This morning I just didn't feel like turning on the TV to watch the usual droll of morning news people acting bright and cheery, so instead, I pulled up an old copy of PC Gamer to read while I munched on my Capn'n Crunch.  After flipping through the rag a bit, I settled on an article written by Desslock about the pros and cons of user-created mods for games.  He hit on some really good points, and it inspired me to write a little on my own opinions of user-created content for games.

I inherently like the idea of user-created content, because it promises the world to you.  If you don't like the game as it is, you are free to fix it as you want.  Once you've spent your time playing through the main game, you are free to try out additions to the game that others have made, sometimes including whole new levels / areas to play, new characters, new items, and more.  These mods might also make your game more realistic or difficult, for people who desire an extra challenge that the core game did not offer.

When it comes to what you actually get from the game community however, the story is quite different.  Many mod-makers take it upon themselves to bend the rules of the game, to give themselves breaks and advantages in many areas of games that wouldn't normally afford you any.  And while these changes are not always made with the intent of breaking the game, they almost inevitably do, because they introduce circumstances into the game that the original designers  has not intended, and did not create the game around.

Another thing that I love to hate about user-created mods is the inconsistencies in quality and in scope.  Sure, it's fun to go back into some of the older games you own and find patches to upgrade the appearances of the characters within the game to take advantage of the power your computer has gained since the game's original release...  but the whole illusion of a consistent, cohesive world is lost when you are running around your newly enhanced world and suddenly find the one character that the modder just happened to miss, either by pure ignorance, or by lack of interest.

This kind of stuff ruins the world of fan-created content for me.  Like Desslock wrote in his PCG article, I would rather play through the game as the original designers intended, for the balance in aesthetics and gameplay... the tweaking will come after I've played through the game in it's entirety.

It does depends on the type of game though - a mod for Oblivion could change the entire game, while a mod for Half-Life 2 would just mean a different type of game to try out, that doesn't have any effect on the main game.  And I will say - I enjoy working on mods sometimes, even if they only consist of one custom-made level, or something similarly small in scope.

Tthe fact is that for me, fan-made, entire-game-altering mods are a commodity that remains as something I can do without until I have exhausted the fun of the original game.

Don't take this the wrong way though - don't stop making mods!  I think I'll always hold a special place in my gaming heart for a Doom 3 shotgun with a flashlight duct-taped onto the end, or some decidedly clearer water in Oblivion.

I've spent years trying fan-made content for the Dooms, the Quakes and Half-Life 1, and the inconsistency of quality is really the biggest problem. I've seen a lot of good, and a lot of bad. Which pretty much reflects games or the world in general, but still. You never know when you surf for mods if it's going to be worth the time you spent looking for it or downloading it. Mods like Nehahra (Quake 1) had awesome voice acting, cutscenes and some boss fights, but as with every FPS I've played, the levels had trouble holding my attention.

In fact, having made and downloaded so many mods/levels for first-person shooters, it's really difficult to find something new and exciting. I'm really quite sick of FPS, and I'm unable to enjoy any new games in the genre. Overall, Scientist Slaughterhouse (Half-Life) semed to be one of the more thorough mods in its programming, with weapons like the disc launcher, the anti-gravity gun, and the black hole rockets (seriously).

It's fun and creative to do mods and maps. I've remade nearly all the weapons in a TreadMarks demo, with a shotgun, rains of destruction (a la Skies of Arcadia), an overpowered nuclear bomb that produces a mushroom cloud, a matter railgun, you get the picture. No-one but me will ever see this content, but it was fun doing it, and learning the game's object system.

Anyway. To get back to mods "breaking the rules", there are some great ways to trick the Doom engine into doing bridges, windows above doors, seemingly sloping walls, deep water, seemingly multiple attributes to a single Sector, "voodoo doll", intentional "noclipping" ghost enemies, and some other things you wouldn't think were possible. The more devout in the fan community used these "features" to create some very inventive and clever levels. Sure, it's no longer vanilla Doom, but I hardly think that's a problem with levels that cool.

Lastly, props to the Rocket Arenas for being (IMO) the best mods for the Quake games. Especially Rocket Arena 3 - finally an FPS of skill, not item-hunting, or Rocket Launcher and Quad-hunting like in the terribly broken multiplayer of Quake 1.

Hehe, yeah I used to play Quake 2 online back when I first discovered online games on my PC...  and it was pretty fun until it became more of a race to get a sweet weapon rather than a test of skill.  The funniest / most disappointing thing of all time was to be frantically running around looking for something better than the crappy pistol, only to find a gun you thought was going to be awesome, but ended up being the mini machine gun or the grenade launcher.  Still, it was fun...  sometimes I long for the simple multiplayer of those old games.

I find that Quake 3 is the only one I still enjoy in multiplayer, with the aforementioned RA3. It's very simple and to the point, and I think they did a good job of balancing the weapons (minus the BFG which is disabled by default in RA3). The only comperatively "bad" weapon would be the Grenade launcher.

Yesterday I booted up an old map I made for Quake 1, called Quake Olympics. It was made for two players, namely me and my friend in university. It had Rocket long-jumping, Duel (you get teleported to two platforms, and you must turn around and shoot a trigger over the other guy the fastest to squish him), Ski jumping (one guy runs down a slope and rocket-jumps into a pool of lava, while the other sits beneath the ramp and tries to hit him in mid-air with a rocket), Bounce (bounce around with 1 health on a platform with only the axe), and Axe (getting thrown with 1000 health into a vast pool of lava armed only with a quadded Axe - first to die loses). In order to do these sports, I used triggers, doors, wind tunnels and damage brushes in creative ways, to allow the map to set the players up for each sport automatically and have them start e.g. Axe simultaneously. I don't know if id ever thought of people making crazy maps like that. Just thinking up the sports like Ski jumping was sometimes more fun than playing them, actually.

Hehe, that's actually a pretty good idea Ultimortal.  I like the idea of a set of challenges for the two players to compete in, and I don't think that I have ever created anything like that in my days of modding.