A Look At Successful Game Mods 287
Parz writes "Mods have been an important part of gaming for well over 15 years. Not only have they provided plenty of additional free gaming to players, but they've acted as a launch pad for independent and amateur programmers to show off their skills to potential employers. This Gameplayer article highlights the programmers who are doing it best, and what mods have made biggest and most enjoyable impact on gaming. The article not only provides details for each game, but also links to the downloads, and is a great resource for those interesting in getting up-to-date with this exciting scene."
Obviously, this list will seem incomplete to anyone whose favorite mod was omitted. What mods contributed most to your enjoyment?
Warcraft III (Score:5, Interesting)
Counter Strike (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the first, but still the best... (Score:5, Interesting)
...the Doom (or was it Wolfenstein?) mod that let you blast Barney into oblivion.
teh hell??? (Score:3, Interesting)
not even a mention of one of the original FPS mods. I am talking about Team Fortress for Quake. I think, (and people can/will correct me if I am wrong), that it was one of if not the first mod out there.
it is a shame to not have mentioned the mod that started it all.
Let me see... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Unreal4Ever & ChaosUT mods for the Unreal series.
The TeamBG tools & mods for Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Torment, etc) I made a few mods for these games, you can still fine them at purveyors of fine Infinity Engine mods.
More mods than I can even recount for Morrowind & to a lesser extent Oblivion.
Anything that adds content that was cut from Knights of the Old Republic II (replaying it now)
My really cool space mines for GalCiv I :D
Neverwinter Nights. nuff said.
Vampire Bloodlines Unofficial Patch? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, it is probably the most professionally done mod I've ever seen.
They took the buggy piece of crap that was vanilla Bloodlines and turned it into one of the most immersive role playing worlds I've ever seen.
You could argue that the dev team should have done this job, but I say that it's the end gameplay that counts, and this mod really delivers. Check it out. [patches-scrolls.de]
Not even one Total Annihilation mod mentioned? (Score:5, Interesting)
The reviewer is obviously too young or too obsessed with the present state of modding, since not even one of the many dozens of mods and thousands of units created by fans for Total Annihilation was mentioned. It's still being actively modded now, even though the game is over ten years old and has more recent "sequels".
Total Annihilation is very likely the most heavily modded game of all time, and it wasn't even mentioned? Pffft.
Re:I'll vote warcraft III also (Score:3, Interesting)
And if you wish to take that route, then the many maps in Starcraft were the original "mods". Warcraft 3 just took most of Starcraft and made it 3D with a "hero" system. Guess that's why I never really enjoyed WC3, but loved Starcraft to death (SC2 and its now many 'expansions')
First game I ever modded (Score:5, Interesting)
First game I ever modded was QBasic Gorillas. I found the variable that determined the blast radius of the bananas and increased it to ridiculous amounts, discovered that the game used colour-checking to do collision detection and gave the gorillas armoured helmets, found the palette entries and made the gorillas green, and composed my own song for the intro. That game was quite possibly the only good piece of software Microsoft ever produced.
Quake - Action Quake, Future vs. Fantasy (Score:5, Interesting)
For me Quake had some of the best mods ever. For Quake I there was Future vs. Fantasy, a great mod where you could play as different characters either from the future, or from the fantasy realm.
Quake II had a great one called Action Quake, which is somewhat similar in playing-style to counterstrike. But it had nice things like if you got hit in the leg, you'd bleed, and have trouble walking, until you applied a bandage. Thery were so much fun at the time!
They stayed a lot in my mind, though lately all I've been playing is DotA... :-)
Re:12 half empty pages WTF! Text follows (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks a ton for posting the textual content of the article. Before even reading / searching through it, I somehow knew in my heart that not a single racing simulation related mod would be mentioned.
No GPLEA (the folks who continue to breathe new life into "Grand Prix Legends" on an annual basis, a sim that is over a decade old), no mention of rfactor (a racing sim essentially designed to allow easy modding by the community which right now has over 500 mods and tracks, on separate counts available), heck not even a single flight sim on this list.
Well, I guess I'm just not mainstream enough anymore ;-)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Counter Strike (Score:3, Interesting)
I have never played through much of Half-Life, but I've spent countless hours playing Day of Defeat and Counter Strike.
The same goes for Warcraft 3. I haven't even touched the single-player part of the game and just did various mods like DoTA or some form of Tower Wars.
No Steam games? (Score:1, Interesting)
Although they had a few Half-Life 2 metions in the article. They failed to mention the fact that Steam [steampowered.com] was made mainly for the purpose of creating and maintaining a MOD community for Half-Life.
Re:First game I ever modded (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Warcraft III (Score:1, Interesting)
DotA basically re-invented WC3 for Blizzard. The guys there give a lot of praise for the community. I think the DotA community is larger than the regular WC3 community.
Re:Warcraft III (Score:5, Interesting)
Blocked by work firewall... but my first thought when I heard about successful mods were things like GameGenie or Gameshark....
Re:Vampire Bloodlines Unofficial Patch? (Score:5, Interesting)
But yeah, VTM: Bloodlines is pretty goddamn fantastic, and the Unofficial Patch makes it playable, though there's been some breakage in recent versions. It's unique (somehow, the vampire theme is rare in RPG format), creepy, funny, at times very scary, and just extraordinarily well-written, with a dark, gritty, very real atmosphere throughout. And I say this as someone who usually has little patience for epic stories in RPGs. Give me an engaging setting and I'll pay attention to your story.
Unfortunately, Bloodlines stops being fun about 2/3 of the way through the game. Starting with the sewers and continuing through the end game, it turns a fantastic, deep RPG into an unremarkable FPS. It's as if they suddenly fired all their writers and designers, and got some level designers well-versed in recycled FPS cliches to build the rest of the game.
Re:Counter Strike (Score:2, Interesting)
How in the hell did they leave Counter-Strike off the list?
Not only was it the most popular mod for Half-life, but also Half-life 2. In my opinion, this is THE definitive mod that has been recognized as a game of its own. There were actually mods of CS itself. And they forgot CS from this list?
Re:Counter Strike (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, last I knew CS was still the most widely played multiplayer FPS around. Leaving it off of the list is simply unfathomable to me.
Re:teh hell??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Started it all? People have been modding games forever. The earliest I can think of is the Bards Tale, with the Bard's Tale Construction Set (1991). But I'm sure some grey-bearded gamer can beat that.
AnonymousAdventurer (Score:2, Interesting)
Money (Score:5, Interesting)
The "we have no clue but slashvertisments pay"-kind.
Slashdot is declining but still attracts roughly 8 million page views per day [alexa.com].
The article has 10 pages, each carries 5 banners.
Let's assume they are paid a very conservative $.50 USD per one thousand unique visitors for each of these banners.
Let's further assume slashdot drove 2 million unique's to the article.
Let's further assume those people, on average, clicked through 3 pages before they realized there is nothing to see.
That's a solid $15000 USD, under fairly pessimisic assumptions. They probably made closer to $30000 by the time you are reading this.
A mod made me do it! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Warcraft III (Score:3, Interesting)
That's exactly what I thought. I got part way into the article when they started talking about the Stargate mod for Cyrsis that is nowhere near a playable form and i started losing interest.
I'm as big a fan of the SG universe as the next guy, but I really thought the article was going to be about the great mods that are out there right now - the article doesn't even touch on counterstrike, team fortress or the counterstrike-a-like Urban Terror - all classic mods with gameplay to spare! I'd have thought that a top list of "best mods" would feature more gameplay-oriented chat rather than "we've seen screenshots of the weapons and it's based on crisis so even if it's crap it'll look great!". Did someone from marketing write that?
Re:Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Score:2, Interesting)
This game was awesome for it's hackability.
Everyone hated the hackers, and so did I when they ruined non-hacking games, but it was really amazing to see the kinds of stuff they could do. When it was hacker against hacker, you'd see the extent of their bag of tricks: measures, counter-measures, counter-counter-...-measures, never before seen tricks, etc.
Basic example: You had people that could "fade" which required setting a flag on an opponent's character to make the game think they were falling to their death. The victim's screen would then constantly fade to black as if they were falling off of a cliff, and deaths would be counted against them. Setting your victim's death flag required altering the code for various force skills. For example, you could alter the force grip code to set the "fade" flag instead of the intended "choke" flag on your victim.
That was the most basic hack. Then you had people that had counter-fades, counter-counter-fades, counter-fade penetrating fades, etc. Of course, this is just an example, there were a plethora of things you could do: shoot all manner of projectiles (AT-AT out of a repeater? Sure!), fill the level with water, almost anything you could think of.
Some of the great hackers just couldn't be killed by anything you threw at them, hacked or not, and your attempts to make yourself invincible just wouldn't work against them.
The hacking became a game of its own. You couldn't just alter any code any way you liked, you still had to play by a certain set of rules. The game used (basic) checksums, and you had to be clever with your hacks in order to have them work.
This ease of modification led to some really awesome mods, but it was the ways people could twist the original game within the constraints that really intrigued me.
I think there's still a community on IRC that keeps this game alive, and I bet there's still a hacking community :)
Article author is clueless... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, how can this be called "The Best Game Mods"? As much as I hate it, Counter-Strike has to be one of the biggest and widely played mods (and now standalone game) of all time, and it doesn't even get a mention???
I could list countless other mods over the past 10+ years that make a lot of the vaporware in that article look like some 14 year-old kid just heard about modding and started making some screenshots.
Some of the big mods that should/could have been on that list if I were to write it: