2007 Mod of the Year Winners

intenscia writes "The 2007 Mod of the Year Awards players choice winners have been announced, capping off a great year in gaming. This year titles which were influenced by the War in Iraq fared well, with Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2 and the GPL'd ID Tech 3 engine polling strongly in the indie games and released mods categories. Crysis mods, though still in the early stages of development, did well in the best upcoming category as indie developers attention shifts to some of the next-gen engines."

My mod of the year

[Malevolent Tester]

Was all the people who gave me + moderation for this comment.

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[FooAtWFU]

Now, if only they had modded you up as something other than Funny, it'd be worth something. :)

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[bughunter]

I would also like to thank them, for creating the opportunity for me to perform the metamod [slashdot.org] of the year.

read that too fast

[techpawn]

"The 2007 Mod of the Year Awards players choice winners have been announced, crapping on a great year in gaming"

I'm sorry, I take all video games awards with a grain of salt now since the spike VGAs and gamecock... Some games get better with mods... others, not so much... I just know I don't want to be the one sorting the gems from the crap.

Maybe one day we can include console mods too

[elrous0]

I dream of a day when modding comes to consoles, and they can have a "best console game mod" category. We've seen some promises of user-generated content and console modding (such as with Unreal Tournament 3), but still no delivery.

[Sigh] Maybe next year.

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[nickthecook]

Woops!

Here [ut3mod.com] is some "delivery". :)

Some of these mods are fantastic, and definitely improve the experience of the game. The shield mod is great fun.

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[elrous0]

The last time I heard, Epic still hadn't released the software for users to actually "cook" their own mods. In order to do a mod, you basically have to send it to Epic, get their approval, and have them cook it for you. That's not my idea of "delivery."

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[nickthecook]

Sorry if my post was unclear. I was attempting to inform you that your information is out-of-date.

Try that link out.

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[elrous0]

Did they finally release the new software?

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[XO]

PS3 Mod tools are on the Unreal Dev Network page. The limitations to PS3 mods are pretty substantial, though. (no imported sound/music, can't combine code and other resources..)

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[ShadowsHawk]

Never played time splitters 2 on the GameCube eh? A friend of mine designed an entire level around screaming monkeys with machine guns. The techno was a nice addition too.

Re:Ridiculous.

[jacksonj04]

Player's choice - it's the players who voted for these. Mod DB had no say in who won, only the people who voted did. If you're interested in the Civ IV mods though, feel free to look [moddb.com] and you can vote for your favourite next year.

Disclaimer: I am a site manager for Mod DB.

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[Ford Prefect]

I'd be interested to know some details on how the titles were nominated and how the voting was done. Care to share?

Vague approximation from memory: first stage late last year, each ModDB mod and game profile had a vote button on it - each ModDB member was allowed to nominate an unlimited number of mods and games.

Second stage: the top hundred mods and games [moddb.com] from the first stage were subjected to a second vote. I think that, once again, each site member could vote for as many as they liked. I think there may

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[jacksonj04]

Sure thing. Ford Prefect (above) got it almost perfect.

Any mod or independent game (Not commercial titles) which hasn't been archived (Marked as inactive with no signs of life) or deleted (Through simply being a waste of oxygen, no signs of anything more than a vague idea, think the countless CS clones) is eligible to be nominated for MotY by any registered user of the site. Each user has unlimited votes, but may only nominate a mod or game once. At the end of the phase one voting, the top 100 mods and game

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[IdeaMan]

Warcraft 3 has excellent Mods (maps). The map editor is totally awesome. A friend and I recently broke out wc3 and played some Final Fantasy Epic RPG and Tower Defense maps.
I wrote about 6-7 maps, and fine-tuning those things takes ages to get right. I learned a lot about game balance doing that.

I would dearly love to have a platform that was open source and similar in power to WC3. WC3 has a bunch of limitations especially in regard to reaction times and keyboard mapping that would easily be remedied b

Not a bad selection

[Maserati]

Lots of straight-up FPS/RTS action. Beyond the Red Line (the BSG mod for Freespace 2) took first place in its category, and rightly so. the BtRL team has worked wonders in recreating the dogfights from the reimagined Galactica. Sound, voice chatter, environments and visuals all look Just Like The Show. And the dogfights play out like the ones on TV too. Gotta spend more time in multiplayer with that...

It is a shame that the Silent Hunter mod community isn't represented on ModDB. The Grey Wolves Expansion (GWX) is an amazing piece of work. One truisim of sim development is that most commercial projects aren't made up of enthusiasts (IL-2 Sturmovik is lucky to have aerospace engineers and pilots writing code), so commercial sim releases tend to have weak campaign modes and compromises to detail and realism. The GWX mod (now at 2.0) changes damage models, sounds, AI behavior, ship and aircraft models and textures and overhauls the dynamic world in which you run missions. Stock SH III campaigns get boring fast, in GWX you never know what you might run into on your next patrol. Oddly, it's both more varied and more realistic. And SH III always had the fear factor, attacking an escorted convoy is an exercise in applied terror: applied to you. Many SH III veterans will admit that their hands shake after an attack no matter how many times they hear depth charge splashes above them.

If you're at all interested in submarines or naval warfare, try it. Skip it if you get motion sickness, North Atlantic storms make for very rough patrols. SH III is still available cheaply, may still be available for download. GWX itself is a free download, check the www.subsim.com forums for links.

Alaaaaarrrrmmmmm!!!

[BeeBeard]

I play the GWX mod pretty frequently, and cannot recommend it enough! It's much more than a graphics update. I love the added REALISM that the team has added to the vanilla SH3 platform. And the way the difficulty level is scaled, as things get more realistic, they also get way more difficult.

No longer can you surface and go toe-to-toe with your deck gun against a destroyer with impunity, like you could in vanilla SH3. The oceans are littered with roving convoys of war machines bent on sinking you. Planes w

Just suffered through the entire 20 min video

[BeeBeard]

...and can safely assure you that unless you are a fan of very minor variations on the "I have a gun, you have a gun" FPS concept, there is *nothing* for you here.

The expectation may be for some original, Portal-quality games. If that's the case, then these fan-selected winners will be a disappointment.

Not that bad...

[Steauengeglase]

Given that mods are pretty much dead (or at least not where they once were) it is good to see that people are still playing around with Valve's Source SDK (though not too much else it seems).

If someone could just come up with a quicker method of creating new meshes/maps/art I think the mod comminuty would obviously be in a better state. Lets face it, the time it takes to create new assets has gotten crazy. It isn't something for a 15 year-old kid with 5 hours to burn and a copy of Milkshape anymore.

Blender devs are you listening?

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[im_thatoneguy]

>>If someone could just come up with a quicker method of creating new meshes/maps/art I think the mod comminuty would
>>obviously be in a better state. Lets face it, the time it takes to create new assets has gotten crazy. It isn't
>>something for a 15 year-old kid with 5 hours to burn and a copy of Milkshape anymore.

>>Blender devs are you listening?

Yeah Blender devs! Make me a program that reads my mind, improves on my ideas to make them actually good and creates a 3D mesh of exactly

Not such a bad idea .after all

[westlake]

Yeah Blender devs! Make me a program that reads my mind, improves on my ideas to make them actually good and creates a 3D mesh of exactly what I need fully textured and realized.

What is so implausible about a program that provides the tools to customize and animate a generous selection of pre-built models? Pixar uses in-house tools like "Universal Man."

There are other professional tools out there to generate realistic terrain, trees, and so forth.

Why not something for the modder?

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[im_thatoneguy]

Because aquiring 'stock' models is infinitely less expensive unless you need thousands of them and don't need a great deal of control (ala Universal Man).

All of these tools are built off of fractals (terrain/trees) or else fast ways to tweak existing models. Either way if you want to create something that doesn't involve someone wearing stock clothes with a stock body and a stock face... you know something new and unique. You still have to have artist create it.

It's like saying "Why doesn't Gimp add a fe

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[Kiuas]

Given that mods are pretty much dead (or at least not where they once were) it is good to see that people are still playing around with Valve's Source SDK

Anyone here in Slashdot who is interested in good source-mods should definetly check out a free mod called Dystopia [dystopia-game.com]. IMO it's the best multiplayer mod for the Source engine ATM. Although it is (as usual for multiplayer games) an FPS-game it's not just plain shooting, because it involves another dimension: Cyberspace, it's a sort of level-in-level thing, each level has the so called "meatspace", where the futuristic punks battle against corporation-troops, and cyberspace, where hackers must try to accomp

More of the same.

[Carbon016]

A lot of real quality mods didn't come to light in the Unreleased, which is a shame. More of the same stuff we always see, more of the same mechanics and scenarios. Still a lot of "hey we have a lot of models" with no actual new code or gameplay being shown off. Zombie Panic had an absolutely awful launch and I still prefer Zombie Master. Insurgency is a snoozefest, I really tried to like it, though. Project Reality is fine if you can find a populated server: good luck! Empires is really the best one out of

I play games on a console...

[bjmoneyxxx]

you insensitive clod!

summary please? kthanx

[duncanator]

can someone please summarise this? The video has a lot of 'I learned editing yesterday, watch me play music and show images I made' stuff in it. I just want a list of the winners, dammit!

Urban Terror

[Geekbot]

I have been playing Urban Terror the Q3 mod since my son was inside my wife's belly 7 years ago. I love that it's still going strong with updates, new maps, and new players. Now it has a version of the open source'd Q3 code so it's free to play.

To win a MOTY

[Hsien-Ko]

you must have: - tanks - guns that fire bullets - soldiers - realism - fans that can't decipher anything more than the above in gameplay terms and you've got a winner. Shame OA and Fortress Forever didn't make it. OA was only 7 votes away from being in the Top 100 and it didn't even call its community out for any votes. Ever.

I would loved to nominate "Black Mesa: Source"

[9Nails]

..It's unfortunate that the much hyped Black Mesa: Source is unavailable to enter this contest. Early screen shots have it looking so nice that it's almost a crime that this should be a Mod to Half-Life 2: Source. This should have been a project taken under by Valve, and completed with-in a shorter time frame.