Modding Question

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by meade95:

Additonally, why not simply give the customer his choice to modify (for single player)....Seems there is no harm in that - And absolutely no way to "mess it up".

Why?

Community.

Even with CM, there were so many frigging scenarios out there that no two people seemed to be playing the same games. It was great when the demos came out. Everyone played the same two scenarios, then actually talked about them. And reminisced about them for years afterwards. They had shared experiences, and a shared sense of community.

All kinds of guys coming up with their own pat formulas, aside from the asinine hero worshipers that JonS describes, can only serve to further splinter and fragment the community and ensure that even simple things like answering questions on tactics become impossible to do in open forum without tons of caveats and having to preface any discussion with "and please take into account I'm using the Lorrin Bird M-1 tank armor stats from Steelbeasts.com and the APDS stats from BigRedDog and the BDRM models from CMMODS - either MikeyD's or Scipio's, I forget which."

[ May 21, 2007, 11:35 PM: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[Kineas]

What Michael said.

I'd love to have a Cold War mod with a significant user base, but more likely we would just have 78mm Stug front tweaks and the like.

[Battlefront.com]

Dorosh is correct. That is yet another reason we locked up the data. Experience shows that people spend more time bragging about who has the KIL'R kOooL ModZZZZ that they forget to actually play the game. No thanks

Then we get the huge fights between people arguing about this or that thing. The user base fractures into people that will only play the game one way and not another way. Yes, even if the mods are limited to single player mode. I've seen it happen to other games and it is absolutely not what we want.

Worse, this is a very, very complex game and even little tweaks are likely to produce quite large, and unexpected, results. Even to the extent of something like a tank turing up to the sky and bouncing up and down like someone on a pogo stick. We could drive ourselves mad trying to reproduce the problem and then come to find out that some numbnuts put a .0003 value instead of a .003 value someplace and 15 steps down the stream of calculations it fed a completely bogus value into the movement physics system. Well, I don't feel like tracking down this crap so someone can have the opportunity to give an Abrams an unrealistic top speed just because the player wants to. Not what I signed up for

Lastly, there is no reason why CM *needs* this sort of modding. FPS/RTS games almost require it because the gameplay gets redundant and boring rather quickly, no matter how good the game is. I've been playing FPS games since the very first ones, and they really haven't changed all that much in terms of gameplay. RTS stagnated even quicker. That doesn't mean new games in these genres have nothing to offer, because they do. I'm just saying that most of the things they offer are evolutionary and can be found in at least a dozen contemporary games at the same time. CM:SF doesn't have this problem since it is, in all regards, unique. That's not some sort of marketing claim, that's simple fact. We're nearly 10 years since starting CMx1 and there is STILL not a single game that is comparable to it. We will be shocked when we find out that status quo has changed, and then we'll be happy for the competition. There's plenty of room for it!

Steve