Saturday, June 6, 2009

Computer Game Mods and the Issues Surrounding Them.

No picture for this one, this is an essay I wrote as part of the last year's coursework, and figured I'd put up here now it's been handed in (ie finished). Fun fact: this was the first essay I'd written in almost 2 years. It's also shorter than my last blog post ^^; [EDIT And now it's after the break!]


In this essay I intend to examine the controversies surrounding the issue of computer game mods. In order to do this, I will firstly look at mods themselves, what they are, and their good and bad sides. I will then look at the positive role they can play in computer game development, and the negative role they play in the development of games for consoles over PCs.

The first thing we must do is to decide exactly what we mean when by a “mod” in the context of computer games. Wikipedia says that:

“Mods are made by the general public or a developer... are not standalone software and require the user to have the original release in order to run. They can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, textures, levels, story lines, music, and game modes.”[1]

So then, a mod is a piece of software that modifies an existing game in some way, hence the name. What is bad about this? The most major problems with the idea occur in multi-player games.

The first problem is that mods can, potentially, be used to break End User License Agreements (EULAs) or Terms of Service (ToS), which can lead to users being banned from playing the game, in a parallel to the case of WoW Glider[2], which was not a mod due to being a separate piece of software, but raises similar issues of allowing players to do something against the ToS.

The second is similar, in that it is possible for mods to be used to give one player an edge against others. For instance, there are mods for FPS games to change enemies' skins to make them more visible (such as a mod for Team Fortress 2 which makes a small pet follow anyone playing a Pyro[3]).

However, overall, I would consider mods to be a good thing in spite of these multi-player foibles. After all, a lot of mods can enhance a game's lifespan by a significant amount, which is to say, players who find the mod keep playing for longer than those who do not. The best examples of these are custom maps, mods which allow the normal game to be played in new locales, often with different units, weapons and even game-play types. One game that is still played today, thanks in part to its map mods, is Warcraft 3. Maps such as Defense of the Ancients[4] made using the official map creator of the original game mean that the game is played today even by people who have long since stopped playing the game in its original form.

An issue that is bad in multi-player games, that mods can make a game easier, can be good in single-player games, or the single-player parts of multi-player games. So long as making the game easier for one person does not make it harder for another, mods doing this are an excellent way to help less able players get into a game that they might otherwise be reluctant to play. For instance, the World of Warcraft mod QuestHelper[5] helps new players know where to go for quests, but as there is no competition over levelling inherent to the game, this mod has no averse affect on players without it.

In addition, mods can help a mostly good game escape those aspects which are bad about it. For instance, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is a game that was released with many bugs, a lot of which were never fixed by an official patch due to developers Troika Games closing down shortly after release[6]. However, fans of the game continued to produce mods to fix these bugs, so that the game could be played and appreciated despite its development issues[7].

Quite a few popular games over the last few years have launched with official mod tools or map making utilities. Examples include 2002's Warcraft 3[8], 2004's World of Warcraft[9], 2006's Elder Scrolls: Oblivion[10] and 2008's Fallout 3[11]. In all four of these cases, the map editor or mod creation tools have been advertised features, and in the case of Oblivion, is a Unique Selling Point (USP) of the game.

These mod creation tools are very good because they do a good job, as is their intention, of allowing amateur developers with good ideas but low resources to make their games in the media of existing games. In this way, talent flourishes which might otherwise go unnoticed due to lack of resources to put into developing a full game. A prime example of this is the game Counter-Strike, originally a mod for Half Life, which has grown into a series of published games in its own right[12].

However, there is also the issue of the often opposed areas of PC gaming and console gaming. While the majority of this issue often boils down to preference of control scheme, mods play a key part in it. Mods exist predominantly, almost entirely in fact, for PC games. For instance, the mod tools of Oblivion and Fallout 3 mentioned above are only for the PC versions, and do not exist for their Xbox 360 counterparts.

As an example of this discrepancy, one of the first pieces of paid downloadable content for Oblivion on the Xbox 360 was a small patch allowing horses to wear armour, something which Xbox users had to pay for despite the same patch being free for PC users[13].

The issue, however, is that at the end of the day, the flexibility and infinite potential of mods means that, in cases of games such as these existing on both console and PC, the PC version will be definably better due to having mods while the console version does not.

There are signs, though, that this is changing. Halo 3, the latest in Bungie's best-selling FPS line for Xbox 360, came with a feature called Forge, a multi-player mode incorporating a map editor[14]. In addition, at their conference at this year's E3, Nintendo spoke about the Dsi, and numerous games for it such as Wario Ware DiY which focused on user-generated, shareable content[15]. While not mods in the strictest sense, these cases show that mods for console games are becoming a possibility, and perhaps in the next generation of consoles we will see them truly catching up to PCs.

So, in conclusion, I'm optimistic for, and in favour of, mods. The problems in multiplayer games and current edge of PCs over consoles are more than outweighed, in my mind at least, by the single-player improvements and the potential for showcasing developer skill.

1 comment:

  1. SkiDesignS10/9/09 14:54

    Great essay, dude, I completely agree. There were also a few Oblivion Mods that were worth mentioning simply for the fact that it made the game playable on lower-end machines.

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