Mods in General, Wargame & World in Conflict Thread - WIC: Modern Warfare Mod for World in Conflict

There's been some revelations about mods over at the Wargame community, including great words of compliments about the World in Conflict MW Mod (thanks!). I'd like to add my perspectives on the matter with respect to modding in general and what we think it means for game communities, as well as if we were to mod Wargame, how it would look like, at least initially.

1. Mods do not divide the game community.

Mods don't divide the game community, it actually enlarges them and prolongs the useful life of a game. There are many games which are over 5 years old but still running strong due to commitment from few dedicated modders.

When it comes to the multiplayer, you have the main leaderboard or scoring system that is maintained by the game publisher -- modded games do not affect the leaderboard. In reality, game mods actually bring renewed interest into the game by bringing new fresh content that the original devs may have overlooked. Men of War, Company of Heroes, GTA, ArmA, etc are just some of the great examples of this.

2. Mods bring "niche" to the game.

Multiplayer is about competitive fun. Single player is about a movie storytelling if you want your game to die off quickly (unless you can keep refilling the story with commercial DLC releases). The other side to single player however, is the "sandbox" mode of gameplay -- this is where mods dominate. People love playing mods for single-player games in a sandbox environment -- take Garry's Mod for example, and much of the ArmA community.

Sandboxing bring a lot of fun and niche to the game, because it allows the player to play the game in however mode he wants to enjoy it as, without giving regards to balance that is critical in a competitive multiplayer match. Take WiC:MW mod for example -- our mod is based on sandbox principle where we wanted to portray modern firepower accurately, without giving too much concern to competitive gameplay balance. Balance for competitive gameplay is important if you are aiming your mod to be primarily multiplayer. But for single player or sandbox type mods, who cares? Every mod has a purpose that the author wants to achieve -- that's what is so great about modding, it brings different ideas and utilities into a game that we so enjoy today.

3. MW Mod and Gameplay Balance

The issue of gameplay balance on MW Mod has been a complex and long story. Initially, it was called "Fun Mod" back in 2009 and lot of attention was paid to ensuring good unbiased multiplayer game balance. There was no "missile porn" or "arms race" of destabilizing weapons of intense firepower like you see in MW Mod. However, it soon became readily apparent that mods do not have any viable place for multiplayer in WiC. The vanilla game already does balancing and overall game playability so well that there was little value to convincing people to download a mod to play a multiplayer match. At one point though, there was an interest in creating a community-based "Patch 12" Mod (patch 12 as in, the next game update, as the latest official update was Patch 11) with cooperation from old time WiC clan-war players. Having participated in ESL cups for WiC myself (I was the AA support player in the NoW clan which won the ESL finals; people who played usually remember me for the nasty air-to-air strikes), we had pretty good ideas and collaboration on what we wanted to do for the so-called "Patch 12 Mod." However, the interest quickly died off because we were at a time where clan matches and competitive match modes were becoming obsolete because all the good old competitive clans have left the game after the final ESL championship.

After determining that there wasn't going to be much use for multiplayer based mod for World in Conflict any further, I've decided to change the strategic direction of our mod -- instead of focusing on multiplayer, we've changed to focus on fulfilling a niche sandbox role -- like Garry's Mod if you will. The new goal of our mod going forward was to portray the modern battlefield in the most entertaining and authentic manner possible -- we wanted to create the Tom Clancy style of techno-thriller in World in Conflict. So from that point on, name got changed to Modern Warfare (MW) Mod.

From this point on, balancing became a huge issue. Creating a "realism mod" does not happen overnight by simply changing unit characteristics and values. Air vs. Anti-Air for example alone was highly complex challenge to solve; and then from that point, you start asking the question of "what role do infantry and armor play anymore?", because all of a sudden the so-called "realism" mod makes everything so overpowered and destructive that everyone and their grandmother get wiped off the map the moment they spawn. Not to mention, this created lot of controversy with the MW Mod where people criticized the mod for focusing too much on AAs and Air and Air being too overpowered, and then AA being too overpowered, etc. It was really confusing and we knew that we've hit the limit of the World in Conflict game, its modkit and our creativity on the whole issue.

This was in late year of 2010 and the mod team was really in crossroads as to what to do next. Mired in controversy and things just not working out the way we wanted to in portraying modern firearms, I was getting ready to call it quits and move on, as it was starting to become waste of my free time ;-) However, dedication from new guys like Torrisco who kept churning out new maps, and staunch supporters of the mod drove me to keep finding a solution rather than abandoning them. At this time, an accidentally discovered "hack" when I was working on something else showed very interesting potential (more details at this blog post). Without going into details about it, this accidental discovery was fully capitalized and a new intense development work was started to create a missile simulation software layer for World in Conflict -- this new project was called Flexible, Advanced Air Interceptor, later shortened to just Flexible Interceptor or "FLINT".

Work on the base FLINT code was painful and on-going for over 6 months straight -- yes, it required dedication; and yes, people are impatient and they made shitty remarks about game balance and laughing at how retarded we are, etc. But when its development was completed, FLINT was the proverbial saving throw that saved MW Mod from being abandoned. If you look at MW Mod today, people are now surprised at how remarkably well balanced it is -- air vs. anti-air "feels" right, armor battles are now no longer unbiased like they used to be, infantry is now very unique in its every own way. People with open eyes taking a look at MW Mod today and comparing it to what it used to be couple years ago are all surprised at how different it is from what it used to be.

The greatest thing about MW Mod today is you can play and enjoy the game in whatever way it suites you. If you are ground pounder, MW Mod is ArmA on RTS -- we are the only real-time strategy game that allows you to drive a laser designator and actually guide ordnance with it in real-time. No other RTS game does this. Not only that, battlefield assets deployed by AI and support roles are there to help the infantry. Need artillery? you can call down artillery strikes from battlefield artillery units not as a form of TA, but as a way of creating fire missions for in-game MLRS units. Infantry players love the mod with all these cool toys they get to play with.

If you are a military technocrat like myself and love reading high-tech thrillers like Red Storm Rising, well then you've got the right place -- MW Mod offers wide array of stand-off weapon systems for you to enjoy, everything from tactical air-to-surface missiles like Hellfire, guided stand-off bombs to theater ballistic missiles and missile defense systems. We are the only RTS that actually portrays an integrated air & missile defense system with such high degree of authenticity which rivals combat simulators-- to the point where even people working for defense contractors are buying World in Conflict on Steam to play MW Mod.

Now the best part of all this is, no matter which role you want to be -- ground pounder, missile lover, arty lover, whatever -- all of these systems are tightly joined together to form an integrated gameplay in MW Mod. It's almost like, you can play a different role everyday and every role feels like a whole new game by itself.

4. Wargame and World in Conflict

I am not opposed to modding for Wargame. I'm a fan of Eugen's products, loved their Act of War RTS back several years ago, and I think Wargame is awesome except for the inferior camera compared to WiC. That being said, there are two logistical issues we need to look at here. First, there is no software development kit (SDK) or modkit available for Wargame, so right from the get go, it's a non-starter. It is conceivable that any modification work that we do for Wargame would most likely focus in porting over the Flexible Interceptor / FLINT missile simulator code to Wargame, rather than creating a whole new gameplay that's mired with balancing nonsense and controversy like we had in World in Conflict. The initial mod for Wargame would probably not introduce any new units or destabilizing weapons -- it would probably retain all of the existing units and abilities that the devs had already put into game, but we would install a new missile simulation engine by porting over the FLINT system to Wargame environment. This would bring powerful capabilities and gameplay potentials in areas of realistic behaviors of missiles, laser designation, fire control systems, ECM and so forth.

Second fact to consider is that World in Conflict and Wargame are inherently different games, they are not really the same type of RTS. World in Conflict focuses more on FPS style of gameplay in an RTS setting -- it is technically called Real Time Tactics (RTT). WiC had pioneered the removal of base building and turn-table style of strategy since the days of Ground Control. While Wargame had also moved onto the WiC style of RTS gameplay as well, it is still not as tactically zoomed in like WiC is -- Wargame is designed to retain more of a "strategic" thinking to the overall gameplay. That being said, I believe that there is a different niche between Wargame and WiC, and it's likely that mod for World in Conflict would still be maintained for as long as it is feasible to do so, especially given the fact that WiC can be played in sandbox mode.

We look forward to modding Wargame to meet the niche of those with keen interest in high-tech military science, but only if the devs allow us to do it. The work that we do for WiC will be unaffected for as long as feel WiC is fun game to play, I'd prefer to maintain the two separately -- especially given the fact that we can organize multiplayer matches even when Massgate is offline.

Looking back, the dedication for creating military techno-thriller theme in a game mod was challenging and rewarding work. When I started working on MW Mod, I knew nothing about advanced maths, science behind the guidance laws, or any of that. And no, contrary to popular belief, I do not even hold a college degree, I didn't go to college. Now, fast forward to today, MW Mod and FLINT code are rocking complex rocket science like it's nothing, and yes it is true that I had received job offers and maintain a good professional relationship with those in the defense community, directly as a result of FLINT missiles made for World in Conflict mod. So yes, mods allow creativity and innovation of new ideas -- many of the ideas can be short lived, but some of them are great, and that's what's beautiful about it. More choices to the player is awesome thing to have in my book. <3

Edited by: blahdy

i would love a Wargame MW Mod. And keep working you are awesome.

Awesome story Blahdy. You are really and inspiration

Awesome story indeed。

I just heard that modding tools for wargame AB are being released now. But I totally understand why you want to stay with wic for a good while yet, but it would be totally awesome to see a working FLINT system in the game. Good work!