Why is the modding community so extremely small?

[printz]

23 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

Why is interest in game modding so extremely limited considering that MILLIONS of people are buying games?

Because mods are free, not everyone wants to spend their time to benefit those millions of people for little to no compensation. Only few really dedicated ones do it, motivated by learning and the art of craft, as well as the social aspect (gaming communities).

 

Regarding commercial modding: aren't there any games with built-in DLC stores? Where anyone may register and sell their own DLCs as DRM-protected expansions (so you can't just copy-paste them to others), provided they only reuse copyrighted work from said game (besides their original work).

[Barry Burton]

2 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

 

Well yea 99.9% of modern westerners are basically the cenobites from hellraiser compared to the ancients lol. My point was merely that that most people don't have any creative drive.

 

What a nice thing to say.

 

There are plenty of creative minds here, but you'll often see many posting about how to work with DECORATE, or how to export sprites from SLADE or work with DeHacked.

[Marcaek]

oh no culture is degenerate because people enjoy themselves, let's go back to medival times when people were pure

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Does anyone else miss the good old days when people were much smarter, stronger,taller,devout,loyal and creative than these damn people running around nowadays! Such a disgrace to our ancestors. 

[Doomkid]

The past was bettah gord dornit 

 

Seriously though it would be awesome if there was a higher percentage of game modders in general. So many great games languish in obscurity because there’s a fixed amount of content that can’t really be expanded. I’m of the mind that many mid-80’s titles would still be popular online games to this very day if there were toolkits released for them. Imagine games like Donkey King or Marble Madness but you could make custom stages? There would be an absolute wealth of content out there for them, so much so that they would hardly get old - like what’s happened with Doom.

[crazyflyingdonut]

Maybe I've been a gamer for too long, but I have no idea what you mean when you say that the modding community is "small".

[Cruduxy Pegg]

46 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

The past was bettah gord dornit 

 

Seriously though it would be awesome if there was a higher percentage of game modders in general. So many great games languish in obscurity because there’s a fixed amount of content that can’t really be expanded. I’m of the mind that many mid-80’s titles would still be popular online games to this very day if there were toolkits released for them. Imagine games like Donkey King or Marble Madness but you could make custom stages? There would be an absolute wealth of content out there for them, so much so that they would hardly get old - like what’s happened with Doom.

 

Yea. Running into hard-coded limitations and engine limits is really annoying and outright kills many ambitious modding ideas. Sadly most games will never have their source code released for fans to carry the torch from the devs.

[Loud Silence]

Some players like me are really happy with original games. The only mod i use is Vsmooth. Also not all games are worth modding. Doom is keeper, most of people are playing it for up to 25 years, so mods are fresh air for them.

[D4NUK1]

Maybe i should quit my modings studies because im not creative enougth, with a work and friends stuff coming up, nah, is better to try edit some sprites and make maps. /s


Anyway, this modding communitys is one of the huges (comparing to others huges, like source, goldsrc, elder scrolls) but we have the aventage point of be the same game as 25 years ago, yet, the modding is not stoping or touching the high skill roof somepeople will say than in 2011 a proyect like total chaos was super exagerated.

[TakenStew22]

On 11/27/2018 at 6:15 PM, hardcore_gamer said:

For both Doom as well as all games in general?

 

Think about it. We are talking about MILLIONS of sold copies for the most popular games and yet they will spawn maybe enough high profile mods to be counted on a single hand. And even if we count all the modders rather than just the higher profile ones it's still a laughable number compared to the number of copies sold.

 

Why is interest in game modding so extremely limited considering that MILLIONS of people are buying games?

You have been making alot of weird threads lately...

[kb1]

23 hours ago, Pegg said:

 

Yea. Running into hard-coded limitations and engine limits is really annoying and outright kills many ambitious modding ideas. Sadly most games will never have their source code released for fans to carry the torch from the devs.

Especially with those '80s games, it would shock some people how little RAM and ROM they use to accomplish their goals. For example, the raw text on this page is bigger than Pac-Man's compiled code! These games are nothing short of amazing. Unfortunately, expansion of them is really not possible.

 

Modding really started to become possible later, on home computers. And, yes, Doom is largely responsible for bringing the idea of built-in modability to gaming. Before then, people had to disassemble code, hex-edit resources, hack, test, repeat, to learn what the data structures did, and what could be done. But the WAD format presents the resources in the open, and the Doom engine was designed to respect PWAD resources over IWAD resources.

 

Unfortunately, it was not perfected, and, due to bugs, it was difficult to, say, modify monster graphics. Regardless, mods were welcome at Id Software.

 

But, not everyone can mod. It takes a certain personality and mindset. It also requires knowledge, skills, talent, and especially lots of free time. On top of all that, the community is full of WAD connoisseurs  who tend to pick apart first releases. So it also requires a thick skin to survive as a modder. I do have to give credit to many reviewers here who intentionally, respectfully go easy on first attempters.

 

There are more than 36,525 maps in the archive. That means that I can play 1 map per day for 100 years, without running out of maps. There is no shortage of modders of Doom.

[joepallai]

On 11/28/2018 at 6:50 PM, Doomkid said:

The past was bettah gord dornit 

 

Seriously though it would be awesome if there was a higher percentage of game modders in general. So many great games languish in obscurity because there’s a fixed amount of content that can’t really be expanded. I’m of the mind that many mid-80’s titles would still be popular online games to this very day if there were toolkits released for them. Imagine games like Donkey King or Marble Madness but you could make custom stages? There would be an absolute wealth of content out there for them, so much so that they would hardly get old - like what’s happened with Doom.

 

I would love to make levels for Marble Madness--absolutely loved that game, must have sunk $100 in quarters playing that.

[hardcore_gamer]

51 minutes ago, kb1 said:

There are more than 36,525 maps in the archive. That means that I can play 1 map per day for 100 years, without running out of maps. There is no shortage of modders of Doom.

 

Speaking of this, is there some way to download the entire archive at once?

[kb1]

7 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

 

Speaking of this, is there some way to download the entire archive at once?

Yep, search the forum. (It might just change your view on how big the modding community is...)

[Paar]

It's harder and harder to make mods for new games as they get more and more complex. That's why there is so much content for Doom, it's rather "easy" to create something for it that could be considered good. I would say the easiness of modding for FPS games ended with Quake 1/Quake 2 era, maybe Quake 3. With games after that, you would need to spend insane amount of time creating a quality mod. It's understandable that not many people are willing to do it.

[FractalBeast]

Let's not forget that the new blood that flowed into the modding community in the past, has new avenues for game development nowadays. Why would you make a mod for a game on the Unreal engine when you can just install the Unreal engine yourself and become an indie developer?

 

I'm new to Doom modding, but I've circled around the periphery of C&C modding for years - and as C&C game engines became more and more complex, I've seen more and more people give up and just jump to (amateur) indie game development.

[Reisal]

On 11/27/2018 at 5:48 PM, FractalBeast said:

Also consider that the amount of companies with a supportive attitude towards modding are small. And it's shrinking everyday.

 

What big mod friendly companies still exist? Valve, id, Bethesda...

 

You forgot about Unreal..

[Gaia74]

I do not think that the modding community is small, maybe you'll fall for the wads that are gameplay, but even so they are many and some very good

It is difficult to create wads for doom, although relatively to other games is easier, even so it has its grace, so many people, simply do not want to stop at it

I have been in modding for 2 years and still need to learn a lot

[FractalBeast]

46 minutes ago, Glaice said:

 

You forgot about Unreal..

I kind of lost track of whatever Epic produced after they were done with Unreal, but as far as I remember, Epic is more geared towards indie, AAA and "AAA-indie" development.

 

Renegade X is less of a mod, and more a really fancy free game.