Veni, Vidi, Video - DBolical YouTube Roundup August 8th - August 14th feature - Command And Conquer : Generals Evolution mod for C&C: Red Alert 3

Intro

Hey there! Welcome to this week's roundup of the YouTube, where we'll be looking over the last of the 20th Anniversary event!

For years, fans have hoped for a retelling of Commander & Conquer Generals in a modern engine. Red Alert 3's engine was a staple of EA's late-2000s, early 2010s games, and now, it's the engine powering Generals: Evolution, a total conversion taking the Generals we know and love and turning graphics and effects up to eleven.

The first results category unveiled was the classics, mods that placed within MOTY during the first decade of ModDB. These mods are the ones almost everyone has heard of - mods that changed the landscape of modding and opened up the door to even greater creations down the road. Some of the things being done with mods today and games like DOOM show modding has continued to evolve in crazy ways, but these mods did it first, and they did it well.

The second category was for some of the biggest mods in scope - total conversions, which have defined ModDB's history over the last twenty years. We saw a lot of total conversions in the early period of the site, when competent modding tools for games allowed for truly huge mods to be made, but the 2010s saw a decline in this kind of mod when newer games failed to ship with as powerful a toolset and custom content was mostly relegated to older titles. Now, though, there's more modding support working its way into titles old and new, and the TCs are coming back in earnest.

The third category results featured mods built within existing universes that weren't trying to reinvent the wheel, but instead, provide a great new take on that world. When I said "the stories we want to hear", a bit of background as a Half-Life modder was seeping through, seeing as the non-existent Episode 3 has been a point of contention for many. But Half-Life - as with many of the franchises featured in the category - marches on, thanks to a community of dedicated creators adding life to otherwise seldom-explored worlds.

The fourth category released on Saturday and was focused on the mods we once played with friends and, perhaps, still do to this day. This category was not as popular as the others - by necessity you generally need to have experienced these mods at their peak, as opposed to right now when many of them are challenging to find players for - but those who remain with these form tightly knit communities that revisit the glory days, and thanks to community around one of my projects, I've had the good fortune to occasionally resurrect one of these mods for a one-off gamenight with that community.

The final category we unveiled was the one which by far saw the most engagement, perhaps expectedly due to its recent relevance. These mods are the modern trailblazers that show modding is alive and well, twenty years after ModDB's inception. Gigantic projects like The Chronicles of Myrtana - which won the poll by a landslide, though Mental Omega also saw a very healthy showing - release regularly to this day and prove modding will persist, now, and forever, so long as someone is happy to tinker with configs, make texture replacements, or generate whole new experiences.

That's all for this round-up. What do you think about the mods listed? Feel free to discuss below and check out the YouTube for more videos past, present, and future!