Vanilla’s good, sure, but have you tried it with sprinkles? : Modding and Games

You can spend ten thousand hours working on a painting and the minute you show it to somebody, you’ll get a comment about how to improve it. Nobody is 100% happy with anything and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. We certainly wouldn’t have mods without that little bit of “Hmmm, it needs something else…” Mods, for those who aren’t familiar, are user created changes to a game. Maybe you think that a weapon is overpowered, or that a questline should have different objectives, so you go into the games files and bam, you’ve got a different weapon or quest.

I mean yeah, your brushstrokes are good. But what about the palette? Also, this would be better with aliens.

But what do mods do for a game? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?

When talking about mods, you’ve got to mention Doom. While not the first game to have mods, the Doom developers made it incredibly easy to modify the game, resulting in a flurry of creative activity. All of Doom’s data was packaged in files called WADs, or Where’s All the Data, making it possible to make whole new levels, weapons, and storylines.

Doom is one of the most important games in history, and the start of the first person shooter as we know it.

The advent and expansion of the internet made it easier and easier to distribute and download mods, expanding the scene further. Doom also showcases one of the key benefits of mods; extending the shelf-life of a game. Doom was released in 1993, but people are still refining, ideating, and creating new mods for the father of the modern FPS. Brutal Doom, released in 2012 and updated at the end of 2015, is one such mod. It’s a total conversion of Doom, meaning that the authors of this mod created entirely new levels, changed up the weapons,

They somehow made it bloodier. Don't even ask me how. I have no idea. They also added reloading, more melee attacks, and a whole slew of other content.

tweaked the mechanics, and came out with a whole new Doom. While not all modders are ambitious as those who created Brutal Doom, you can see how providing tools to your users can extend the life of your game far beyond the paltry 1-2 years that most games are active for.

Of course, you don’t have to look 20 years back to see how important mods are; you need only look back to last year’s Boston based adventure, Fallout 4. Bethesda, Fallout 4’s developer, has a habit of releasing modding tools to users fairly soon after the games have come out, going as far back as The Construction Kit which shipped with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

A bit dull looking, maybe, but you can change up the whole game however you like. There's power in these here boring windows.

It’s no surprise that The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have now become synonymous with mods, but the way that association is viewed might surprise you. While the mods are generally viewed in a positive light, there are those who feel that Bethesda are viewing the modding scene almost like they would view beta testers. By “relying” on the modding scene to fix common issues with their games, you could argue that Bethesda is pushing their work off onto their consumers. You just need to look at the top mods on any Fallout 4 modding site to see some form of the phrase “Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch.” Part of this is definitely due to the scope of Bethesda’s games, but it’s hard to imagine that the phrase, “the modders will fix it” is never uttered in the Bethesda office.

Over 145,000 downloads as of time of writing. 4th most endorsed file on NexusMods, the largest non-Bethesda download site.

Even Fallout 4’s settlement system seems like something that modders would have implemented themselves at some point, though not at the scale that Bethesda did. Mods are great, but the perception that you’re relying on modders to fix your game is not.

There is one area where mods are not so welcome; multiplayer. Any sort of multiplayer game requires balancing, an incredibly time consuming and mercurial process to ensure that there’s more than one way to play. Mods are the antithesis of this, being changes that users create to satisfy a personal want. Maybe you think StarCraft’s Zerg are overpowered, but if you were to be able to mod the game to make them less so, and then play online, any Zerg player would have an immediate disadvantage.

Not to say that the Zerg couldn't just a little nerfing. Zerg rushes aren't fun for anybody. Or maybe they are, at least for the rusher.

There are other concerns around how your product is experienced as well. A recent example of the clash between mods and multiplayer is the forced shutdown of the legacy (meaning unaltered and unexpanded) World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius. Nostalrius was the largest WoW legacy server available until its April 2016 shutdown, with 800,000 registered users. It was not an issue of theft, like if the Nostalrius devs were charging for the use of the server, but more of an issue of branding. Games like WoW rely on expansions to keep people subscribed, to get new subscribers in the ecosystem, and to create a unified experience for all the players. WoW devs do have legal and arguably reasonable reasons for shutting down the server, though it did anger a lot of people. Because multiplayer games are never quite “finished” and because the experience is shared there’s not really any room for personal touches. Think what you will about that, but I don’t think it’ll be changing anytime soon.

Mods can extend the lifespan of a game, fix issues that the original developers missed, and create a stronger relationship between studios and gamers. They can also ruin the balance of a multiplayer game, dilute the vision of a particular project, and create more work for the dev team (got to build those tools out after all). It’s up to each individual developer whether to include modding support in their games, but it’s worth noting that the sales of any modable game are going to continue long after their non-modable counterparts.

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Hit me one more time: Death and Punishment in Games

Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

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You stand in front a dark, foreboding cave. What do you do?

Exploration might be the oldest kind of fun mankind has. It’s pretty much written into our DNA to want to see what’s over the next hill, the next horizon, or even the next planet. It’s only natural that games have included more and more exploration as time has gone on. Since the very first games came about, little Easter eggs were hidden, and secret areas secreted away for the hardworking player. Over time, games were developed with exploration in mind. There’s little else to do in Myst but solve puzzles and explore a magical island, for instance. Exploration is everywhere, but sometimes it’s plodding and annoying, and sometimes it’s great.

If you're telling me you don't want to see where this path goes, I'm callin' you a liar.

So then, we need to ask. What makes good for good exploration?

Fallout 4, and the Fallout series in general, are exploration heavy games. In the most recent game, there is a slew of post-apocalypse Boston locations to explore. From the second you start the game, exploration is shoved in your face. You’re supposed to go looking for loot, people, and enemies from the minute you can. This never-specified quest has several connections to your gameplay, which is good. Weapon and gear modification, settlements, and companions are built and found by exploring ruins, vaults, and tiny hamlets.

I'm gonna turn all of this into a really sweet gun.

Boredom sets in a little faster than you’d think, though. As you continue on, your map fills up with fast-travel icons, but they never end up being anything else than quest points on a map. Rooting through ruins for duct tape and wonderglue becomes boring and annoying. All of these fast travel points become little instances, rather than part of a larger place. What changed? Well, you only spend a small amount of time in each place, and most of them look very similar. Exploration is rewarding because you feel like you’re making progress, finding new places, and you feel like you know more about your world. In Fallout 4, you never feel like you’re finding anything interesting, with a few key exceptions.

Oh so memorable. This what hundreds of thousands of man-hours are reduced to; just little points on a map.

Every once in a while, Fallout 4’s environmental storytelling shines. For those who aren’t familiar, environmental storytelling is the notion that you can tell a narrative with an environment, and you can let a player piece things together as they move forward. Fallout 4’s vaults are great examples of storytelling, with a few enemy-occupied exceptions. One vault was comprised of addicts who all worked together to overcome addition with group meetings until a plant revealed a secret cache of contraband that caused the occupants to fall apart.

Here, in the members-only Boylston club, the members committed mass suicide with poisoned wine when the bombs fell.

Another vault was designed to create a superior human being through genetic experimentation and education, with the older children folding into the vault staff. Little notes and carefully arranged skeletons can tell much more of a story than all the cut scenes in the world.

Ratchet & Clank might not be the game you think of when somebody talks about exploration, but it might surprise you. Ratchet & Clank is a platformer with light 3rd person shooting elements, based in a futuristic and alien galaxy. You travel from planet to planet and head through the mostly linear levels, progressing through the story.

Future! Robots! Weird cat thing with robot backpack! These games are full of fun nonsense.

Through the game, you acquire items that make revisiting levels enjoyable, as you unlock new areas. Every level has a number of hidden areas that are filled with secrets, items, and even the coveted gold bolts, used to unlock golden versions of all the weapons. All of the levels are colorfully designed, and sprawling, so that exploration doesn’t get dull often. Each new area you unlock is a testament to how well you pay attention to the level and how well you use your arsenal.

There's probably all kind of stuff hidden in that city. All we've got to do is figure out how to get there...

Though exploration is by no means required to beat the game, it definitely improves the experience and the replay value. Ratchet & Clank is one of the only games I’ve ever 100%-ed, just because it was fun. A lot of fun hinged on the rewards I got for exploration, though. There are definitely times when your reward for the work you do is a little lackluster, which can hurt the natural fun of exploration.

The Grand Theft Auto series is also a series that’s big on exploration as well. Each game gives you the reins to a huge city, filled with shops, characters, and weapons. The cities are almost universally well designed to have distinctive areas, radio stations, and people. GTA IV is no exception, with its famous Liberty City getting a nice update from GTA III.

Such a beautiful city, full of people to run over with a dune buggy that I painted neon pink.

Exploration in this game is as natural as driving. You pretty much have to get to know the city, and over time, you get a really good sense for how it all fits together. A lot of games fail to make the various areas of the games cohesive and feel connected. Each area of Liberty City looks very different and has its own kinds of shops, restaurants, and people. Finding new kinds of clothing is really rewarding, and makes you feel like your character is progressing through the game, rather than just being static.

Started from Serbia, now we here.

There are things that could be done better, though. Besides clothes, all of the various restaurants and gun stores just offer the same things, rather than having different kinds of inventory. While going around the city is fun and easy, there’s not a huge point to doing it besides finding missions and the plain fun of wreaking havoc.

So, when all is said and done, what makes for good exploration? Well, good use of environmental storytelling, levels with intrigue, good rewards for exploration, and a sense of progress. Not a bad list, all in all. Man that was easier than I thought it would be. Alright developers, get on it. Let me know how it turns out.