Hacker News Reader

Comment by codexon | Hacker News Reader

I think we are headed for the dark ages of PC gaming.

Before, the top AAA studios made games with mods in mind. This allowed massive genres like Dota and Counter-Strike to come into existence.

Nowadays AAA studios see modders as leeches and try to cut them out of the game so they can sell DLC and skins to whales.

You can see this happening everywhere.

- No modding in Blizzard's new games.

- No modding in Dota2.

- CS:GO and TF2: Making 3rd party servers hard to find compared to official ones.

- Minecraft declaring freemium servers to be illegal

The indie games on Steam Greenlight don't make up for this. It is much harder to prove a concept by making a game from scratch. Most of them are quite shoddy and get abandoned after they receive a bunch of money from early access.

View on HN

> No modding in Blizzard's new games.

What about Starcraft Arcade, which makes use of Blizzard-provided tools to heavily mod the game?

http://us.battle.net/arcade/en/

> No modding in Dota2.

Valve announced workshop tools that would allow users "to create, play, and share custom maps and game modes for Dota 2."

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/discussions/-1/3522031560...

> What about Starcraft Arcade, which makes use of Blizzard-provided tools to heavily mod the game?

Starcraft 2 is not recent anymore. Out of WoW, Diablo 3, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and Overwatch, it is the only one.

> Valve announced workshop tools that would allow users "to create, play, and share custom maps and game modes for Dota 2."

Announced about half a year ago with no apparent progress? And the game has already been out since 2013 with a hefty 1 year "beta" where anyone that wanted an invite could easily get one?

> * Starcraft 2 is not recent anymore. Out of WoW...*

Starcraft 2 is still quite heavily played, and an expansion is still in the works.

I don't see how you can say Starcraft 2 is not recent, and then use WoW to further your point, when that game was released many years prior.

The fact that Dota 2's workshop tools are still in alpha is irrelevant. The fact is, there is a healthy, modding community within Dota 2, and this is being officially supported by Valve. It is also growing all the time, which contradicts your point that we are "headed for the dark ages of PC gaming".

> Announced about half a year ago with no apparent progress? And the game has already been out since 2013 with a hefty 1 year "beta" where anyone that wanted an invite could easily get one?

The valve mod tools are based on source 2 and already work, though they are in an early state. I've played maps made using them - anyone can - they're in the DOTA 2 workshop. Valve has said the dev tools are paused while they port the main DOTA 2 client to source 2 so the client doesn't need to close & boot source 2 to play user-made content. I'm not a game developer, but I'm told the current source 2 map maker is excellent if buggy & poorly documented.

It's possible Valve will release Source 2 for the client and never update the tools, but that seems unlikely. They've made an enormous amount of money off user-created content, and I expect they'll want to continue to add to that revenue stream (as well as it being the cool & decent thing to do).

1. Blizzard only ever had extensive mod tools for their RTS series, not any of their other games, so this is not new.

2. Starcraft 2's mod tools are vastly more powerful than those from Warcraft 3 and especially Starcraft 1 (in some ways this is actually a bad thing).

3. Blizzard implemented a major overhaul of the custom games interface for Starcraft 2's first expansion in 2013, so clearly they still care.

4. Starcraft 2 is still under active development; the latest expansion is expected sometime this year.

I remember Diablo2 being heavily modded though

Right, but they weren't using any mod tools provided by Blizz.

Most of the good mods from the last generation (CS, DoD, TFC, DotA, etc.) were less mods and more total conversions. And you don't need to mod a game to do that these days. The Source engine is free. Unity is free. The Unreal engine is cheap. We have more tools for making fully-fledged games at our disposal than we ever had in the past.

This is false. Nearly 100% of the assets from Dota 1 came from Warcraft 3.

I am not familiar with the other games to know how much original content there was, but I remember that both CS and TFC used a number of assets from the original.

Source is not free. Saying Unity is free and Unreal is cheap completely ignores the cost of modeling.

THIS so much.

One of the more 'interesting' gaming communities is the PAYDAY 2 community. It's a fiercely competitive multiplayer game with lots of levelling up (why does EVERY game want to be an RPG these days.... I digress) yet all the play has been sucked out of the competitive part. There's this massive conflation between 'modding' and 'griefing' where the attitude to people experimenting with the game is openly hostile.

Now admittedly yes, in a multiplayer competitive game it sucks when a cheater enters your game server and griefs your game. Yet I couldn't imagine the kind of open hostility existing in the Doom or Duke Nukem 3D communities of old, where modding was encouraged and celebrated as experimentation and where the games weren't taken so damn seriously.

Uh, there's a difference between modding and cheating in a game. I should know, I used to do both (the days of hooking the DLLs OpenGL calls... though I mainly did it for the technical challenge, it's no fun playing a game where you get to win no matter what); modding and hacking are entirely different. One is building things on top of the engine, the other is exploiting it (and ruining others enjoyment of the game). How you can conflate the two is beyond me.

Some say it is the Golden Age (see MrMember's comment), some say the Dark Age. I say there is a bit of both, but it is getting so crowded with people trying to make a buck, vs. people trying to make good games, that it is easy to be pessimistic (I definitely am in many regards).

There is not enough accountability on Early Access and Kickstarter, and this is magnified by the fact that most people are not good at judging a team's ability early on (see: YogVentures, etc).

Things are still rosy because most players are not tired of the genres (MOBA / CS) that grew from the last generation of being friendly to modders.

It may take a while but I forsee people getting tired of getting milked for DLCs and skins, and the major studios won't have another genre like Dota or CS to copy because they screwed over modders.

> Minecraft declaring freemium servers to be illegal

Yes, the dark ages, where developers look to protect their consumers (which in this case are often children!) from money-sucking leeches.

The Minecraft mod scene is thriving and massive and Mojang hasn't tried to stop it at all.

You know, it costs money to run servers. I'm an adult; I can choose to pay for extra items in a game if I wish to.

Actually, just as Warcraft allowed for modding which led to Dota, Starcraft 2 supports modding. So that spirit is still alive in some form at Blizzard.

Starcraft 2 came out about 4.5 years ago. Hearthstone and Diablo 3 don't support modding, and all indications show that Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch won't either.

After reading some initial reviews of Diablo 3, I just got Torchlight (1 & 2) instead, and haven't really missed D3. They are not a AAA games, but they do have an active modding community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com