When Modding Reaches A Barrier... Thread

Most of the mods I''ve found on Moddb either suck, are never completed, or were completed and masterfully put together into what could practically be considered a sequel to the original game. If continuously progressed, these mods could practically renew the popularity of older games, as well as create an almost entirely different game altogether. But there's always one barrier that hinders any further progress to the mod -the original game engine. My question is if this is the case with many modders,
Why not just mod the game engine?

Edited by: GottaHaveIt

It's extremely hard and time consuming to reverse engineer a engine, in most cases it's not worth it. Better of getting Unity/UDK and starting an indie game at that point.

Game engines tend to not be open source so that moddders cant get to the code for them.

And in saying that even if they where open source how much would any modder even change (If they were skilled enough programmer to do so).

Lack of knowledge on how to do so and most likely the source code for the engine. More mods fall from being too time consuming to produce and being over-scoped than engine constraints though.