Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Mods and a Lack Thereof!

Mods have long stood as an institution by which gamers can prove their creativity, dedication and talent to game designers, reinterpreting the rules of play in such a way that they become something new, something wholly unrecognizable. There are very few gamers of a certain age who don’t speak of Counter-Strike in hushed tones, wringing their hands discussing the brilliance of a game you got for zero dollars, simply by poking around on the internet after you bought Half-Life.

Since then mods have become something of an institution over the span of gaming history. Mods have given us some incredible experiences in real-time strategy games, entering many new sub-genres and game types like tower defense and the hero-slugfest of DotA into the dialect of gaming. They’ve allowed first-person shooter fans to express themselves and conceive of new and interesting ways to kill one another. They’ve given upstarts careers, given people with nothing better to do a creative outlet, and they’ve given me a wealth of fun experiences over the years.

But it feels of late like the mod community is changing. Games that would’ve been mods years ago, games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam: the Colon Returns and Heroes of Newerth. Not that these aren’t fine, polished experiences. It’s just that we would’ve seen that sort of fine, polished experience coming from amateur hands in the early aughts, instead of from the hands of seasoned, well funded developers. And these experiences would’ve lead to more mods and fed into the cycle of mod life.

It sometimes feels like a beautiful pattern has been interrupted. While I occasionally play games like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Left 4 Dead and think “what a wonderful framework for modding,” far more often of late I find myself looking at the creative landscape emerging from players rather than developers and despairing. Perhaps some of this is owed to the developers and publishers of games, rather than the player base. A quick survey of most of the major first-person shooter releases in the last few years show a heavy concentration from publishers like EA and Activision, parties hardly known for their magnanimous nature with intellectual property. Paired with a growing focus on console development, where mod tools are a rarity if they are at all, and a shrinking market window for modders to find careers through their passion, and it’s hardly surprising that mods have slowed down.

Although perhaps not all is lost. Modding is still heavily encouraged by many larger designers. Little Big Planet, for example, is a franchised based entirely around the mod mentality. For all my qualms with SCEA, they’ve done an excellent job of providing players with a toolset and letting them run wild with it. I still haven’t tried LBP, or LBP2 due to a lack of a Playstation 3 and the motivation to get one now that the price has dropped to a relative pittance, but I can still sit on the sidelines and watch the levels build and build enthusiasm over them flood and fade and feel some encouragement that modding will find a new life on consoles.

The other hope stems from Starcraft 2’s extremely robust set of map building tools. For all my earlier comments about Activision, their giant cash-cow Blizzard makes up for much of Kotick’s miserly chest thumping. There must be some sort of strain in that relationship, or perhaps simply grudging respect for Blizzard’s ability to make shitloads and shitloads of money regardless of what Activision does. I’m still not entirely sure what Blizzard needs Activision for, except perhaps to occasionally make them look moderately less successful and karmically balance them out, in case they do a few too many good deeds. Anyhow, as aggressive as Activision has been about controlling content in most of their properties, Blizzard hasn’t changed their policy one whit. They built a name by giving players what they want, and they continued to do that in Starcraft 2, including one of the most robust map-making toolsets in recent memory with the game.

I haven’t been as active in looking into the mods emerging from SC2 as I should to be totally honest, but what I’ve seen so far has been pitch perfect. A quick look at the custom games tab reveals a veritable shitton of mods available for play, most of them no doubt horrible. But nestled among those awful, awful fuckfests are a few choice game play modes. I’ve had some incredible experiences with Left2Die, a mod that sends up two of my multiplayer staples of late. It’s a re-creation of everyone’s favorite level in SC2 which, by now, everyone has hailed as brilliant. But what has hooked me is the Night2Die version of the mod, which involves a last-stand style holdout battle against ever-increasing, never ceasing waves of enemies. It has a unique feeling to it of iterative, educational play, and each time I get a little further a new challenge emerges to ruin my day. It’s a great feeling.

The diversity and breadth of SC2’s mods are encouraging, given how underplayed many other mods are in major titles. Left4Dead 2, for example, features a robust toolset many people use to create fascinating scenarios, but I play Left4Dead 2 on a nightly basis and I honestly have no idea how I’d even go looking for a mod game. The same goes for Neverwinter Nights 2, which I’m mostly playing so that I can understand the mod system surrounding it. The single player campaign has proven a poor introduction to this community so far, however, and I find myself quickly growing tired of the 3.5 edition D&D ruleset that so many nerds ceaselessly rant about.

Of course, it could always be that I’m just not looking hard enough. Case in point, Quake 2 was a game surrounded by mods, but the only way to discover them was reading forums constantly, searching the web on, at the time, arcane search engines and then tooling around with whatever files some fan-hosted site had on hand until they worked. Myth 2 had mods up the wazoo, but you had to search websites, sometimes multiple websites, to find the right version of the right mod your friends were playing. Perhaps these other mods are just hiding out there, waiting for people as young and passionate as myself at 13 to find them. But the world of mods seems quieter now, less likely to draw in some new talent to the game design stage proper, and that seems like a loss for us all to me.