The future of mods and modding

[marks]

Over the last 5-10 years we've seen a huge increase in the amount of man-hours it takes to create a AAA game (Half-Life 2 / Crysis / Gears of War etc). Nowadays, it's a lot more work to create a mod which is close to commercial quality. Source was a pretty big step forward in terms of the technology used, and it still had/has a lot of mods released/in production. The next step down the road however, CryEngine2 and Unreal Engine 3 ... huge, huge amount less mods for these games (comparative to Source).

I predict that in another 5-10 years, creating mods to a close-to-commercial level of quality will either be impossible, or it will take so much time and talent/experience/knowledge that people simply won't choose to do it.
Sure there will still be the 'small mods' the little tweak here or there, a new gamemode or some such. But mark my words, the days of mods like Dystopia / Insurgency / Counter-Strike are numbered, and that number isn't very big.

Discuss.

[Habboi]

As it stands. I use modding as a way to improve my skills so I can reach the quality standards as they are today. How far can graphics really go before they become photo realistic. I recall reading an article stating that games will never be able to truly capture real life but my father always says that if you can imagine it, it will be invented.

You also have to consider the tech used to build games. As more powerful machines come out and games get more advanced, so too do the programs that create them. Generating a landscape takes seconds thanks to height maps, faking 3d gaps are possible thanks to normal mapping and parallax mapping.

This brings up a topic I thought of once where I suggested that one day, games wont need human developers anymore. One day there will be programs that will be so advanced they'll have the power to dish out AA title games faster than any human. I mean you remember people would animate complex scenes by hand? Well now they use motion capture which is the next step. What's next?

So I think as games go up the ladder, so too will the programs and the skills of the developers. One thing goes up, so do the other factors in the equation.

[marks]

So I think as games go up the ladder, so too will the programs and the skills of the developers.

This is the point I'm making. The skill required to make a mod to a commercial level of quality is going nowhere but up. There will come a point where people who don't have endless years of game-industry experience are simply going to fall short of the mark.

[Habboi]

But I think that to counter this, the technology to produce such quality will be easier. They'll be tons of libraries where you can drag in pre-made content and building a level in Killzone 2 quality would take a day at most. Have you seen the latest video for the Unreal engine kit? They showed off this clever program that recorded the hot spots such as deaths, conflicts and displayed it in a sort of "heat-map" style.

I just think that it'd be mighty stupid if tech got so hard that the industry slumped. On the other hand I have noticed that there are a lot less quality games than there were in the good ol' PS2 days. Perhaps the standards have raised the bar and maybe the future generation will miss out on games design.

Maybe in the future there'll be ear plugs that give you the skills you need in seconds

[Athlete{UK}]

my honest feelings are that one of the next big steps in game technology aside from graphics physics etc will be simplification of technology. Companies are already looking at streamlining the pipeline. I.E IDs rage.

[Zipfinator]

Also UE3 Engine is an example. Compare importing a model into Source, then into UE3. I hear UE3 is much easier, just a few clicks where as in Source you have to create .vmts, a .qc and organize it all in folders and shit.

[Enraged]

Putting models into the Source engine is an absolute nightmare when compared with Crysis. However, to that end, as I got in various responses on the other thread I made concerning the future of modding, the Source engine can be pushed to create almost perfectly realistic scenes, Ofcourse, the more perfect you try and make it, the more time it's going to take. Either way, I believe that there will be very little difference between how we work today and how people in the future will progress, i.e, our children if they were to be so interested. Who hasn't heard from their parents that programming is an extremelly difficult task. I'm only at a hobbiest level and do intend to enter the games industry when I get older, but I already know a fair bit of C++, and can model, animate etc already in Max. All that will happen is our kids will learn the newer, and what we consider more complicated stuff, only because they want to. Aslong as people have the drive I don't see it as being "impossible," although I do acknowledge your not putting it that way.

[Dionysos]

my honest feelings are that one of the next big steps in game technology aside from graphics physics etc will be simplification of technology. Companies are already looking at streamlining the pipeline. I.E IDs rage.

This. Also, I think at some point the graphical development won't sell more and more games anymore. At a certain point, people wont care about the differences anymore. Couple that with piracy and bigger development costs, and what I think we'll see is an increase in time and effort spent on quality and gameplay, its cheaper.

[Dr. Delta]

Putting models into the Source engine is an absolute nightmare when compared with Crysis.

Easier doesn't [always] mean better. Now you have some kind of a "protection" against 11 year old [stupid] kids. As for the level editor. Sandbox 2 [crysis wysiwyg lvl editor] is almost as easy as pie [same for dunia/fc2]. But do you see large amounts of stunning and impressive crysis levels? I don't...

[marks]

Example: sure the tools for making a normal map might get a lot simpler - but you still need to understand how a normalmap works in order to make good normal maps.

I don't think the "technology will get simpler to use" argument really stands up to scrutiny. It is still getting harder and harder to make games, no matter how easy-to-use you make the editing tools.

[dissonance]

Are we talking about making games, or making games look good?

[marks]

We're talking about the ongoing practicality of making mods to a level of quality similar to commercial games - this includes graphical fidelity (which frankly is a large part of the discussion I think) aswell as gameplay and other components of successful games.

[R_Yell]

I don't think there shouldn't be any big issues. Total conversions will make less sense, but that won't be bad at all. You can see how many of those long time projects don't really bring anything new to table. Just hope people realizes you can create completely new games just using the SDK assets, the custom part could be insignificant and minimally time consuming. If the initial concept works then it could evolve into something bigger, with more custom content and more people behind the right projects.

Just imagine if people joined efforts into projects which have been released and proved to be fun from the beginning. That won't happen until the "total conversion" crap is erased from Earth. Don't want it to sound bad against those people working in TC's, just I try to explain how the natural order of things should be. Now many mods are simply ignored because the artistic level isn't good enough, and some of them are pretty fun.

[Spike]

Putting models into the Source engine is an absolute nightmare when compared with Crysis.

Easier doesn't [always] mean better. Now you have some kind of a "protection" against 11 year old [stupid] kids. As for the level editor. Sandbox 2 [crysis wysiwyg lvl editor] is almost as easy as pie [same for dunia/fc2]. But do you see large amounts of stunning and impressive crysis levels? I don't...

Well, Crysis models pwns Source models in all the ways.

And for the level thing, that's not the engine fault, that's because there're lots of kids making maps for Crysis and FarCry2, they just open the editor and make a crap. But I'm sure people can make awesome maps with them.

[source-maps]

I dont know allot about crysis leveldesign, but arent all the buildings and stuff models?
and you can only make a island with models on them...
if you want to do something like a urban setting you will have to make allot of models?