On the Subject of Mods

Heidi Montag*

As Field Marshal, I spend a lot of my time delivering the good news to our sand dune-dwelling chums in various sweaty arse-cracks around the world. But that has nothing to do with this rant, other than to explain my recent absence from the blogging airwaves. But fear not! When I am not busy defending our glorious Great British way of life, I am still committed to delivering my glorious judgment on all matters relating to gaming, with the added bonus of pictures of hot women with big (or in this particular case, medium) jugs.

And so, on with the show.

This evening I will be musing on the venerable subject of mods. In principle, mods and modding are good. They are a large part of what sets us futuristic PC gamers apart from the knuckle-dragging console neanderthals. Unfortunately, even though the daunting task of building an operational game engine is already done, it's easy to underestimate the work required to bring even a small mod to completion. Raw code, models, textures, animation, levels, sounds, effects; they're not going to magically appear without substantial human intervention.
This brings me to a phenomenon I observe with special derision. Imagine, if you will, the scene. Some leeeeeeet gamer types are gabbing away on Vent or some such after pwning some noobs in their FPS of choice.

"Huh huh huh we pwned them"
"Noobs!"
"huh huh yeah"
"hey, let's make a mod. Then we can pwn more noobs"
"yeah! I can do the coding, I ran a script that someone gave me once, I'm teh leet haxor"
"dude! I'll grab photoshop and 3d studio max, neither of which I've ever used before, off bittorrent"
"we'll do it this weekend, then we can sell it like counterstrike and be rich"

I guarantee 90% of mods start out like that. But we haven't even got to the derisive part yet. What I really hate is how the majority of mods spend their "active" lives with nothing more to show for themselves than some shitty offline renders of guns.

This is shit

They're easy to spot. Someone on the "team" will spend hours putting together a ruthlessly-accurate but entirely inappropriate model of some rifle or other and produce the obligatory ambient occlusion render. This render will then appear on the mod's website, which will be another area in which someone will expend a great deal of effort without accomplishing anything of any value.

This also is shit

These renders seem to be compulsory for any FPS mod, but what really riles me is just how worthless they are. Even if by some miracle the author has produced a model which would be appropriate as an in-game weapon, the guns really have to be the least important part of the game. How are the environments looking? How are the character models, textures and animations progressing? How's the game logic coming along? What's that? No one has actually done anything to develop the mod, rather they've been too busy creating a theme for the website and trying to prove they know how to use 3D Studio or Maya or XSI? Oh dear.

complete fucking shit

For me, ambient occlusion renders of guns are like a great big sign saying "this mod will never actually exist other than in our imaginations".
And tell me, does your mod feature real-time ambient occlusion on all the high-res models? No? So why did you render your little gun model like that? And why was it grey? Will it be grey in the game? Are you too lazy, ineffectual and talentless to texture it? Yes, I thought so.
You almost have to feel sorry for the modeler, he's undoubtedly the only person on the "team" actually trying to do something constructive. You might even put it down to naive, youthful enthusiasm.
But let's not. They are annoying, pointless fucking shit and every mod that has any on their stupid fucking website should just pack their bags and call it a day right now. You're not going to create the next counterstrike. You're not even going to ever get your piece of shit mod into a playable state, let alone create a polished final product that people beyond your little Vent channel will actually bother to install.

* I feel I must apologise for the blondeness of this update. Put it down to my righteous indignation concerning the subject of the post. Still, she does have a great body, albeit a surgically-assisted one.