I believe modders are

Modders are the best *(Me) lol it really gives us a change to make a game and theres alot more mods out there now.

Of the cream of the current professionals, I wonder how many started in the mod scene, or the bedroom developer scene that the mod scene grew out of? I bet a large chunk of the coders, and a fair chunk of the art and design folk, started in this way. That's why studios like Valve, Epic and Id are so supportive of the mod scene - they recognise the spirit of it, because it is the same spirit that got them to where they are now ;) They know that putting the tools out there makes it easier for the next generation to practice their skills, and produces lots of talented people to hire in future :)

Modders are the soul of gaming without them, what is there to do after you beat a game? really, how many people have beat a game and then sold it? I have seen a ton of people beat singleplayer games on consoles and then selling it cause it gets boring, modder keep the pc gamers interested in a single sometimes multiplayer game. and i also agree with Gibberstein on the dev. fact

Nightshade08 wrote: Halogen, a mod for C&C Generals, made the Halo universe into an RTS platform. Bungie liked the idea, so their big brother Microsoft came by and shut down the project after 3 years of work.

You do know Halo was a RTS game for Apple when it was first showed off at Macworld in 99?

Halo and GTA 3 werent mods, but totally changed the way games are. I know big mod supporters will talk about Counter Strike, but let's face it: it's good, but not revolutionary. Good mod support is tha mark of a good game. It's one of the reasons why Half-Life and UT are so popular. But there were games before mods. Games will always be more important, no matter how good mods are.

Mods still rock, though! XD

There'll still be good games, but of course, modding expands the games.
Games are for making money, so ideas normally are not to revolutionary, if they create a game for a niche market it won't be *too* successful. Whereas mods can be made by and for anyone. Someone may make a mod for them selfs and their friends, but give it to everyone. Some may change games to your proffered style, others may have ingenious ideas or others might just be full of zombies :V

Halo totally changed the way games are? Really? It's a fun enough shooter, but it did absolutely nothing new. Much as I'm no Counterstrike fan, CS innovated way more than Halo did.

I'm going to guess that you are a lot younger than myself, and that Halo was one of the first, if not the very first FPS you ever played. When you're old enough to remember when Doom was new and exciting, Halo doesn't seem so special ;)

if u said "Not required, good games will still be made" then u need 2 get off this site ASAP. In fact, just get off the internet all together pls.

Okay...I still believe good games will still be made, but I've played some kick *** mods on here, and they are definitely innovative. A lot of them rival what Valve has put out in professional quality and design, some of them are crap. But in any case, modders can continue the original game exponentially to keep a player busy almost indefinitely. Not just Valve, but all the other games mods have been made for, it's enough to keep any gamer happy. Go modders!

Modders have originality, no arguement there.

Modders are the people that make the game last much, much longer. They can completely transform a game into something new, never-before-seen material.

From simple tweaks to complete conversions, a mod can make you enjoy a game in many ways possible, adding stuff that you would only dream of. And that's just the start of it. Modders pretty much encourage the community to become more united (or in some rare cases, destroy it), share more opinion and basically just enjoy the game even more.

And INtense, I disagree with your last statement, "...the majority of the time the mod begun development before the actual game did...". That's just impossible. Almost every game that is made is announced to the public after being in development for a certain period of time. Some mod teams start the development of said mod AFTER the game's announced, and some other start development AFTER the game is released.

^ ^ ^ All said in one.

Im 4th to sign in the comments w00t ^^^

Valve see Modders as an advantage and EA Games doesn't.
Now...who has better games? :D

Some game ideas look like they are stolen from a mod.... so I say:
The innovators of the games industry

But there are a few good games...

joker_mx ftw

if somebody calls me ruining the game ima slap them. modders ftw!

INNOVATORS FTW

Innovators - just look at Counter-Strike.

They are the Innovators of Games undoubtly, but even so I kinda hate modders some times, especially cause of CS
(CS was a mod originally right? or am I wrong?)

Couse hell, some mods just should not exist.

Good games will still be made.
But modding is an excellent training ground for game devs, and for the rest of us its probably a hobby rather than a sense that we must do our part to save the gaming industry from collapsing into utter unoriginality.

"By wrote:
By my comment I mean most of the original ideas we see coming out of the games industry were dreamed up and "attempted" by mod teams before they were attempted by commercial game publishing houses

Another reason to look at Valve and their games. :D

The next poll made should be "Do you think that EA Games are a blessing or the downfall of games".
I'd like to see the results for that. :D

Without the modders the game industry wouldnt have any talented people to recruite.

Modders can turn a crappy game into something fantastic. Simple.

Right now I can't give any good examples of mods that have really been that great innovators. I mean, of course mods like CS had impact in commercial gaming industry, but did that mod really have that much of new ideas, or did it just have rather conventional ideas carried out in an expectionally influential way?

Please, give me examples of mods that have innovated something really new into the games industry and prove me wrong. Should be easy?

That comes from one of them. Check Starcraft mods.

Let me turn it around: if Counterstrike isn't a big enough innovator, what game is? Now it's been cloned to death and overrun by the worst sort of noob, but when it was new it was very different. If it isn't enough then what commercial project do you consider significant enough to qualify?

Sounds like you're raising the bar so high that no-one can rise above it, be they mod or commercial project -_-

let's take a look at mods for some of the most popular games on moddb.com:
BF2 has 3 remakes of other games in their top mods (at least, not much in moddb.com is loading for me atm).
CnC3 has at least 7 remakes in it's top mods.
Doom 3 has 3 remakes & one that adds co-op.
etc...etc...etc..

nearly every mod out there is a remake or using someone else's IP. Innovative? Maybe in the gameplay in some instances, but pretty much it's all remake after remake or using someone else's innovative idea (I fall under this too).

modders are as innovative as EA is. Modders are now exactly like the big publishers, scooping up everything already done & re-doing it or taking all the existing ip's out there & putting them to a game.

the innovative ones are the smaller companies that want to sell, so they can't use an IP because they WILL get sued & the can't do what's already been done a million times because their game won't stand out among the crowd enough to get sold. Only a handful of ALL mods fall under the "innovative" name. Many of them have already been made in to a million remakes.

-Nightshade08 wrote: Before it just used to be the one guy at home messing around with his game, making minor tweaks and changes for himself. Today, we have around 4-6 people per mod, all focusing to make their mod the best they can in hopes of some great recognition.

Before (not sure before what) modders did what they did because they loved doing it, recognition was an added bonus. Only one person made Aliens Doom. A handful of people made TF. some nutjobs thought that shooting a giant ball would be a great premise for Q-Pong. All because they wanted to do something that was theirs, and say "wow, that's awesome."

if you want 15 minutes of fame go do something stupid in the real world.

Mods today have reached there own level really. Before it just used to be the one guy at home messing around with his game, making minor tweaks and changes for himself. Today, we have around 4-6 people per mod, all focusing to make their mod the best they can in hopes of some great recognition.

Other mods are done so well that other companies take a second look. Halogen, a mod for C&C Generals, made the Halo universe into an RTS platform. Bungie liked the idea, so their big brother Microsoft came by and shut down the project after 3 years of work. Now we have Halo Wars coming out soon without so much as a thank you to the ones who started the idea.

Modders do make the games, but dont get enough recognition for what they do or try so hard to do.

Oh and MadKil40, EA is a downfall to games. Look at C&C again. Westwood made the game great, EA got a hold of it, Generals and C&C 3 suck. Moral of the story, EA needs to stay with sports games.

CS was actually just an example of what modders could do with the source code, but people liked it so much that it became a game/mod, like garrys mod.

modders are nothing but the barrier that keeps indie development from going further, since modding syphoons most of the resourceful people for project not only based on commercial games but that usually dont go nowhere.

Modders dont innovate. In fact, innovation is perhaps the only thing they dont do since they only work in pre-made games instead of creating their own. Its because of them that the gaming industry is becoming more and more of a feudal-like system, controlled by big companies like EA and centered in temporary game paradigms like Half-Life and before it, Q3. All of this simply because modders dont have the guts tostart game projects from scratch or from some Open Source indie engine.

Eventually the situation goes around, and more mods attract more people which will create more mods that will never get finished wasting years of valuable resources and time for nothing. Meanwhile, indie game projects are left to rot because of the lack of personel interested in creating games from scratch, therefore elliminating all possible competition to professional companies which consequentially will be manipulated by big publishers that will control the market according to their own will. So resuming, modding doesnt innovate game development; it slows down creativity, creates a certain elitism in game development and stagnates all independent innovation because of its dependance on current and forthcoming titles.

This doesnt mean i find modding pointless, but considering the excessive number of people working on it, it sure is overrated.

So, if there's good metaphorical definition for modders, it would should probably be the Chickens of the Gaming Industry.

@Monochrome_

That is an utter pile of crap. If I want to make a game, you think I should have to build the renderer, editor, tools pipeline, AI subsystems, networking and a whole lot more from scratch? Why, when they have already been made for me? I could spend years doing all that, or I can have a mod done in six months. They'll both look and play the same, but one gets finished in a fraction of the time. Why is that so wrong?

Mods can be more innovative because all those basic elements are already done. You get straight to adding new features rather than reinventing the wheel again and again.

Also, all those mods that fail as mods would fail even quicker if they tried to build from scratch. If they can't manage to finish a project on a working engine, what hope would they have on a half finished engine and tools?

No mr. Bond, i expect you to die.

That is precisely the kind of thought that takes modders to nowhere. They think they can finish a mod in 6 months and they end up taking 2 years and still remain on beta phase. By the time they are done, a better game will have been released and the mod will be forgotten. So much effort in vain....

This doesnt happens with indie game development because not only these kind of projects are more based in solid gameplay, than on graphics, but the target "audience" isnt so obcessed with the graphics quality aswell.

Also, the point of making games from scratch, especially if open source and free, is to give something to others without them needing to have another piece of commercial software as a pre-requisite while having something you can trluy call yours.

Besides i am not saying modding is wrong nor i am judging any of your work. I saying that am modding, in its essence, is completely overrated by the eyes of its own community. You may all be proud of your work, but your names will always be shadowed by the original game itself and your efforts will decay on the dawn of the following title, especially because most of the new generation of modders forgot their humble roots and do it mostly to achieve fame, false promises when you are bounded to the weight of your own shadow.

Modding doesnt offer innovation. It offers a temporary solution until the next game is finished, even though a few modders actually manage to suceed on professional game development like the DoD dudes, but like a slave, they only bought their own freedom.

Going indie is the big step that most of you dont even have the courage to take. There a lot of Open Source engines that offer as much in therms of stability and resources without overshadowing the projects themselves, even providing commercial licensingwithout any compromises, but i guess most of you simply prefers to remain slave on other people's work.

That's still a pile of crap. Where are these miraculous indie projects that are delivering the gameplay nirvana you speak of? You talk in grand sweeping terms, but don't offer any actual games that fulfil the vision you describe. Anyway, good game is a good game, no matter who provided the technology that powers it. Gamers don't really care. If you have the desire to make a game, you want the best tools available, and I haven't seen any Open Source solutions that get you up and running as fast as Unreal does. Why suffer by using the lesser option?

As for the commercial side, modding is about the games - not about getting rich. It doesn't matter that you aren't allowed to sell your work. Plus, the community around the original game provides a lot of easy promotion - again, if you care about giving people a good game and don't have some half-baked idea about getting rich, modding will get your game to a very large audience with far less effort than a standalone engine.

It seems you are as bothered about the potential to make money as you are about the gameplay. There's nothing wrong with wanting to earn a living, but when it comes to doing it for the love of gaming, modding is as pure as it gets. It's all about giving people something to play that you hope they'll enjoy. You want to talk freedom? Mods are only limited by your skills and effort. No commercial restraints whatsoever. Not everyone takes advantage of this potential, but it is there. If you want to build innovative gameplay, you want an engine that lets you get straight down to building new gameplay rather than building editors or renderers. You want no commercial pressures shaping your design. Modding gives you exactly that :)

Hm. Who the hell made this poll? The available answers are far too lopsided - neither of them is what i'd expect to be appropriate.

It's kind of a stupid thing to have people poll on. If you poll that modders aren't really needed, then what the hell are you doing on a frickin mod site in the first place? :/ If you think that mods and modders aren't required, then go sulk around some other website dickbag! :eyebrow:

Look guys, you can love mods, but can we all agree on one thing. Games were here before mods. Mods do tend to be more creative, because they don't have people like EA breathing down their necks. Ok maybe I made an overstatement with Halo.

Mods are awesome. Don't get me wrong, guys.

Mods are more creative, but areusually limited in terms of innovation. They're limited to the flexibility and tech of the modded game's engine. They can be creative because they're free

Vanilla games are made by Commercial groups and usually have the best tech behind them. They are rushed. They do usually have to stick to tried and true stuff.

I think I can feel safe saying I LOVE mods, but games are more important. Because without games, there's no mods. No matter how much better the mod is from the actual vanilla game.

Love mods, love them more than vanilla games (I know I do) but always respect vanilla games.

Modders help the game makers!

Yeah, like when the guys behind Desert Combat helped make Battlefield 2.
Valve really owes all the HL2 modders. I think its all the mods that make it so popular.

Why are the mods better than the games ? Because the mods are more personnal than the game itself that why !

Psh no need for modders! jk

Mods are better simply because they have no deadlines or budget. That allows the teams to work the mod to perfection and do whatever they want.

I'd like to think that modders are the harbingers of creative development in the game industry, but objectively the most earth-shattering games (IMO) weren't based off of mods at all. On the contrary, if it weren't for professional game developers, we wouldn't really have anything to mod in the first place!

I think you have to put modders on the same level as big-name developers. Although the developers make the engines, do the basic programming and such, they also have the budget. Modders take what developers give them - a canvas - and invest their creativity and time into a game which will most likely not provide any monetary return.

Thats what makes them cool. Its not a job. Its a passion.

Drunkill: "Games are for making money, so ideas normally are not to revolutionary, if they create a game for a niche market it won't be *too* successful. Whereas mods can be made by and for anyone. Someone may make a mod for them selfs and their friends, but give it to everyone. Some may change games to your proffered style, others may have ingenious ideas or others might just be full of zombies "

Very much the above. Also important to remember is that most games are not made for the hardcore market, and are thus deemed "poor" by your own personal criteria. Looking at the popularity and success of each subsequent Sims expansion, and the exploding small flash and java online scene, confirms quite clearly that a good game can appeal to a variety of audiences and doesn't have to be "uber awesome crazy" to sell really well.

The other key is that, as a general rule of thumb, the extra effort to push a game from the mid 80s to mid 90s in traditional reviews ( metacritic et al ) doesn't produce anywhere near the additional revenue needed to justify it. There are exceptions, of course, but it's generally seen as "not really worth it". Modders, by contrast, have potentially infinite time and thus do not suffer in the same way.

We could be classified as opportunists, but above and beyond all we are dreamers who share our dreams with others using the tools available to us. I call it a good thing.