bethesda taught us a very important lesson a while ago - if your game isn’t good, then the modders won’t bother. Skyrim despite its flaws is a good game, and has mods to show for it, Starfield despite its budget is pretty bad, and after the initial hype most ambitious mod projects were cancelled.
because of that i don’t think there’s any neferious plot behind the game makers celebrating their modding community, and the modding community certainly isn’t getting forced to work without pay - they’re passionate about the game and want to make something of their own within it, and honestly that builds a good portfolio for future use too
Defending amateurism in amateur fields is reasonable. Especially when amateurism is a legal defense of the practice such as modding. Professional mods without official license are copyright violations.
This is similar to fanfic communities. The amateurism of the field gives it part of its charm and community, and it also makes it easier for people to come in, develop these skills, and move into creating and selling original works if they’d like to move in that direction.
Copyleft “fanfics” are what we call the entire SCP universe. CC-BY-SA is just like the GPL. Notice it’s not CC-BY-SA-NC (NonCommercial). Labor, even if it’s “mods” or “fanfics” is still labor. What, suddenly your work grew in value because it was based off of a different license agreement? The hard work didn’t change, yet it suddenly legitimately grew in value?
If i ever made a game, im making sure everything is released cc by sa and a FLOSS software license for the source code. Because fuck the mentality that says your work isn’t valuable simply because I didn’t give you a license to “my stuff”
Labor is labor, and copyleft is great. Hell copyright has massive issues. But also if youre going to participate in amateur labor where it would be illegal to profit, something wonderful and fulfilling for many people, then you don’t get mad when you don’t get paid. If you decide you’d like to make it something you get compensated for you can file the serial numbers off as has become a common practice for fanfic writers who achieve a certain level of popularity.
But also, the exchange of money changes the nature of labor. Labor done out of love and a desire to create and act and give to one’s community is deeply human and quite satisfying and it’s why amateur communities develop culture of amateurism. And it’s why many people who don’t want to do these things for a living choose to do them for a hobby
I don’t either. But if they’re joining an intramural league, I oppose it. Because its a league defined by amateurism in which nobody’s really seeking to profit.
When we talk NCAA or Olympics then I think that as people are starting to profit off of it the athletes should profit. Though I ask why we’re endorsing the everyone profit model rather than the “college sports teams should more resemble high school ones and we create a minor league instead” model.
Lets go to a form of labor I’ve done: open mic nights. Comedians should be able to make money off their craft, but open mic nights shouldn’t pay because that creates conditions that ruin the point. It’s a space where anyone can go up, try their hand, and with minimal judgment perform. You being good is a nice surprise to the audience, unlike when you’re being paid where they have reason to expect it. It’s a different environment, one more focused on the human desire to create and perform and share it and on the development of skills to a level that they can be sold.
That’s what amateurism is about. It’s about keeping it low key, keeping the expectations reasonable, and keeping the vibe of “people are selling their stuff here” out. It’s the same reason that as a former nudes poster who has dated nudes sellers I’ve wanted to keep those communities separated.
So yeah, it kills the vibes and for us supporters of amateurism we know we’re losing out on highly skilled people’s contributions to our communities when we say we’d rather them not engage in commercial works in those realms. Thats OK.
And I’d like to add that I do purchase art from former amateurs when they move into professional realms. Tamsyn Muir is my favorite author and her writing drips of her fanfic history. But her fanfic is for her and under a name idk if shes even released, and I wouldn’t buy it if she were to sell it wholecloth, because that kills the vibes.
I don't get ballooning mod teams. I mean, at that point why not ship a standalone game? Last time this happened it was called The Witcher and I hear that did alright.
A friend of mine had a similar thought. He was sitting down to do some work on an open source game, and then was like “Wait. What am I doing?” and he made his own game from scratch. ( This one: store.steampowered.com/app/1271280/Rift_Wizard/ - It’s good, but kind of too hard for my brain )
It helped that he a had a lot of xp in game development. I imagine some of the boring, difficult, stuff doesn’t have as many people readily available. There’s a lot of “Why does the game crash if I push the up arrow key when I’m in my inventory, sometimes?” stuff you have to worry about when you’re doing the whole thing.
Part of me is so pulled by games with customizable characters and good magic systems, but roguelike… oof. But it calls to my childhood self. Maybe I’ll watch a playthrough to try to see if it’s for me.
Props to your friend for making and finishing a game at all, let alone the reviews said one lots of people enjoy!
Modding something that already exists is way easier than making a game, and when it comes to huge mod teams most people contribute in small ways in their free time. People also come and go to the modding scene whenever they feel like it as opposed to actually requiring to work in a timely manner.
Yeah, well, that's why game engines are a thing. I didn't pick The Witcher at random, that was built on top of Neverwinter Nights tech.
Maybe I'm too stuck in the 90s, but I never quite got the point of doing all those total conversions for Quake games when you could just as well use the exact same tools by licensing the engine and just ship the thing as a game.
Well, no, I'm lying. The point of those total conversions was very often that people wanted to use a bunch of licensed characters they didn't own, which I guess is the point here as well, so maybe I've answered my own question.
Pre-existing models/art is something that is a huge work effort. Not to be undervalued. If one can get those for free, it can be the reason some game exists.
Take Auto Chess for example. I can imagine programming that DOTA 2 mod was an effort one or few programmers did as a hobby at first. If they would have had to either pay or network with artists to create the art and other people to do marketing, it would have been a lot more than a hobby.
"One or few programmers" is the key part of that, though. I'm not saying every modder should get into game development out of the gate. Modding is a great way to dip your toes into gamedev without having to do all the teambuilding and groundwork of putting together every piece of a game.
But some mods get so big they do have a full-on dev team. Nothing wrong with spending some time getting proof of concept that the team can do the job, but if you're spending years with a full team completely overhauling a game... I mean, get paid, man. You're doing a whole ass job at that point.
I’ve never heard that this started as a mod. Last I knew, even Witcher 1 was a licensed product even at the initial development. It’s been a couple years since I watched the CDProjekt documentary though.
It didn't, technically, but it WAS originally build on the Neverwinter Nights toolset/engine. A licenced version, then modified. Which is sort of my point. Why mod if you have a big group of devs and you're working at speed? Just pay to license the toolset you're using and ship a game.
Because Larian wouldn’t let them do that. It’s extremely rare for companies to legitimize and officially adopt a fanmade mod as a real product. Larian isn’t licensing the BG3 engine as a game toolkit so there’s no legal avenue for fans to do this.
They would need to make it a new IP with different tech and new assets, which is much much harder than what they’re doing now.
Well, I don't know that Larian is the problem. They don't own the D&D or the BG license and they´re moving on from both, apparently. That said, I don't know how willing they are to license their engine. I'm guessing not particularly, since they haven't done it so far, to my knowledge.
Yeah, definitely not Larian, they’ve always been pretty open to players and other devs alike. And if they really do end up moving on, I cannot wait to see what they do next. Maybe a new Divinity game that’s as in-depth as BG3?
They do eventually that’s how we got most of our legendary studios and genres, but modding is low risk and cuts a lot faff. It also gives you a massive boost in publicity without spending on marketing.
Again, people seem to be reading this as saying "don't mod, develop full games". Not what it says. I'm saying "if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead".
In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it's worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don't like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.
Yeah I agree sorry if it came across as comtrarian I just live the idea that game dev is going back to the 80s90s with non published games outpacing AAA. Be great to see a proper studio come out of this. Hopefully there’s some dedicated full timers in those numbers.
For me, what I like to see in an RPG, is the ability to play a game multiple times and have notably different experiences, both in terms of play-style and narrative. It should make me want to go back and play again to see what I missed or how else I could do it.
The idea of having multiple ways to deal with a quest, and having that impact further story beats in meaningful ways is what I want to see. What i don’t want to see is meaningless scale full of nothing but filler.
I don’t think dagger fall is the best example because much of its size was just procedurally generated landscapes. The ability to actually specialize and complete quests in unique ways, as well as a branching story, is great. Mindlessly massive map, not so much.
I think JRPGs do focus on choice, but usually more in terms of the gameplay and deep combat systems with weird synergies to discover. Story-wise… yeah definitely more linear.
Personally I’ve never been a huge fan of JRPGs, Some I’ve enjoyed, but rarely will I ever play them twice.
Also I think there’s a fair argument to be made that if you cannot play a role, if there are no choices to be made on how you play it, it’s not really a role playing game. It’s action adventure if it’s a linear story with only one way to play it.
Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it’s always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.
I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also… quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don’t know what a “modern” Daggerfall would look like.
Honestly I have played only a little of Arena (very late, around the time Bethesda started to give it for free on their site). I think the farthest I went was the second staff piece dungeon.
yeah its just that the race or class or whatever that did not regenerate mana but could get so much mana from items. I was levitating with a forceshield and blasting things before long right into the end. I was like gene grey or magneto just tearing up the place.
Oh, kind of like the Sorcerer default class in Daggerfall and the Atronach sign in Morrowind and Oblivion then (and sort of Atronach stone in Skyrim too, though this one is just less regen, not no regen at all).
Yeah, those are fun. You’re basically a magic sponge.
I can tell you. It would be HUGE absolutely generic open world with AI generated characters and quests, virtually zero human made and interesting quests and gameplay would feel like filling excel spreadsheets. Somewhat like Ubisoft recepe :-D
At least that’s what original Daggerfall 's spirit would be. It was at the time where “the biggest” was simply the catchphrase and Daggerfall was exactly that. The biggest. But also very shallow and empty. Sure there were billions of quests but what for? When for one interesting there were dozens of generic ones? Don’t get me wrong, it was still a great game at the time, because players weren’t as spoiled and something was always better than nothing. At least that’s my impression.
daggerfall is so messed up that the legitimate strategy to beat the game is go in and out of dungeons and waiting for the quest item to randomly appear next to the front door
That’s honestly what I am worrying it would be, and what I meant by a huge part of the game being “impersonal”.
Daggerfall has parts that are fascinating, even long after its time.
Its custom class creator is rather fun. Its magic effect system too… despite some of the most intriguing effects not even working at all. Seriously. You can craft those spells, they just don’t do anything.
Its dungeons are intimidating in scale, and the 3D automap is both a feat and almost no help at all.
There are freaking linguistic skills, plural because there are like 8 different languages or so. They are mostly useless, because they just add a slight chance a monster won’t attack you, but since you don’t know when it works you’ll murder them anyway.
And then there’s the undistinguishable random quests and the grind.
I think, at this point, most of the nostalgia is for Skyrim, despite being the newest one in the series, it is nearly 14 years old now and way more people have played it. It had issues, and lost a lot of what was great in Morrowind, but it’s a beacon of quality compared to what came after.
It’s started to impact their success though, starfield has only sold like 3 million compiles so far, compared to the 12.5 million of fallout 4 on launch day. Hell, Morrowind has sold 4 million copies, albeit over 23 years.
It’s probably to late for Bethesda to turn things around, but, it’s a great example of what not to do for other studios and publishers.
That always takes the fun out of games for me. You can do whatever, but there’s a correct way of following the story, which is subconsciously grasped by the community and thrown down your throat if you deviate and complain you are having issues.
Yes, it is fine as long as they dont advertise "a huge branching story", when really there's only a handful of endings. If you dont count random game over screens.
BG3 has a lot of dialogue options, but they rarely change the outcome of the story.
It’s not necessarily even more expensive to develop, it just impossible to do with the management techniques brought in recent years. Techniques brought in with the intention of streamlining personnel management and to make lay offs easier.
But you could also make the same argument about graphical fidelity, which has been pushed further and further for decades, greatly swelling the cost of production
Because it is an easy metric and looks good in trailers. Indie games prove again and again, that good games come from good gameplay and not from photo realistic graphics
I agree, but my point was that cost isn’t a sufficient explanation.
I think I particularly agree with @megopie: one reason we see photo-realism instead of more stylised graphics is that it is more generic, and thus less dependent on a specific team.
The more artistic/creative your work, the less interchangeable your workers are.
I hadn’t even thought about preferences for photorealism being a streamlining thing, but it does fit the idea.
I think it’s also a risk aversion thing as well. Few people will complain about a game looking realistic, so it’s very low risk from the point of view of publishers/investors/marketing. Most people will prefer a unique and stylized look that meshes with the game, but investors and marketing teams can’t be sure in any given case, so it’s written off as a risk.
It’s a question of longer development time with smaller teams, or short timelines with big teams. A small team working on content in series is more cohesive, but, requires a longer timeline. A big team can do a lot in a short time by making content in parallel, but this necessitates that content be siloed to prevent needing constant revision. A few long quest lines with lots of outcomes, or a bunch independent quests with simple outcomes.
A small team working longer will cost the same as a big team working shorter (generally speaking). But the priority is short timelines, for the sake of chasing trends and packing the latest greatest tech in. This same kind of priority also leads to spectacular failures of long timeline games, like “black flag” or “duke nukem forever “. The issue there is not the long timeline, but the constant changes in priority to chase trends.
I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.
Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.
Yeah I’ve spent considerably more time on BG3 than any other game I’ve played on this console generation, but still haven’t finished it. I could have gone for something shorter, but it’s kinda nice to come back to it every few months and put a few more hours in.
Some of them already evolved into a tounerous new goblin of a subspecies (MOBAs) to fill a different niche, the rest stayed the same because they were already good as is. That’s literally how evolution works. You don’t improve RTS by drastically changing the formula, you improve then with graphics, lore, and interesting mechanics within the existing framework. If you evolve the formula then it’s not an RTS anymore.
I hope we will se more non-micro RTS games. More like HOI4, but that takes less than 1 hour to finish a game. Dune and Line Wars are on the right track.
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