Industry Trends: Mods and their effects on gaming

What are mods? Well the term mod is short for modification and video game mods are essentially anything that changes, adds, tweaks or removes something from the base game. Although younger gamers may not know it, a number of the most popular games today originally started from mods.

Games such as Counter Strike, Dota, Halo, League of Legends, Team Fortress, Overwatch and while not started by mods, the tower defense genre was popularized by them with Warcraft 3 custom TD maps being extremely popular. Not to mention mods like BF2 Desert Combat, Red Orchestra, Project Reality, Age of Chivalry are very popular as well. GTA 5’s online systems could also be influenced by the multiplayer mod that released for GTA San Andreas on PC.

Nowadays the mod scene seems to be declining with exceptions like Bethesda Games, Valve games (which actually pay modders for making great content) etc but back in the 90s and early 2000s mods were a huge part of PC gaming and almost unavoidable for the majority of PC gamers. I believe this is due to a lack of mod tools being released and multiplatform development in general but I haven’t looked too much into it so I can’t say.

I should also mention modders also fixed games using mods, almost every Bethesda game is riddled with bug and/or broken mechanics that modders eventually fix in time. Mods and Bethesda games are simply synonymous with each other at this point. Many modders also continue support long after games are no longer supported. Skyrim, once again, is a good example here, with many unofficial patches being released to fix bugs/issues long after bethesda has stopped doing so.

I still remember Dota’s early days with its limited heroes, complicated item system and tons of other mechanics (some which were even taken from the base Warcraft 3 game) and now I look at what that has become as well as the genre it created and I’m still amazed that a mod could jump from a custom map to one of the most popular games of all time.

The most recent trend I have seen spawned from mods is the open world survival genre. Popularized by DayZ which was a mod of ARMA and since improved on by many other games (the most recent and popular being PUBG).

Some of my personal favourite mods include

Dota

Counter Strike

Doom 3’s Flashlight mod

KOTOR 2’s Content Restoration Mod (Literally a must have for any fan of KOTOR)

Third Age Total War

This one in particular is pretty great because it’s an overhaul mod which essentially changes the enter game. This mod has its own campaign, unique units etc, It is truly amazing how much work the guys put into this.

Lately I haven’t seen much influence in the modding community (outside of Bethesda/Valve and GTA) of course there’s a chance that I simply haven’t been looking hard enough, but there don’t seem to be many big hits coming out of the mod scene. Which is a shame considering how much mods of contributed toward gaming as a whole, so the industry losing strong mod communities is quite saddening. Sony also refusing to allow mods on to their network seemed like another blow to the mod scene, but microsoft being more welcoming was a good sign.

What about you guys? Do you guys agree or disagree with me? Have you had any positive experiences from mods? As usual, upvote, resteem or leave a comment if you liked this and want to see more (also check out my other posts if you feel like!).

Credits to Youtubers svaalbard (insane0hflex), Dirty Weasel Media, three6D-Moddren, GamePressure and Pixelated Apollo