Gaming Top 5 moddable games

The Source engine was/is so easy to work with once you get the hang of it.
Even I was able to make some maps.

 

HL in number one? What a crock of ****! TES should have have won that spot by far!

 

I thought the Battlefield games would be up there, some great mods on them. Also the C&C series had alot of mods which were great.

No surprices Half Life is there. The most famous mod of them all counter Strike. I remeber when that first came out and trying to download it at college onto floppies and then later 100MB zip drives. Oh yeah they were fun lan partys.

 

GOTYE

 

And the top 5 worst avatars are.... the first four dousches on this forum, and mine!

Nature out!

 

I think the results would be quite different if we were to get the collective opinions of some mod communities..

I agree with this - TES and NWN may have been modded a lot by their respective communities in the sense that there was a vast amount of user-generated content produced for the games, but I wouldn't consider them in the top 5 of moddable games, considering that the majority of said content was extremely similar, sub-standard and limited by the "appeal-to-newbies" toolsets.

I've always felt that there's a trend in software whereby the more user-friendly a program is, the less powerful it is for an advanced user, and I think that rings true with the NWN toolset, and to a lesser extent the TES Construction Set.
They may be easy to work with and they make it so that just about anyone can build a map and create a few quests, but woe betide anyone who tries to do anything more complex than that, because the software is made too user-friendly.

In the TESCS, for example, magical effects can't be modified apart from base costs, power, etc, and new magical effects can't be created without the use of an external, 3rd-party (ie; made by modders) hook program or script extender.
The scripting function in the TESCS is a nice addition, but it's not very flexible or powerful - You can code basic quests or simple scripts that modify stats, add/remove spells, but it provides no control for more complex operations such as giving the player a new ability and adding it to the list of bindable actions in the game's own menus - All that has to be done through the script extenders made by modders, which, though it works, is a messy solution because it doesn't integrate smoothly with the game's own UI.

I know this all seems horribly ungrateful, because at least the NWN toolset and TESCS are better than nothing. Don't get me wrong, I love to see the developers encouraging the mod community, but I'd rather they provide the actual tools they used to make the game, than dumbed-down versions with an easier learning curve and limited capabilities to appeal to modding newbies, and then claim that their game is 'moddable'.

"What, we gave you a toolset, what more do you want? You're only a gamer, what would you know about modifying our game?"

Source code, tools for unpacking the game files, the developer's plugins for 3DS/Maya/Lightwave, IK skeletons for character models, texturemap templates..
All of the above would be nice, and not unreasonable or unrealistic for any developer who wants to support the mod community of their game.

Anyone remember Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption?
A 3D Diablo-alike with a plot, set in the World of Darkness Pen & Paper world, released sometime around 1999/2000.
The developers released an SDK for the game which included their original map-editor, the fully documented source code for the cutscenes, map events & spells; original Maya model files and an exporter plugin for the game's character models, 2 fully-playable example chronicles for multiplayer with source-code (including cut scenes and maps), an object template editor, instructions for editing all of the engine's proprietary filetypes..
THAT, to me, is a game which is moddable.
Sadly, Activision refused to release the game's core source code to the mod community despite numerous petitions, which hampered efforts to fix some of the game's more fundamental flaws and allow for the creation of TCs or whole new singleplayer campaigns.

Somebody else mentioned Far Cry already, but I think more needs to be said about it.
Crytek's own mod-community site for Far Cry & Crysis:
Cry-Mod Modding Portal
Crytek employees post in the forums, commenting on mods and complimenting people's work, mods are given publicity by the site and tutorials are provided to aid modders in getting to grips with the tools and the engine.
Crytek provided the exact Sandbox editor that they used to make the game, not a cut-down user-friendly version - It's still a polished, well-made program, but it's also still flexible and powerful.
Additionally, they coded the majority of the game in human-readable ASCII Lua code, stored in basic text files in the game's packages, which makes it ridiculously easy to edit large portions of the game's coding with some basic knowledge........and yet, they didn't have to dumb it down, a la the NWN toolset.

If you've ever tried to make a new character model for NWN, you'll almost inevitably end up using a modder-created tool like NWMax, a hook program for gMax which 'exports' your model vertex-by-vertex, face-by-face in ASCII text, then compiles it into a binary model file from that text.
Kudos to the creators for integrating it so well with gMax and making the process reasonably simple, but it's not fast and the fact that the tool had to be made by the very people who need it, when the dev-team could simply have provided one seems ridiculous.

I'm surely not the only person who thinks it's a bit ridiculous for a dev-company to extoll their game as a modder's delight, then leave the mod community with no option but to program their own tools to work with the game's propietary files if they want to do more than make a typical "fetch me a loaf of bread" quest in a tileset map editor.

This probably makes me seem like an elitist with no time for newbie modders, but that's not the case.
I'd just rather see newbies learning to mod using the real tools and achieving real results, not another million house mods for morrowind or another million "kill the thoozle" quests for NWN.

So....to sum all of that up, I don't agree with NWN and TES being in the top 5 at all, but I definitely agree with the choices of HL and Quake, and though I probably wouldn't have thought of it myself initially, I agree with the inclusion of Max Payne too.
If anyone read all of that, then seriously, have a cookie.
I'm far too verbose at times..

Oh and don't get me wrong, Brett - I liked your article, I just don't agree with all of your choices, and it's nothing personal.

 

I really thought hard about putting UT99 or 2003 on there. It would have been #6. Oblivion was contemplated, too. But Morrowind is (by fairly general consensus) a much better game than oblivion, so I thought TES was best represented by its (so far) crowning achievement.

The only problem I had with UT99 et al was that every mod, everything for it never actually changed the game or its gameplay - it was, above all, a deathmatch competition and that's it. Nothing wrong with that, and there are some hella fun mods that go with it...but one of the beautiful things about each of the games I listed is that the starting premise is barely recognisable by some of the mods out there. The fundamentals of the game change underneath.

That being said, it's still a very worthy addition to the list.

 

UT2003 IS NOT A REAL GAME! None of the devs recognise it as a game. UT2004 is the real successor to UT99

 

it is a damn virus.

 

Great choice of HL - the game that spawned CS should be the top of any list tbh.

 

Umm, TESCS is the program they used to make morrowind (along with third party programs like 3D Max). They originally weren't gonna release it but near the end of Morrowinds development, they thought "Hey lets chuck the CS in there for some of the modders life a little easier" and didn't expect it to be so popular with the "noob modders"

I don't see the problem with needing 3rd party programs to add more stuff in anyway, all other games need that.

You do get some big projects with morrowind, but because of the shear scale of the game, it's very difficult to make a full mod. CS? Thats easy, new textures, a couple of new maps, done. To create an entire new world for morrowind takes hundreds of man hours and isn't possible unless you have a very well organised mod team.

 

What about Unreal Tournament '99 ?!

That game is/was soo famous. Software for creating awesome maps. Even mods came out of nowhere. At the moment there are alot of weird mod servers like BunnyTracks or some kind of monster mods.

I believe Unreal Tournament '99 is still one of the best FPS online games and also very very moddable.

 

if you want to argue it that way, then all you need to edit the thirdwire series is reasonable understanding of photoshop or gimp (in order to save as .tga) and notepad (the rest of the stuff is all done with .ini files) and most of the heavy lifting for the more complex stuff (like weapons) is already part of a weapon editor made available by the developer. The model flight characteristics are also in .ini files, but the models themselves are easily made in blender (freeware) or gmax or the like. with all these files you would think the size would be rediculously large; but this is not the case. I've packed mine with 40+ new aircraft, redone terrain, and 400+ new weapons; yet the folder size only approaches 5GB. by contrast, when you do the same to CFS3, the CFS3 root folder starts to equal roughly 14GB.....

 

You young whipper-snappers! What about Total Annihilation? It's 10 years old and still being modded.

 

One word: Freelancer.

 

its good that HL is #1. but HL2 has a HUGE number of mods as well.

 

Big agree here, but Freelancer is often overlooked in general. Fantastic game though. Also agree with Total Annihilation.

Going by units sold is a little silly, considering that gaming was still kinda a nerd niche when Quake was released. Half-life had a lot more hype going for it and is arguably a better game, but that doesn't make it a better moddable game.

I would've swapped quake for #1 with half-life for #3, reason being that quake pretty much defined the game-modding genre. Doom perhaps defined map making, but Quake set the ball rolling (hard) on mods.

Quake 2 also had a number of underrated but very unique and awesome mods, such as Generations, Gloom, and of course the venerable Action Quake 2. Action Quake 2 remains wildly superior to even the vaunted Counter Strike: Source -- though CS:S is closer to AQ2 than CS1.6 was.

 

UT2004 should be there tbh, very flexible engine, and all you need is notepad to make changes to the code.

 

How are none of the Unreal Games in there :/
Tools provided with the games with huge community's and online guides on how to do things..

Make something Unreal contest anyone? Whole games being made of mods, such as Red Orchestra?


*baffled*

 

l2wis: Go look in GD under "Hi Everybody" and "This Avatar"