The above is a nifty new 2000 DPI, adjustable weight gaming mouse that arrived on my front porch this afternoon, courtesy of a giveaway on Massively Overpowered. I’m on the site almost every day and a faithful listener of the Massively OP podcast. If you haven’t been to the site, you should really check it out.
Anyways, just wanted to thank them publicly and show off my shiny new tech!
Monthly Archives: April 2015
Steam: Mods For Sale
FUS RO DOLLARS!
Sorry. I couldn’t resist. Now that we have that out of the way…
Since everyone and their cat is talking about this, I thought I’d weigh in. Yesterday the above banner appeared across the Steam homepage heralding the addition of a new system that allows users to charge for their mods. Side note: technically, mods have only been on Steam for about 3 years, so saying that Steam “has always been a great place for discovering community-made mods, maps, and items” is a bit of a stretch, but that’s beside the point. The point is, the Internet quickly exploded with hate for the new “feature.” As of this writing, 13 of the top 15 “most helpful” reviews for Skyrim, the only game with for-pay mods thus far, are negative, not because of the game itself, but because of the for-pay mod system.
EDIT: Scratch that, in the time it took me to finish writing this post the two positive reviews have been pushed down. They’re literally all negative now.
One of the main reasons for playing Elder Scrolls games, at least for the PC Master Race, has always been the mods. For instance, I play an Imperial named Palpatine who uses lightning magic and a red 2-handed lightsaber. That small moon, Secunda? That’s no moon. And, of course, I had to add the Space Core (he currently lives on a shelf in my house and chatters away to Lydia and my adopted daughter all day). There are, of course, many other less silly and universe breaking mods that add everything from new armor to new quests to new NPCs to graphical improvements (yes that’s possible, believe it or not). Do these things add to my enjoyment of the game? Yes. But there’s no way in Oblivion that I would ever pay for them. But I don’t think this is the kind of thing the system was created for in the long run. Granted, a quick glance at the current list of the paid mods shows that they’re mostly to add a handful of cool looking items and expanded versions of existing mods. But I think the real usefulness of this feature is not to add bite-sized DLC, but to incentivize modders who have bigger ideas.
Think about it. How many awesome free projects, whether mods or standalone games, have been abandoned because the creators got burnt out or didn’t have time anymore (in other words, this). People aren’t dedicated to a project they have no prospect of getting money for, even if they’re really excited about said project. They might model a cool set of fantasy armor and dump it into a Skyrim mod, but rarely does anyone create something on the scale of one of Skyrim’s official DLCs. Honestly, people who create DLC-sized mods should be compensated, and conversely, if people know they’re going to be compensated, they’re more likely to make DLC-sized mods. If Bethesda released Morrowind remade in the Skyrim engine, charged $60 for it, all of the Morrowind fanboys would be throwing money at their monitors right now. So you’re saying that if a team of players remade Morrowind within Skyrim and sold it for $10 you’re not going to buy it? I don’t even like Skyrim that much and I would buy that. Yes, there will be plenty of people who create mods for fart magic and dubstep guns and try to sell them for a dollar, but in general I think the hope is to encourage a higher quality of mods.
I have to admit that, judging from the reaction of many players, my opinion is far from popular, and I’ll be honest, I’ve never even attempted to mod anything, so it’s not like I have my finger on the pulse of the modding community. Also, Skyrim is far from my favorite game, so maybe if this was being piloted on a modable game I really like, Torchlight 2 for instance, I would be a little more annoyed. But I’m not going to hate Valve for making this feature available. I’m of the opinion that, if I don’t like a given feature, I’m not going to use it, but I’m not going to label anyone who does use it as a traitor.
In the end, I hope this encourages the already amazing modding community of Elder Scrolls, and eventually other games, to come up with even more amazing things. Yes, there will be a certain number of mediocre mods that would have been free if they were released last week that some guy is now going to try to charge a dollar for, but I think it’ll be fairly self-policing (no one is going to pay for a lame mod, so eventually the creator, if they’re smart, will be forced to make it free). If it means we get just a few projects that are of higher quality and scale than people would have been willing to create without pay, then I think it’s worth it.
EDIT: After just three days, Valve pulled the paid mods from the store and offered refunds to people who purchased them. Valve and Bethesda both apologized for misreading the modding community, though Valve conspicuously didn’t promise never to try this again with other modable games. Only time will tell.
Heart of Thorns: An Expansion Beats DLC
Recently there has been a rash of MMOs announcing that they are ditching the traditional expansion pack model in favor of smaller DLCs. In a way, this really shouldn’t be surprising; the game market as a whole has been doing this for years now, so MMOs seem a little late to the party. But I don’t really think this trend is in players’ best interest. While I was brainstorming this post, Justin Olivetti over at Bio Break posted a great article on this trend, so go read his post because he probably summed it up better than I would have anyway. I wanted to echo his thoughts and talk specifically about why I’m glad Guild Wars 2’s Heart of Thorns is an expansion and not just a DLC.
Back in January, in the days when all we knew about Heart of Thorns was an ambiguous teaser at the end of Season 2 of the Living World story, I wrote about why I was hoping HoT was an expansion. The main gist of the post was that, although ArenaNet repeatedly claimed that the Living Story would, by the end, add up to an expansion’s worth of content, it simply didn’t. Eight chapters of roughly half an hour of questing each with roller coaster difficulty and two bland zones does not equal an expansion. Put all of the Living World content together and you have at best a mini-expansion, what some marketers are calling “DLC.” (Isn’t the whole game technically downloadable content?) A DLC which probably isn’t substantial enough for me to pay for (I missed at least one episode of Season 2 and I don’t plan on going back and buying it). I admittedly haven’t read up on the scale of the DLC/frequent chunk updates planned for games like LotRO and EQ2, but when I hear the idea I immediately think of the Living World and how mediocre it felt and am a bit turned off by the idea.
Also there is, of course, the fact that an expansion sounds a lot better than DLC. I’ve tried to explain the Living World updates to friends who play other MMOs, and I’ve almost always been met with something along the lines of “Oh, my game does content patches sometimes too.” No, that’s not the same thing. Well, kinda, but not really. MMO players in other games can relate to a game dumping a bunch of new features and content in an expansion, and players within the game can rally and get excited about it, but a handful of quests and a couple of new zones, regardless of what other features it may or may not come with, doesn’t sound that enticing to someone outside the game. Also I (and other gamers I know) have judged a game’s activeness by how recently they released an expansion, not by how recently they’ve released a smattering of new quests. If a game hasn’t had a real expansion in two or three years and there’s no sign of one in the future, it comes across as a sign that the developers are losing faith in their product.
Perhaps the worst part of the Living World’s reign is that I felt like Guild Wars 2 was in limbo. It seemed like the developers were constantly rushing to keep up with the every-two-weeks pace of content releases, and improvements to other aspects of the game only got squeezed in while they were taking a short break from the Living World. I’m afraid that a game whose business model is to constantly push out small DLCs will be perpetually stuck in this state. With an expansion, the dev team gets to take a big chunk of time to work on meaningful class changes, new dungeons, and, most importantly, balance them against the rest of the game. We’re already seeing evidence of this with Heart of Thorns, most obviously with the new Revenant class, but also some of the smaller changes like the promise of removing the hard 25-stack bleed cap (my necromancer and thief will be so happy when this change sees daylight). Even better, the player base is usually on board with waiting for this, especially if you tease them with things like dev diaries and closed betas, whereas if you break your advertised release schedule players get restless, even if you assure them it’s for QA purposes.
I know a lot of people favor the DLC model and the promise of new things to do more frequently rather than wait for a truckload of new content to be dumped on you all at once every year or so. What do you think? Is your experience that it’s a struggle between quality and quantity? Or do you see it, as Bio Break puts it, as the same pie cut in smaller pieces? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Occasional Hero 