Originality in mods

[Skjalg]

While steppen and peris provides very valid points, I think they've learned the wrong lesson from their experiences.

let me just start by saying that I agree 100% with the list Hourences made, lets look at a small exerpt;

Great and super efficient design. You cant make the next GTA game as a mod. You cant make a WOW clone as a mod. You cant make a mod with 30 playercharacters, 6 different environments and 29 levels, and 4 types of gameplay. You need to go for something that is doable.

This is where Insurgency failed. Ofcourse you will waste huge amounts of time when you try to make a complete game without a design document. What I think Hourences is trying to say is that you shouldn't have done that in the first place, you should have started small and released early and built ontop of that with a release every other month. This way you wouldn't have needed a design doc, you'd change things and test them as you go and spot bad stuff very early.

I do not believe Jeremy is doing a great job at leading his mods when he does the same mistakes over and over again. The best talent he got is getting a lot of talented people to join his mods, but if he had gone with the fast-release (or fast internal builds and playtests with little or no art involved yet), then I believe his mods would have been more successful. Let's just compare the CS with INS, the two mods are fairly similar in what needed to be done (and in gameplay ), but one took the early-and-often release approach and the other didn't. I would not call Insurgency a hugely successful mod when looking at what might've been; Insurgency had one of the best teams that any mod leader could want, and I strongly believe they could have done a lot bigger and better.

Now, to remedy this whole situation (the need to make something big and successful to compete with "real" games), I would not go and write a 100 page design document that every modder in the team needs to read so you are sure everyone is on the same page, it would just lead to frustrated modders thinking they will not be able to share the joy of actually helping with the design of the mod. Besides, if there was a few things in that document that was wrong or at best looks good on paper but would never ever be good in a game, then you are royally screwed. If you go for the fast release (or fast internal build) approach so that you can playtest all your ideas in a new prototype of the "final" game every week then I think you could accomplish a lot more. Just remember that CS started with 1 room, 1 player model and two teams and it just grew from there, like any healthy mod should.

You could argue that your mod wouldn't be downloaded by half a million (or whatever) like insurgency or red orchestra was at first release like 3 years after it was first started, and that because of this it wouldn't be counted as a very successful mod. But I'll bet you everything I own that if you make smaller releases early (after like 4 months) and built it from there it will generate a lot more downloads eventually and when you reach the 3 year mark you'd own beat the half a million with a million or more...

[Minos]

Let's not get hypocritical here Skjalg

Let's not compare CS with INS they are totally different projects with different scopes. Releasing often is a lot easier when you only have to include a new wad or a new map and your patches are only 5mb big. Things also take a lot longer to get done in Source (comparing to goldsrc). People would surely get pissed off if they had to download a new 100mb patch every 2 weeks to play the mod. I'm quite glad with have access to steam now, so releasing more often can actually be doable.

Of course we could have released more often but I think our pace is pretty good for such a big project.

[Steppenwolf]

I disagree. There were a number of mods for Half Life 2 that released early and they completely failed in terms of popularity. Players today want polished mods otherwise they will bash you to death. Hiring new staff for a unpopular mod is also very hard if not impossible.

Your comparison to CS also seems a bit out of place imo. No mod will ever again reach this level of success. Critizizing Jeremy for a lack of success? We must live in two different worlds. Both his mods won a "Mod of the Year" award. One of the mods won "make something unreal" and spawned a games company. It doesn't get much better in this day and age for a mod maker. A proper design document would have made the only difference. Then we could have released Insurgency 1.0 a lot earlier. Thats the only way i see how this mod could have been more succesfull. And for this was not Jeremy to blame.

[e-freak]

With Valve opening Steam up for Mods its gets easier again though. You can really see the Patch history of DIPRIP, Synergy or Zombie Master getting much more faster since they have the ability to get it straight to the players. Imagine more and more mods getting into automatic update process it will hopefully give back some of the gold-src spirit.

[AlexM]

With Valve opening Steam up for Mods its gets easier again though. You can really see the Patch history of DIPRIP, Synergy or Zombie Master getting much more faster since they have the ability to get it straight to the players. Imagine more and more mods getting into automatic update process it will hopefully give back some of the gold-src spirit.

amen

[R_Yell]

This is where Insurgency failed. Ofcourse you will waste huge amounts of time when you try to make a complete game without a design document. What I think Hourences is trying to say is that you shouldn't have done that in the first place, you should have started small and released early and built ontop of that with a release every other month. This way you wouldn't have needed a design doc, you'd change things and test them as you go and spot bad stuff very early.

It's just different development philosophies, and the one behind Insurgency clearly works for some kind of projects which don't want to reinvent anything. In such cases you don't need to release early because you already know if core gameplay works or not. That early release probably would kill the mod rather than helping it.

[Taylor]

It’s all team size isn’t it?

Leads and a design document sets restrictions and restraints. On a small team this is a negative effect as it restricts a certain amount of development ‘freestyle’ and tweaking that makes development fun and arguably gives a product its soul. But on a larger project it stops these concepts ballooning into evil feature creep and a project that never gets finished.

Previously everyone used to do the small team/small mod with lots of gradual updates. But after Counter-Strike (which itself was developed progressively with a small team), everyone seems to be going for larger teams and the first release being amazing in quality. There must be some logic behind this jump, if someone released a new mod with a couple of classes, unfinished weapons, small map roster and known bugs would the mod-players pick them up and follow them? Or pick them up, label them unfinished and put them down for good? I think there's been a shift there, too.

[FrieChamp]

Previously everyone used to do the small team/small mod with lots of gradual updates. But after Counter-Strike (which itself was developed progressively with a small team), everyone seems to be going for larger teams and the first release being amazing in quality. There must be some logic behind this jump, if someone released a new mod with a couple of classes, unfinished weapons, small map roster and known bugs would the mod-players pick them up and follow them? Or pick them up, label them unfinished and put them down for good? I think there's been a shift there, too.

Would it be safe to say that there were far less MODs available by the time CS made its first releases in comparison to today? I suspect so. People were happy to try anything that changed up the game slightly, today there are way more teams developing mods who compete for player attention. They want to get it right and capture the player from the start. Back in the days there was no police vs terrorists MOD for half-life out there. Day of Defeat only had to compete with "War in Europe", that was it. Today there are shitloads of similarly themed MODs available, so if you can't stand out with an original theme or gameplay (which brings us back to the original topic), you try to stick out with well polished releases, which take a while to develop. That's how I see it anyway

[Skjalg]

I disagree. There were a number of mods for Half Life 2 that released early and they completely failed in terms of popularity. Players today want polished mods otherwise they will bash you to death. Hiring new staff for a unpopular mod is also very hard if not impossible.

Your comparison to CS also seems a bit out of place imo. No mod will ever again reach this level of success. Critizizing Jeremy for a lack of success? We must live in two different worlds. Both his mods won a "Mod of the Year" award. One of the mods won "make something unreal" and spawned a games company. It doesn't get much better in this day and age for a mod maker. A proper design document would have made the only difference. Then we could have released Insurgency 1.0 a lot earlier. Thats the only way i see how this mod could have been more succesfull. And for this was not Jeremy to blame.

You are totally disregardig my reasons for criticizing. I said that he would have had a lot more success if he had done it the way Hourences described with the team that he assembled. I'm quite aware that his mods have received some awards but I strongly believe that this is mostly due to his excellent ability to find talent and getting them onboard with his projects and thus creating something great.

I don't really get why you can't compare INS with CS, and stating that no mod will ever again reach the CS level of success is a bit narrowminded. It's like saying back in 1980 that you'll never need more than 10mb of hdd space. (my point being that people will always outdo what has been done).

Yes you are right about some mods failing when they release early, but this is because their idea was bad from the start and poorly executed, so gamers didn't even see the potential in them. I am talking about what a talented group of developers (like the ones on INS) could have accomplished. If ins had released early there is a small chance it could have failed, but I doubt that since most people on the team had a strong passion about creating something. Also worth mentioning is that those mods that release early and fail would have with 100% certainity failed later on "during development" without ever releasing anyways.

You bring up a good point there Minos, when you say players would get pissed off with 100mb patches every other week. But the only thing that really takes up space is maps, and you don't really need to update them very often, I also said every 2 months, which is a very acceptable timeframe.

[Steppenwolf]

Times have changed. This is why there will never be another CS success story. Modding has become far too complex and will get even more complex in the future. There is a shitload of competition now with other online games and mods, gamers are far more demanding in terms of quality, then you have the console market competing with the PC market etc. etc. etc.

I don't even see TC's being released at all in a not so far future. At least none that can only remotly compete with the quality of the games they are made for. So maybe this whole discussion about team sizes will be obsolete soon anyway.

[Sentura]

Times have changed. This is why there will never be another CS success story. Modding has become far too complex and will get even more complex in the future. There is a shitload of competition now with other online games and mods, gamers are far more demanding in terms of quality, then you have the console market competing with the PC market etc. etc. etc.

I don't even see TC's being released at all in a not so far future. At least none that can only remotly compete with the quality of the games they are made for. So maybe this whole discussion about team sizes will be obsolete soon anyway.

i disagree. it's true that times have changed, but there will always be something new over the next hill. you can't predict what will happen in 2, 5 or 10 years. sure people are more demanding, but in the end this will spawn a new form of modding, unlike of the old. perhaps modding will be reborn as something else...

[BaRRaKID]

I don't know if you guys have read this before, but it's a good insight on what problems and challenges mods (most specifically source mods)face these days : http://www.moddb.com/tutorials/post-mortem

The article tells the story behind the failed development of one of the most promising Source SP Mods, called NightFall. I can tell you that when we where at the peak of our development the quality of our game was miles away from, for example, Black Mesa Source (we had a small partnership with them for a while, so we knew more or less what was going on with their game), but we really had a hard time developing it, and almost everything that could go wrong, actually went wrong, and the project was inevitably canceled.

While i don't agree with everything that is said in the article, and that contrary to the previous examples posted in this thread we lacked a lot of experience, it's still a good read, and i think it might bring something new to this discussion.

[dux]

While this might sound mean, I knew Nightfall wasn't going to last. The moment I saw it was being promoted as a "professional mod" with wallpapers, fancy renders, magazine coverage and all that other glitzy stuff you see real developer studios do. This really is something mod teams need to stop doing. And the only mod I've seen that has done all of that, and survived is Insurgency which only lived because it had a bunch of great, experienced guys making it who knew their balls (except when pongles got beat by his ruskie girlfriend lol at that). I was going to mention something about Nightwatch here but we'll leave that dead horse alone.

[BaRRaKID]

While this might sound mean, I knew Nightfall wasn't going to last. The moment I saw it was being promoted as a "professional mod" with wallpapers, fancy renders, magazine coverage and all that other glitzy stuff you see real developer studios do. This really is something mod teams need to stop doing.

You got it all wrong, although i understand that for those on the outside it might had seemed like we where trying to be like the big boys, all the "merchandising" we had was stuff that Tai (mod leader) did on his own free time just for fun, since he was a really creative person and had the need to constantly be creating something, he even started doing a graphics novel about the mod once but that never went outside our private forum, along with other amazing pieces of graphic design that he did without breaking a sweat.

Some other stuff, like the posters and business cards, where created do to us being invited to showcase the mod at two different game events, and we wanted to have something to give to everyone who played the game at those events. I actually had to spend some money from my own pocket to get a couple of posters printed and spent the entire night cutting business cards just so we had something to give away when we showed the mod at the WCG Portuguese finals in 2006. Also I must say that every mod team that gets an opportunity to have their mod tested in public like this, should take it. The amount of feedback you get from it is invaluable.

About the magazine coverage, we never asked any magazine to promote our mod, they where the ones who wanted to write about us, and you can't refuse opportunities like that as well. Besides i think every major Source mod has been featured in more than one magazine article, if i remember correctly theres a guy that is part of one of the HL2 modding sites, that also writes for PC Gamer UK (if I'm not mistaken), and he made articles about all major HL2 mods. Just go to the sites of a couple of mods and you will see that the articles are all from the same magazines.

I really don't see anything we made as a deliberate "marketing strategy", it was just stuff that got into the mod naturally, and opportunities that where presented to us that we, as a small humble mod team, couldn't afford to refuse.

[dux]

All that time spent promoting and feedback for the mod at game shows and what happens, it died anyway. I would never do something like that with a mod unless I well knew that the mod would never die. Mod developers should spend less time promoting it and actually making it.