Blogs - Typheron

More of my innane babbelings for anyone to read, this time its to do with the overall 40k mod scene. Ive spotted a worrying trend, the death rate is very, very high and its suprisingly not GW's legal department doing the culling.

Ive come to ponder why this is, Exterminatius is doing ok as are a few others, but overall looking at MODDB's listings as well as various threads out there in the wilds of the Web the only place that 40k related mods are doing well is the DoW series.

Its a huge shame really as theres a ton of good ideas out there that given the right team would make great 40k related mods, yet staff numbers stay low. Even here at Exterminatius we have noticed that most poeple have no interest in developing a 40k mod, plenty of interest in playing one however.

Is the 40k universe old hat? I woudl say that in part the "best" mods of recent times are unique, they have there own universe created specifically for the mod, while we are just mimicking an already established one. There is a lot to be said about having a Unique vision, people can get behind it and even add to its mythos. With 40k everything already exsists so its not as exciting and tends to lead to the obligatory "A is more awesome than Z" threads as people always have there favourites.

I think that a lot of modellers, coders and mappers want something new they can bring there own stamp too, while 40k is just too established.

On top of that i think that a lot of poeple do there stint at 40k in there teens, thus when they come along later and see a 40k mod its a case of "oh that was cool then, but not now". I may be entirly wrong here, but i know myself ive not played a game of tabletop 40k in many years (although i still enjoy the universe it exists within thanks to Dark Heresy). The flip side of this is that the people who are trying to develop 40k mods tend to be younger, or mad in our case. This probably results in a lot of mod deaths too as through lack of experience not much progress is made, followed by loss of inertia as the enthusium drains from the team.

Biting off too much to chew was a hard learned thing in Rival Species 1, balancing 7 races was a nightmare. We have 2 now, much better for that kind of thing.

All this preparing up for release (longer than you think, but sooner than you know) must be getting to me.

Ok, let me tell you a tale, it is a cautionary tale.

One Saturday morning I wake up, fire up my PC as usual and begin my day. Before i have even woken up properly, got dressed or even had food my MSN starts pinging like its having a fit.

This is itself is not unexpected, I talk to a lot of people about a lot of things and have the dubious job of being the front line PR man for a mod set in the grim darkness of our far future.

The messages I am receiving, from a individual who will go un-named are abusive, insulting and based on the conception that I somehow owed him something and he should be allowed to test said mod. He continued to insult another team member in regards to his voice on the following clip:

He claimed that I was allowing whiney kids to test over him (which is highly ironic given what he was doing right then). For those that don't know the quote is from red dwarf, the full version being "change of plan, leg it!" and highly amusing for all involved at the time (yeh i know you had to be there really). Additionally, he is the 2nd oldest Dev team member involved (in that he's been with the team for the 2nd longest period of time)

This was entirely unacceptable, he is now banned from everything we can ban him from, and when we get a server up on release, we will ban him from that too. Harsh i know, but he was directly insulting myself and others making this personal.

It leads me to ponder why he acted this way, i never promised him anything, occasionally i would give him (and others) the odd screenshot, or small piece of insider info before they went public on the forum or here. I like to keep those induvidals who are interested enough to seek me out informed, and whenever possible involved in the process. I would hope that they would form a core playerbase on release and aid us with productive feedback on how to make things better.

He ended beleving that I somehow owed him easy access reserved for dev team members who have all contributed materials and a lot of time to the mod.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

weird.