TheLastBaron

Mods for games

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So with Black Mesa coming out I thought about it and realized I don't believe there is a thread dedicated to talking about mods for games (correct me if I'm wrong) even though they are pretty popular nowadays with things like DayZ and such. What are some mods you guys like? Do you usually delve into the modding side of games? Have you ever tried making a mod yourself?

Personally I spend a lot of time with mods. I buy pretty much every Bethesda games only as a mod engine and the fact that there's a game that comes in the box too is just a bonus. Any game that has a mod scene I'll at least check in on every few months if I don't actually just follow it on a regular basis. I spend a fair amount of time on ModDB and a decent amount of time on the Nexus sites, though those are usually in small concentrated bursts. I'll pick up a game like Fallout 3 maybe a year after it's been released when I know there are a lot of good mods out and spend a few days just browsing stuff.

I've recently been on a Total War mod spree, playing games of Third Age and Stainless Steel for Medieval 2, as well as finally trying DarthMod on Shogun 2, and I want to check out one called Hyrule Total War which looks funny.

I also have a list of single player mods that I haven't gotten around to played yet. Besides Black Mesa there's the Stanley Parable for HL2 and Call of the Fireflies for Crysis which look interesting.

There's a lot more stuff I could bring up that I think is cool, but I figured I'd get this thread started first and see what other people like.

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I totally made a Half-Life 2 mod called Shotgun Sunrise. It's an eight-player co-op vehicular objective-based Zombie Western. I was surprised to see yesterday that it's the ninth most popular mod on ModDB and the 4th on Desura. It's pretty buggy and laggy but I'm super proud of it.

I must have played hundreds of mods for HL1. That game was probably the best entertainment purchase I will ever make.

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A lot of my favorite games are mods: Natural Selection, The Specialists, NEOTOKYO°, Research & Development, Minerva, Day of Defeat, Project Reality, The Stanley Parable, Mistakes of Pythagoras, Someplace Else, Forgotten Hope 2, Mission: Improbable, MechWarrior: Living Legends, Mare Nostrum, Darkest Hour, Carpathian Crosses, Resistance and Liberation, Hostile Intent, Move In!, Vampire Slayer, The Ship, Science & Industry, BuzzyBots, Half-Life Bumper Cars, BrainBread, Insects Infestation... and then some even more obscure ones, like The Pit, Half-Life 2: Jaykin' Bacon Source, Holy Wars, Perfect Stride Continuum, Suicide Survival, or Surprise! HL.

Ugh. Now I'm in full on nostalgia mode. I don't know if we're ever going to see a game scene like the Half-Life 1 mod days. Those mods were more fun, original, and fresh than most of the stuff we see these days, and more importantly they were so popular because of a huge install base that was willing to try out new multiplayer stuff. Nowadays half of your audience will ignore your game if it doesn't have triple A graphics and another half of your audience will ignore it if they can't unlock new guns by earning achievements and XP. The days of being able to choose between a game of Science & Industry, Natural Selection, The Specialists, The Ship, or Brain Bread when I wanted to play multiplayer are long gone.

The single player mods, of course, still survive intact, and I highly recommend Planet Phillip for anyone who wants to find good Half-Life and Half-Life 2 single player levels. It's a great website.

Really, though, the line between a mod and a game is pretty blurred these days. I suppose a mod is something that requires that you buy the original game, but by those lights, Black Mesa is not a mod, really, because the Source SDK is free, and a lot of Unreal mods aren't really mods what with the stuff that UDK is doing. If Black Mesa is a mod then Gravity Bone is a mod, and if Gravity Bone is a mod, then I don't see what makes Thirty Flights of Loving a game instead of a mod except the price tag. So, yes, blurry distinctions abound.

And to get off my nostalgia train, I modded Oblivion and Skyrim to hell and back, and I'm going through a Fallout: New Vegas run with a ton of mods right now. I play Mount & Blade: Warband modded, and whenever I play KOTOR II it's with the restoration mod. I run old games like DooM and Duke Nukem 3d in new rendering engine thingies: I guess those are sort of mods (and the same goes for Arx Fatalis). And I mod X-COM with UFO Extender and XComUtil which makes it much less of a chore to play.

And to save Brendon Chung from plugging his shit, you can discover Blendo Games' heritage as a one man mod team right here.

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Seconding NEOTOKYO° and Research & Development. It's an absolute shame NT's community died so quickly, it was a real gem.

The only mod I've enjoyed more than NT(in a strictly multiplayer sense) is Sven Co-op, which apparently is still being updated. The sheer variety of maps in it(including a full port of They Hunger) is incredible. The Tetris maps are some of the best, in my opinion.

DOOM's modding community is still going strong, and it's cranking out some crazy-awesome wads. Reelism is an absolute must if you enjoy over the top run-and-gun action of the original DOOM, but want to kick it up another few notches. Wildweasel's "NAZIS" replaces your good old hellish enemies and futuristic weapons with WWII-themed soldiers and era-appropriate weapons. It's fantastic used in conjunction with the first half of Epic 2. It gives it a great Wolfenstein feel.

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Oh man, there is so much nostalgia in that post. I played so many Half-Life mods. I agree there'll probably never be such a prolific mod scene again, and it makes me sad. I used to collect HL1 mods, it wasn't "I'll play this because it looks good" it's "I will download every Half-Life mod I can find and play them all to death, especially the ones that will play Sven Co-op maps". I wish I still had my first HL1 install, with all its bazillion mod folders.

Edit: Wow, I had no idea Doom modding was still such a thing. I actually played some leaked alpha versions of Doom recently on Dosbox, I guess they planned on having friendly NPCs at one point.

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This was the first mod I played:

I don't really play mods that often except for stuff like Stanley's Parable and Dear Esther.

I wouldn't mind playing some cool ZZT mods though.

:oldman:

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I get nostalgic about the HL1 mod days too. I think nowadays the amateur development scene is stronger than ever, but because there're so many avenues through which they can work on stuff it means there's no single game where most of them are concentrated like there was then. This is kind of a bad thing in the case of honest-to-god mods because it means there's less chance of you having the particular game a really awesome mod runs on, but a good thing in the case of things like BM:S where you don't really need anything to run it.

In a way Valve has positioned Source well as an ultra-accessible platform for amateur developers because you can get your stuff out there without needing a parent game, like BM:S. Source itself has become that parent game, like the HL1 of old; unfortunately the engine is in need of a major overhaul so that continues to hold it back from having the ultra-active scene its predecessor enjoyed.

An observation: my forum was built on a heritage of HL1 modding and most of the guys who were involved with that now spend their spare time working on Unity, CryEngine, and TF2 stuff. Of course it takes so long to create anything nowadays that most of them just create art scenes for screenshot/video purposes rather than actual playable experiences, although the 'unfinished/abandoned maps' thread is amusingly prolific — a sign of how time-consuming it is to bring a fan project to completion nowadays.

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I pretty much switched from modding Source to making games the instant UDK came out. It helps that Unreal is really just better than Source but the main thing was "wait, I can make a game on Unreal and then maybe sell it for money?!?!" which isn't legal with modding Source. I guess Unity and other engines were always available, but for whatever reason they didn't really register with me - until UDK came out it never really felt like I had the ability to make the games I wanted to make outside of modding.

I vaguely remember making a hilarious HL1 deathmatch map where there were a couple of planes you could fly around the map, but they were just standard HL1 controllable trains, so inevitably you'd get shot in the face while flying and the plane would keep going, and you'd end up chasing it down the runway trying to climb back on. Good times.

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I have a vague desire to find an engine and then using pre-existing assets and such to create something nice and narrative. It seems that it is the easiest way to create something new and interesting for a game, I just don't have a clue as to what I want to do and how I'd go about doing it.

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Source is pretty good for that, on account of all the HL2 assets you can appropriate - see The Stanley Parable or Radiator. Probably hit one of the many "my first level" Hammer tutorials.

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