Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Are mods becoming a game developer crutch?

It seems I keep reading whenever anything needs to be significantly changed or improved on the game the response is "Mods will fix it".

And I'm like... but I didn't drop $50.00 on a video game so some guys could play amateur hour. I'm paying for professionals to do professional work.

I find this frequent "But mods will fix it" or "Wait for the mod...".

This all assumes a massive modding community will spring up around the game and present all these options... and when they do they'll do so with the same degree of quality and professionalism that the experts have.

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of mods are great for a lot of games... but I think any playerbase is doing itself a disservice by enforcing the belief that they should be required to fix the problems in the game they purchased...

I'm not aware of any playerbases enforcing or even cultivating the belief that they should be the ones fixing the game. It's an interesting point you make though I'm not sure there's much of a problem, at least from the fans side in this community or any I'm aware of. If Bethesda for example are content to put out an awesome editor but fail to create a decent UI for PC, I'm not sure what the fans/consumers can do about it but what they did, complain and fix it themselves anyway.

Often people will just mention mods to offer consolation to those who are disappointed by a certain feature or lack thereof. For example in your thread about how stats should work the response wasn't so much that we can't expect the devs to produce a functioning, balanced and coherent game but just that development is virtually over and the only recourse you have if unsatisfied is modding to adjust the game to your personal preferences.

Mods are like the go to hope for any issue anyone has with a game really. Personally I'm just very happy that we will have a powerful modkit for this game, which gives us that flexibility to cater to our personal tastes and flesh out the game in interesting, unexpected and sometimes broken ways ;-)

If people were shutting others complaints down by saying, 'shut up mods will fix it quit whining' or something I'd agree there is a problem. I just haven't seen this happening myself though I'm not that much of a forumite so maybe others have a different perspective.

No, but it is a reality. Mods have been around for quite some time..but until the open-development era they were just there. The way things are done, mods are just common-place now, therefor it is easier to assume what the public is willing to do with their time. Not so easy to tell a developer to do.

Besides why contemplate something that amounts to little more than suspecting devs would take advantage of free(maybe not studio quality) ideas..many times(prior experience) these mods are redone/or backed up by the devs.

No.

A more directed response is as follows:

1. What do you mean by "these days"? Neverwinter Nights was released around 12 years ago, and followed a similar process of creating a strong modding community, so what time period in gaming history do you mean existed before modding was so affluent?
2. The phrase "mods will fix it" is usually in reference not to a broken aspect of the game, but a specific player choice (such as 4 player coop or allowing you to fly). The game will work just fine without a single modification created by a player, and if it does not then the issue is not a crutch solution but a design flaw. Big difference.

Mods are great for players to put their own spin on things, perhaps by adding slings, or creating a rogue spell to allow backstab to work with bows, but ultimately I reassert that the game itself is complete, and the mods are just free stuff for the people of the people by the people.

Exactly this.^^

Larian can't possibly cater to every whining crybaby that thinks the sky should be brown instead of blue because that's what they see when they look up so on top of not only delivering one of the best games ever made, they are also delivering the most amazing game creation tool ever so that the whining crybabies can mod the parts of the game they want and play how they want without ruining the game for everyone else....because most people don't actually want the sky to be brown.

They are only responsible for implementing the things they promised and they're doing an amazing job of that.

May I ask why you have such a poor opinion of people who use or create mods? That seems rather petty.

Oh no, I have very high opinions of a lot of mods and modders. I didn't mean my comment that way....bloody hell I'm excited to create stuff with the game's tool myself....but saying the devs didn't do their jobs or that they rely on modders is quite another story and one I don't agree with. The mod tool certainly can be used by crybabies but that's not to say only crybabies would use it....after all it's what created this amazing game.

Yes, there was a few games out there with great modding communities..but the way games are developed open, giving access to anyone to start fiddling with the game itself before release, is more recent.

Mods being made for Rimworld are changing the game. That game was alpha released last November..I have played the game through the transition till current build, and the Dev has \ completely supported it, and incorporated a lot of the mods into the vanilla game.

With Civ 4, there was also a massive (still is) following of avid modders. It's kinda like the training grounds for young developers to get their feet wet. Check this out Civfanatics Civ4 mods ...this game is over 6 years old, very active still. This makes the value of the game go up.

Also don't forget we live in the internet era where communication is vastly faster, communities are filled with all types now, not just ubber-nerdcores. Now mods are easier to install as well, the knowledge is much more widespread.

My two cents:

While I loved Neverwinter Nights, keep in mind Doom allowed both user-made levels and user-made enemies etc. So mods are at least as old as Doom, and possibly even older. It depends what you mean by "mods", I guess.

But anyway, there's a huge difference between mods that adds or removes small things to make the game better for you personally, and mods that fixes things that's just plain broken. I'm all for adding or removing things to make the game better, like installing a ducktape-mod in Doom 3 to add a flashlight to your weapon. It simply means it's possible to see in front of you, as it's not all pitch black most of the time. Doom 3 is very much playable without it, but adding it made it a bit better for me. And of course, there's Project Nevada for Fallout 3 and New Vegas. It adds things like visior for your helmets, a grenade hotkey, a better reticule and so on. Nothing game-changing, but it makes the game a lot better.

What I hope for with DOS are mods like that. Most of us have tried the game already, and we all enjoy it a lot. I don't think we'll stop enjoying it when it's out, and certainly not so much that we'll need mods to fix anything. But I wouldn't mind a mod or five to change up the gameplay a bit, or add features the developers haven't added for whatever reason. More spells, more weapons, more classes, more areas... you name it. A good mod can extend the life of the game a whole lot. In fact, many games survive for years mainly thanks to mods. Think Fallout 3/New Vegas, for instance. Both are getting old, but mods are keeping them both alive and well.

As mentioned in here mods are not the 'base' game. mods are player tweaks mostly. I am not sure how you figure it's a crutch at all. Larian has done all of the programming and amateur hour? Most of the player created mods for games are amazing.

Main reason I bought Divinity was for the toolkit. I love games where I can play around and change things. So ~ great marketing on their part, they hit two audiences with one stone. RPG players and Sandbox gamers ^_^

(yes I class Divinity Original Sin as a sandbox game, since I can edit things)

Having played Skyrim since release ... I can almost totally agree with the OP. Seriously just take a look at the bug fixes in the UNOFFICIAL PATCHES. Seriously it's like the devs never even tried.

O.o the bug fixes in most of the unofficial patches are mod work fixing. making them compatible with in game stuff. Think people are missing what modding truly is. it's just editing what is already in the games code. Most mods are not brand new core coding.
They take code from the source and just edit it, making it do something else...that coding doesn't just come out of thin air O.o The company making the game makes the core. What it can handle and do mod wise is based off that.

No, the unofficial patches for skyrim only fix bugs that Bethesda didn't, they're not about compatibility with other mods at all.

It wouldn't be totally unfair to say that Bethesda is a company that relies on modders. Their games are generally clunky in various ways but modders generally pick up the slack.

NWN1 also is a game that relied on modders as a crutch, the game's OC was just a tech demo for the toolset and so boring I didn't even manage to finish it. The only reason it's remembered so fondly is because of the great things modders did.

I loved NWN and played it all the way through because the story was good, how anyone could say different is as bizarre as someone thinking their own opinions define reality! hehe

NWN was in no way, shape or form reliant on mods. Nope, all mods did was extend the life of the game, which does not constitute a crutch because you could play the game without mods, enjoy it, and be satisfied. And the thing I remember most fondly about NWN is being a bear, with a bear companion, and a summoned bear along for the ride. And humming bear necessities as I played.

Look for the...

Can't please everyone and there is an infinite list of feature requests. In this case, mods fit the bill as they allow people to customize and add their requests themselves. This isn't a case of Bethesda where they obviously released unfinished and buggy products knowing the mod community would fix it.

I'm glad to know it was simply a misunderstanding, then.

Glad you enjoyed it, you will find, however, that relatively few people consider NWN's OC particularly good. Was it, perchance, your introduction to cRPGs?

NWN's OC (I am not talking about any of the expansions, which, according to pretty much everyone are a lot better than the OC) was bad because:

• the story was dragged out by oftne unecessary combat sequences that were dragged out themselves for way too long.
  
  For example at the start where you have to recapture the escaped creatues, you get to slug through one part of the city. Yay, now do it again...and again and then you finally get some meaningful dialogue again as there's pretty much no dialogue or nothing interesting happening in these fetch/kill stuff parts of the game, it's just a Diablo-style slog through various mobs until you reach your goal.
  
  The same story repeats once you make it to Luskan, and when they wanted another round of this crap when I returned from Luskan I called it quits.
  
• henchmen were bland. They were basically mindless zombies there to compensate for your PC's deficiencies (eg. melee tank for a mage, healer for a fighter...), most of them had very little actual personality. They did, however, have their own quests which, at least for the honorable warrior companion, appeared rather uninspired, but beyond that they had no opinion of their own on anything you did or anything that happened around you. Which, in itself wouldn't have been so bad if more interesting stuff happened around you.
  
• combat was uninteresting. Probably mostly because there was very little tactics involved (other than spell selection etc.). You couldn't actively do anything about your NPC helpers' positioning or casting in combat so the only one to be concerned about was your PC.
  
  (DLC later added companions back in, but I had long since moved on so I dunno if it improved things, doesn't matter as far as the OC is concerned anyway.).
  
  Maybe it was more interesting when playing a more hybrid class (like a druid), but playing a wizard (my preferred class) in NWN1 was just painfully dull.

NWN2, while suffering quite a few deficiencies of its own, had *much* better pacing of the story. Also having a full party actually made combat interesting (the combat system is practically the same as the one of NWN, after all), especially since all your party members are actual proper characters with their own personalities and opinions.

As for thinking that my opinions define reality, I'd like to point you to my signature.

I do think that most devs give the mod tools to extend the life of the game, which in turn, only helps them. I honestly believe that's all Larian is doing for us here.

Bethesda is the only one I know of that I honestly believe that the devs tools are given so the game can be fixed by players. And I am talking only of mods that fix the original game and nothing more.

Here is the unofficial Skyrim patch change log:

http://www.iguanadons.net/Unofficial%20Skyrim%20Patch%20Version%20History.html

This patch does nothing but fixes the original game, or adds/removes things that were supposed to be(or not) in the game. I can also tell you that the unofficial patches for Bethesda's other games TES, FO, etc. are not much better.