tools, but Carmack did release nodebuilder source. Might have been a couple years of extra hacking if he hadn't.

Many RTS games came with map editors: C&C, TA, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, Starcraft, etc. All of these are of course newer than Doom. A good example of a game that's heavily modded without official tools is Wolfenstein 3D. Hmm, maybe there's something about FPS games. Even System Shock 2 has some graphics replacement mods.

Some games had interesting combinations. For example, C&C Red Alert came with a map editor, but that's all it came with. There were other tools that did things like Dehacked. The end result was us all running around with infantrymen shooting artillary from their guns. :D

Still, most games were never modded. Of all the games I had in the 80s the only one that had any serious moddability (outside of using a hex editor) was Lode Runner, and most people were never bothered because it came with hundreds of maps anyway.

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E.J. said:

A game doesn't need official tools to be modified. The companies that do release them are far, and few, between. DOOM never had any official modding tools.

Off the top of my limited game-playing head, all that comes to mind concerning official game modding tools are the Bethesda ones. (ie - The TES: Construction Set, and the G.E.C.K.)


It wasn't that uncommon back in the day, for example:
Boulder Dash Construction Kit
Bard's Tale Construction Set
Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (SSI Gold Box series)
Warlords II Scenario Builder, or WL2 Deluxe edition

Heck, quite a few type-in BASIC games from magazines had level editors and/or used plain text for the map data, so you could easily create new stuff.

And of course, many of the commercial games had simple enough data formats that editing tools popped up sooner or later...

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Craigs said:

If I remember correctly, Bulletstorm can't be modded.


Their Unreal game series, specifically.

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Craigs said:

If I remember correctly, Bulletstorm can't be modded.

Bulletstorm's a big bag of shit that doesn't live up to much of anything hyped about it at all anyways and features a lot of bullshit from old Cliffy. (Seriously, why bother with an ad campaign trashing military shooters when your game falls prey to the majority of the same generic modern shooter cliches you made fun of? Also, Cliff making fun of PC "gamers" for being unhappy about being the only release platform to not get pre-release demo, the game being an OBVIOUS console port while VP Mark Rein claims it's "a full-blown, oh-my-god amazing PC game.")

And besides that, Unreal Dev Kit. Can't that do something with/to Lolletstorm?

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More modern games could have mods if developers bothered to support it. Companies like Valve and Bethesda have done a lot of great work in making their games moddable. Then you have games like COD4 and Black Ops where the developers didn't do jack shit so there's barely any mods for it.

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You can download a full SDK for the best looking and most advanced engine ATM (CryEngine3) for free. They also offer a lot of modding support.

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Jodwin said:

Publishers don't want old games to survive. If everyone was playing old games that can be modded there wouldn't be anyone to buy new games.


I don't know about that, id is still selling their newest games while also bringing in a few bucks because people still purchase the old doom games today. I doubt many people who would like to play Doom 4 are going to refrain because they can mod classic doom. Similarly, I don't have a vested interest in Doom 4, and not being able to mod classic doom wouldn't really give me that interest.

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magicsofa said:

I don't know about that, id is still selling their newest games while also bringing in a few bucks because people still purchase the old doom games today.

id is a developer, not a publisher. There's a world of difference there.

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