27th April 2015, 11:13 AM
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/04/27...team-mods/
I'm catching the tail end of this particular news cycle. It would appear oh so very many are upset at this new "buy your mods" system Valve has set up. (For the past year I've repeatedly been calling Valve the company "Steam" by mistake.) They're upset at the notion that someone might want to charge money for a mod.
Now, part of me understands the notion of how "the community" might be mad at this. I can see how bad money can drive out the good, in some ways. That does happen, and inevitably we'll see some of that moving forward. However, sometimes the sheer time and effort put into making a mod should justify the author's desire to actually profit off of their work. Why should such "derivative" content as they develop not be profitable? Along those same lines, those who make extremely tiny "small" mods (and those philosophically opposed to the new model) are still free to make their mods free, and those free mods are sure to be instantly more popular than priced mods that do the same thing. I don't see a future where the modding community becomes so corrupt that minor "fixed this quest bug" type mods are going to be sold.
However, I'm giving the modding community for a lot of these games too much credit. Sure, there are a number of good to amazing mods available to games, but the vast VAST majority of mods I see on sites like "The Nexus" are just... awful. I'm talking about mods that just add their favorite OTHER fictional stuff as "reskins" for your character in the game, with no thought at all as to how well any of it should fit. There's mods that are just internet memes for the sake of memes. Mods that turn your sword into a keyblade, or your eyes into some weird anime eyes. And oh, the anime mods. They all just clash terribly with the in-game art style, and generally don't even look like anything but anime cliches stapled together. Oh, a blue haired pig tailed cat eared lady with weird frog eyes and a nose piercing? Congratulations, you totally NAILED the look of Oblivion sir! Oh hey, it's Megaman's "suit"! Nice one. Did you just mod the main character in Deus Ex to look like Link from the legend of Zelda? Unironically? You win! You win my enmity! Hell, at LEAST try something that was actually your idea.
This video more or less sums up the modding scene in Skyrim right now:
Frankly, I'm shocked that the above modded game worked as well as it did. Another big problem with the modding community is most of the mods I'm talking about here seem to be made in a vacuum. There's a core group of dedicated modders who work hard to make sure that their mods work well with other popular well-made mods, but outside of that, no one seems to know or care about compatibility with the major mods.
Let's tackle the elephant in the room here. Go to any specific game page on the mod nexus web site, and you'll find the list of the current most recent and most popular mods, and just about ALL of them are creepy "nudity" mods. I won't judge someone's sexy style kinks or whatever, but their need to "justify" these mods in the description is what creeps me out. At least they should be honest about their actual motivation, but wow, the lies they come up with... For example, half of the mods that change all the females in the game to ridiculous "bimbo" stereotypes describe themselves as "more realistic women" or "more beautiful women" (frankly, neither of those are true in any way shape or form with the blow-up dolls they seem to be showing in those screen shots). They alter the clothes to ridiculous levels (this is the frozen north, right?), or just change all the women (almost always women) to walk around naked. The most popular mods are just to model in genitals when someone disrobes. Now, that last one I could understand if they were actually going to program in sex scenes or romance systems, but they don't. The entire justification, full stop, is "realism", even though at no point in the narrative does someone get stripped down to their bare essentials. If making stuff players will never see look "more realistic" was such a priority, why don't they fix the various edge of the world "unfished" stuff nearly as often as they fix this?
What I'm getting at is this. At least with the ability to charge, a bit of culling is going to start happening. We might actually see people motivated to make decent mods aside from a dedicated but very small group.
I'm catching the tail end of this particular news cycle. It would appear oh so very many are upset at this new "buy your mods" system Valve has set up. (For the past year I've repeatedly been calling Valve the company "Steam" by mistake.) They're upset at the notion that someone might want to charge money for a mod.
Now, part of me understands the notion of how "the community" might be mad at this. I can see how bad money can drive out the good, in some ways. That does happen, and inevitably we'll see some of that moving forward. However, sometimes the sheer time and effort put into making a mod should justify the author's desire to actually profit off of their work. Why should such "derivative" content as they develop not be profitable? Along those same lines, those who make extremely tiny "small" mods (and those philosophically opposed to the new model) are still free to make their mods free, and those free mods are sure to be instantly more popular than priced mods that do the same thing. I don't see a future where the modding community becomes so corrupt that minor "fixed this quest bug" type mods are going to be sold.
However, I'm giving the modding community for a lot of these games too much credit. Sure, there are a number of good to amazing mods available to games, but the vast VAST majority of mods I see on sites like "The Nexus" are just... awful. I'm talking about mods that just add their favorite OTHER fictional stuff as "reskins" for your character in the game, with no thought at all as to how well any of it should fit. There's mods that are just internet memes for the sake of memes. Mods that turn your sword into a keyblade, or your eyes into some weird anime eyes. And oh, the anime mods. They all just clash terribly with the in-game art style, and generally don't even look like anything but anime cliches stapled together. Oh, a blue haired pig tailed cat eared lady with weird frog eyes and a nose piercing? Congratulations, you totally NAILED the look of Oblivion sir! Oh hey, it's Megaman's "suit"! Nice one. Did you just mod the main character in Deus Ex to look like Link from the legend of Zelda? Unironically? You win! You win my enmity! Hell, at LEAST try something that was actually your idea.
This video more or less sums up the modding scene in Skyrim right now:
Frankly, I'm shocked that the above modded game worked as well as it did. Another big problem with the modding community is most of the mods I'm talking about here seem to be made in a vacuum. There's a core group of dedicated modders who work hard to make sure that their mods work well with other popular well-made mods, but outside of that, no one seems to know or care about compatibility with the major mods.
Let's tackle the elephant in the room here. Go to any specific game page on the mod nexus web site, and you'll find the list of the current most recent and most popular mods, and just about ALL of them are creepy "nudity" mods. I won't judge someone's sexy style kinks or whatever, but their need to "justify" these mods in the description is what creeps me out. At least they should be honest about their actual motivation, but wow, the lies they come up with... For example, half of the mods that change all the females in the game to ridiculous "bimbo" stereotypes describe themselves as "more realistic women" or "more beautiful women" (frankly, neither of those are true in any way shape or form with the blow-up dolls they seem to be showing in those screen shots). They alter the clothes to ridiculous levels (this is the frozen north, right?), or just change all the women (almost always women) to walk around naked. The most popular mods are just to model in genitals when someone disrobes. Now, that last one I could understand if they were actually going to program in sex scenes or romance systems, but they don't. The entire justification, full stop, is "realism", even though at no point in the narrative does someone get stripped down to their bare essentials. If making stuff players will never see look "more realistic" was such a priority, why don't they fix the various edge of the world "unfished" stuff nearly as often as they fix this?
What I'm getting at is this. At least with the ability to charge, a bit of culling is going to start happening. We might actually see people motivated to make decent mods aside from a dedicated but very small group.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
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