The Future of Game Modification Tools (maybe?)

[Dracos]

A while back, Karlinn and I were shooting the shit about game mod tools that seem to be included with every computer game under the sun these days.  There's no disagreement that the consumer of games benefits from a strong mod market, as it means a single purchase transforms into potentially several extra games worth of content.  It's a satisfying concept in that regard.

   That said, clearly not all games should include them.  Mod makers and level designers are not playing the game and moving on.  They put competition out there with every expansion pack or level pack you release for attention, albeit unprofessional competition.  If everyone actually used them the market would stagnate hard because much of the market – the consumers who use mods, and there are many of them – would be tied up for months to years by each individual game they purchased.

Furthermore, many games don't fit well to them.  Civilization, the inciting game of this, has no mods that aren't brief historical scenarios, despite it having an extremely powerful set of tools.  Why is this?  Karlinn suggested that there's not much to do when your playing ground is already the entire known world.  But why do folks continue to very aggressively put tools out there, going so far as to use as marketing lines like "INCLUDES TES CONSTRUCTION SET"?  It can't be simply the success Id got off of it some ten years back.

   This got me thinking, about Neverwinter Nights and television and even Steam a little bit.  It brought Red vs Blue to mind, and its importance in cementing Halo in the public culture.  Neverwinter Nights had a different sort of benefit.  The content included was minimal and relatively unsatisfying, in my own opinion.  The expansions took time to release, time that was far greater than the actual content the game initially had.  Level designs and mods made up the difference in a big way, helping to keep customers occupied with the product line between purchases.  A clever and well-played hand, even if the real intent of those tools didn't truly materialize.  The audience took center stage though for a while.  It became a medium of delivering performance in a way.

   Which gets me thinking to why the push for tools is so strong?  Not necessarily for any of those reasons, but for something else entirely.  Creating a media platform, if it takes off, is both very lucrative and extremely exciting for an artist.  It is no mean feat to have one's worldset be so well liked as for folks to continually make new content for it; to move from the 'free mod' content to actual offered 3rd party content built on top of a game.  Think about it a moment.  Tools are rapidly advancing, as are actual game products.  In many ways the tools included in games for construction, scripting, and such are very powerful authoring tools complete with the ability to rewrite considerable portions of the game, and sometimes to link in both new voice and art content.  Games, meanwhile, continually advance the measure of what is necessary to be sellable digital content in that area.

   So what if, in a generation or so, some folks stepped out of the rat race, took a really powerful game and started selling content under a modder's license for it.  The development team would get the highest compliment: their professional peers wanting to produce new content for their world or alternatively on top of their design tools.  The publisher would get licensing fees, as the 3rd party developers would require help to market and sell their work, or a long lasting and loyal fanbase which maintains an interest in the product.  The fans, meanwhile, are not only getting good mods, but professional quality additions.  They have suddenly a game universe which is consistently producing new content.  Like a television channel.

   Moreso, one could also work through the rising digital distribution channels.  You log into your game and get a sort of channel guide scan of recent high profile products on one side of the window, which can be streamed down for play while you play your current game.  Producing such a cohesive delivery service would allow for reduced distribution and ad costs on all sides of the equation, lowering the necessary cost to make games profitable.

   It's very likely a pipe dream, all said.  Anyone reading this should note that many of the things in there are long shots at best, but they came to mind rather strongly when considering why a company would add development tools which are only used by a small group of players.  It does, however, capture the imagination.  When backed with the chance of it helping to market the game, it's very easy to consider why developers turn insider tools into general use products that are given away alongside the game.

[Dracos]

A follow up on this, based on playing Oblivion and being shown first hand the other philosophy.

Games are getting extremely complex lately, and the ability of players to simply modify content can be a big difference.  Oblivion, bethesada's most recent offering as of this post, was designed to be modded.  Modding the game is extremely easy both from the creation of mod side and from the loading/unloading user side.  The result of this is a vibrant and impressively healthy mod community about the game that is largely dedicated to improving and expanding the game.  Prefer the game harder?  Well, there's mods that handle that.  Get annoyed with something?  Probably a mod that fixes it.  It didn't take me long into play to load up a full suite of convienence  mods that smoothed out frustrating elements of play and vastly improved the overall experience.  Similarly, there were dozens of small graphical improvement mods, each of which could fluidly get put in or removed without any real trouble.  I really have to give a thumbs up to how simple it has been there and how much a focus on that early has improved the PC game with time.  There's no ifs ands or buts about it.  The Oblivion I am playing is a better game than the one they shipped.  With both small tweak mods and larger massive rebalancings, there's a lot out there to tweak the experience just to what you want.  It's not perfect, but a great deal of the ability of the game to have an appeal to a much wider market than normal stems from how the toolset was made and how the game system was built to be extremely accepting of mods.

Overall, a good show, and something to really think about.  It's not so much a 'we're going to get a huge community working on our game' as 'we're going to make our game very friendly to everyone we can'.

Dracos