The actual thesis of the video is "modding is great and lets you fix games + make them better", which is true. The title thesis (at time of comment, "How Mods Changed Video Games Forever") is...
The actual thesis of the video is "modding is great and lets you fix games + make them better", which is true. The title thesis (at time of comment, "How Mods Changed Video Games Forever") is totally unsupported.
One of Jakey's weaker videos, but if you haven't modded before (either installing or making mods) it's worth a watch.
I couldn't bring myself to watch something like this for 17 minutes. I just don't see the appeal of this style of editing and direction at all. A constant stream of them going through a whole...
I couldn't bring myself to watch something like this for 17 minutes. I just don't see the appeal of this style of editing and direction at all. A constant stream of them going through a whole cartoon sound effect library and non sequiturs over 3-second clips. And that audible page flipping transition... It's like it's made to entice toddlers, which seems weird given a toddler would have no interest in the subject.
Not to be too much of a debbie downer I will add something interesting about the history of mods. In the European cracking scene of the home computer era it was common to add "trainers" to games. A lot of prestige was attached to being the first to release a cracked version of a game, which was nailed down to an art form by a few groups that had suppliers in the industry, so competition in that area was fierce. I think trainers were essentially one way to differentiate your crack from those that were quicker but didn't have trainers.
Trainers were basically hacks of the games, adding optional changes that you could pick in a menu before the actual game launched. Some changes are obvious cheats, like unlimited lives, invincibility or whatever. More interestingly, some trainers added fixes that basically rebalanced the games or significantly changed it in some way that wasn't just an obvious cheat. Clearly made by people who knew what about the mechanics annoyed them.
Several companies sold hardware intended to make it easier to mod games. There was a tool called Action Replay which eventually existed in some form or another for several computer and video game systems. The Commodore 64 version allowed you to freeze the game, inspect and modify the memory (including the code) and then resume the game with those changes. Marketed as a cheating device, this turned out to be a very useful tool for crackers as well as modders. The Commodore 64 version even included assemblers and disassemblers.
The console versions are interesting to me, because by definition you can't modify the content of a ROM cartridge. On the Sega Megadrive, the Action Replay instead sits between the cartridge and the cartridge slot and intercepts the memory accesses on the bus. That way it can present a different value to the CPU than the cartridge ROM would in some places and just forward the data from the cartridge in others. You could create a rather short list of such interception points in order to cheat. There were also rudimentary mods made this way. I recall there was one for Sonic 2 that simply swapped a palette entry, turning Sonic green and black.
There are course earlier examples of modding. Before the era of commercial computer games especially, when games weren't so strongly considered as proprietary, and hacking on a game you had access to was just par for the course for the people that did.
That's a little reductive. Jakey has been in the business for a while and was rather influential on youtube game reviews as a whole. He's been a fixture and the ranking isn't simply because of...
That's a little reductive. Jakey has been in the business for a while and was rather influential on youtube game reviews as a whole. He's been a fixture and the ranking isn't simply because of "toddlers".
I'd say this video and the Rockstar table tennis one, are him trying a style where he's overly excited to the point of near insanity because he found something he finds incredible and it's consuming him. It works better if you're aware of the baseline.
It's not even that I disagree this style is a bit much, but calling it for toddlers does sell short what NakeyJakey has made in the past and how this video relates to that.
Personally I don't feel obliged to play the game the developer's way, especially for the 'the one true way to play' games. There are a lot of games where they have an interesting idea but choose...
Personally I don't feel obliged to play the game the developer's way, especially for the 'the one true way to play' games.
There are a lot of games where they have an interesting idea but choose to add some obnoxious anti feature such as grinding or save restrictions. Removing that is one type of modding. For me the difference between spending several hours grinding and just adding the whatever is not a feeling of acomplishment but several hours of doing menial labour.
Then we have content or game mechanics mods that can change the way the game feels but do not specifically remove or bypass some the game design.
And finally the mods that simply use the base game as a foundation to do their own thing. Mods for Legend of Grimrock 2 are a good example, with several being larger and more complex than the base game.
It all comes down to the type of game and the context of the times. If you want to build tension, a limited save system in a series like Resident Evil makes sense. You don't to ruin the horror by...
choose to add some obnoxious anti feature such as grinding or save restrictions.
It all comes down to the type of game and the context of the times. If you want to build tension, a limited save system in a series like Resident Evil makes sense. You don't to ruin the horror by save scumming (also, save systems may be elements of limitation. Easier to establish a few safe points to save than any arbitrary position).
Likewise, grinding/life systems were made in times where games realistically only had maybe 5 hours of content. Dollars per hour is still an important metric to many gamers today, so developers needed ways to extend that playtime. The arcade style of forcing a high skill floor to see the end of the game is one such result. MMO grinds to give activities for guilds to bond over is another.
I'm all for doing your own thing if you so help it. But a key rule in UI/UX is that people stick to the defaults. Game designers try to ultimately make good enough defaults to satisfy the most people (including people so enamored they feel a need to take the time to modify the game).
Someday I might rescue Shawn from the Institute. But right now I've got a few dozen settlements to manage and Raiders to wipe out again. Thought you could retake Corvega Assembly Plant? You...
Someday I might rescue Shawn from the Institute. But right now I've got a few dozen settlements to manage and Raiders to wipe out again. Thought you could retake Corvega Assembly Plant? You thought wrong...
My first swing at modding a game was the old Macintosh System 7/8/9 game Escape Velocity from Ambrosia Software. I got tired of getting wiped out every time a pirate showed up in the system, so I...
My first swing at modding a game was the old Macintosh System 7/8/9 game Escape Velocity from Ambrosia Software.
I got tired of getting wiped out every time a pirate showed up in the system, so I made a weapon called The Big One, which had a detection range of the maximum system size, a payload powerful enough to wipe out the most powerful ships in one shot, and a range that would extend to pretty much the entire system. I also made it have an outfit size of 1, a weight of 1, and a price of 100 credits, then made it available at every single outfitter (that took the longest time as I had to work through a list of the outfitters in the game and laboriously input each one by hand). By the end I could take my little starting shuttle and begin taking over the entire known galaxy just for shits and grins.
I know that making an all-powerful weapon is supposed to make a game less fun, but I think when you build it yourself from concept to final product, it becomes a more interesting endeavor and even if it breaks the game you still feel a sense of pride and accomplishment (Jakey actually addresses this point in the video.)
In addition to learning how Escape Velocity worked under the hood, I also learned a ton about the 2-fork system of the MacOS System 9 stuff, where you had your data fork and your resource fork. This led to me learning AppleScript and automating my system, something I still use to this day on my Mac. It just makes using my systems that much more interesting to me.
If nothing else, I encourage modding so you understand more about what goes into the games you like so that you can understand why programmers made the choices that they did. To quote a tweet I once saw:
Programming is chaotic magic. There are no rules. You ask a game dev "Can the player summon a giant demon that bursts from the ground in an explosion of lava?" and they'll say "sure, that's easy" and then you'll ask "can the player wear a scarf?" and they'll go "oof"
I think this is my first time encountering EV in the wild after all these years. Probably the first game I really loved. My dad tried to ResEdit the pilot file so I could afford the Kestrel, but...
I think this is my first time encountering EV in the wild after all these years. Probably the first game I really loved. My dad tried to ResEdit the pilot file so I could afford the Kestrel, but in the end I think it was the ship prices you had to modify this way. Pretty sure he cracked the game so I didn’t have to deal with Captain Hector. If there’s one thing he taught me it was how to crack software.
Only made maps, never released a mod myself but I first learnt about them in Total Annihilation. The devotion of the community amazed me then as it does now.
Ah, many a gameplay session of mine ended at the hands of Captain Hector. In later games he didn't do anything but fly into the system and nag you to buy, but I recall in early games he'd...
Ah, many a gameplay session of mine ended at the hands of Captain Hector. In later games he didn't do anything but fly into the system and nag you to buy, but I recall in early games he'd annihilate you.
I never did end up paying for it, and honestly I might've cracked it myself, I can't recall. When I get the itch/urge to play EV again, I turn to Endless Sky: Steam / Github -- I have 265 hours logged on Steam, but I've probably got closer to 500 hours in the game across Linux / Mac / Windows. It's a very faithful recreation of the EV series as a whole, with a lot of Quality of Life improvements that game in later iterations. I still haven't managed to explore the entire galaxy.
As a fellow xkcd quoter, I usually find myself quoting 927 or 1053
I haven't watched video, I'm commenting on mods as they are. I'm not entirely anti-mod, but I have the philosophy like this: The game MUST be good by itself without any mods. If it isn't, I don't...
I haven't watched video, I'm commenting on mods as they are.
I'm not entirely anti-mod, but I have the philosophy like this:
The game MUST be good by itself without any mods. If it isn't, I don't care how it is with mods.
Some examples of applying this.philosophy:
Fallout 2 is great game, but it's better with widescreen mod
Breath of the Wild is great game, but I see appeal of some people using non-breakable weapons mod
Skyrim is shallow and tacky game and no mods can change my view on that
Mods are enhancing games, making them sometimes better, sometimes more specific for each player, better for roleplaying etc. But mods don't change for me how the game came out all on its own. I don't like bad games and even if you polish them with mods, I still see them as bad games.
To be honest, Skyrim is everywhere and honestly it feels half-baked. Maybe three-quarters baked. It's a game where, in order to make it minimally viable, I have to: Refuse to engage the main...
To be honest, Skyrim is everywhere and honestly it feels half-baked. Maybe three-quarters baked. It's a game where, in order to make it minimally viable, I have to:
Refuse to engage the main storyline and forever leave the Jarl of Whiterun waiting for me to come tell him about the dragon from the intro scene.
Install mods to give all characters the Khajit nightvision, make it stay on when toggled and not a timed spell, and take away the screen blur effect that it normally has because the color balance on the game in dark areas is basically crippling.
Always play as a ranged stealth character, because melee combat is so impossibly broken that I have yet to uncover mods that make it more realistic
And that's just to be able to dink around in the game. The only other character type I can play is Nord/Orc/Redguards that sprint into battle and tank a ton of damage and bash people to death with war hammers or long swords. Nothing else can handle melee combat. I recall trying to make casters in the past, but basically if you don't burn/ice someone down before they reach you, in the early game you're basically glass and you'll go down in just one or two hits. Many is the time a low-level bandit one-shotted my mage.
But none of this, absolutely none of this has stopped me from pouring about 350 combined hours PC/Xbox into this game. It's an affliction, I don't know why I am like I am.
See? This is what I mean. I played Skyrim on PS3, which was really bad port of the game. It was almost as bad as Cyberpunk on PS4 or Xbox One, but weirdly - nobody cared as much as they did about...
See? This is what I mean. I played Skyrim on PS3, which was really bad port of the game. It was almost as bad as Cyberpunk on PS4 or Xbox One, but weirdly - nobody cared as much as they did about Cyberpunk. Playing on PS3, I had to endure the game without mods, this is why I don't make compromises when talking about it.
I actually finished the game two times on PS3 and played once more as mage. First playthrough was stealth sniper and I got all the trophies (achievements) and finished all quests there are in the game with this one character. After finishing it, a question was raised in my mind: What now? And it got literal - I played the game, I did everything that could be done. What to do now? How to enjoy it more? There is nothing for me to do anymore.
But I tried. I started pure mage build. Damage dealt would be only from spells or using Thu'um (or whatever). I also bumped up difficulty one notch, which means, if I remember correctly, that enemies deal 3x damage and you deal 1/3 damage to them. Basically - if I saw bear before it saw me, I had a chance to kill it. If it saw me first, it was load game. I managed to get somewhere, actually, but I left this character to dust.
Then I said to myself I will try once again on normal difficulty and I will use only warhammer through the whole game as my only way of dealing damage (apart from Fus-ro-dah-ing enemies off the cliff). Yes, in the game where your main enemies are flying dragons, I chose warhammer. And I finished the game. That was it - the game is flawed and this was the last thing I needed to see to be done with it.
Another thing that is straight up bad is the Whiterun battle. No matter which side you pick, you end up fighting over Whiterun. This is not how you do games. You simply choose one way and make it so no matter which side player chose. That way player would have to play again to see the outcome from both sides. Having played the game twice, I saw there is basically no difference in what side you pick. Hell, there is no difference in anything! I don't want to play such game.
And mods? I couldn't install any. And this is why I hate the game even though I loved it at the beginning. I even went on the midnight start of sale in chainmail and with sword in my hand and sack of coins to pay with in the other one. While this was fun, the game ultimately isn't. I understand why people mod it to hell. I even understand they enjoy it after modding it. But that doesn't change the fact the underlying game is shit.
The actual thesis of the video is "modding is great and lets you fix games + make them better", which is true. The title thesis (at time of comment, "How Mods Changed Video Games Forever") is totally unsupported.
One of Jakey's weaker videos, but if you haven't modded before (either installing or making mods) it's worth a watch.
I couldn't bring myself to watch something like this for 17 minutes. I just don't see the appeal of this style of editing and direction at all. A constant stream of them going through a whole cartoon sound effect library and non sequiturs over 3-second clips. And that audible page flipping transition... It's like it's made to entice toddlers, which seems weird given a toddler would have no interest in the subject.
Not to be too much of a debbie downer I will add something interesting about the history of mods. In the European cracking scene of the home computer era it was common to add "trainers" to games. A lot of prestige was attached to being the first to release a cracked version of a game, which was nailed down to an art form by a few groups that had suppliers in the industry, so competition in that area was fierce. I think trainers were essentially one way to differentiate your crack from those that were quicker but didn't have trainers.
Trainers were basically hacks of the games, adding optional changes that you could pick in a menu before the actual game launched. Some changes are obvious cheats, like unlimited lives, invincibility or whatever. More interestingly, some trainers added fixes that basically rebalanced the games or significantly changed it in some way that wasn't just an obvious cheat. Clearly made by people who knew what about the mechanics annoyed them.
Several companies sold hardware intended to make it easier to mod games. There was a tool called Action Replay which eventually existed in some form or another for several computer and video game systems. The Commodore 64 version allowed you to freeze the game, inspect and modify the memory (including the code) and then resume the game with those changes. Marketed as a cheating device, this turned out to be a very useful tool for crackers as well as modders. The Commodore 64 version even included assemblers and disassemblers.
The console versions are interesting to me, because by definition you can't modify the content of a ROM cartridge. On the Sega Megadrive, the Action Replay instead sits between the cartridge and the cartridge slot and intercepts the memory accesses on the bus. That way it can present a different value to the CPU than the cartridge ROM would in some places and just forward the data from the cartridge in others. You could create a rather short list of such interception points in order to cheat. There were also rudimentary mods made this way. I recall there was one for Sonic 2 that simply swapped a palette entry, turning Sonic green and black.
There are course earlier examples of modding. Before the era of commercial computer games especially, when games weren't so strongly considered as proprietary, and hacking on a game you had access to was just par for the course for the people that did.
It's #16 trending on gaming... So make of that what you will.
That's a little reductive. Jakey has been in the business for a while and was rather influential on youtube game reviews as a whole. He's been a fixture and the ranking isn't simply because of "toddlers".
I'd say this video and the Rockstar table tennis one, are him trying a style where he's overly excited to the point of near insanity because he found something he finds incredible and it's consuming him. It works better if you're aware of the baseline.
It's not even that I disagree this style is a bit much, but calling it for toddlers does sell short what NakeyJakey has made in the past and how this video relates to that.
Personally I don't feel obliged to play the game the developer's way, especially for the 'the one true way to play' games.
There are a lot of games where they have an interesting idea but choose to add some obnoxious anti feature such as grinding or save restrictions. Removing that is one type of modding. For me the difference between spending several hours grinding and just adding the whatever is not a feeling of acomplishment but several hours of doing menial labour.
Then we have content or game mechanics mods that can change the way the game feels but do not specifically remove or bypass some the game design.
And finally the mods that simply use the base game as a foundation to do their own thing. Mods for Legend of Grimrock 2 are a good example, with several being larger and more complex than the base game.
All are wonderfull.
It all comes down to the type of game and the context of the times. If you want to build tension, a limited save system in a series like Resident Evil makes sense. You don't to ruin the horror by save scumming (also, save systems may be elements of limitation. Easier to establish a few safe points to save than any arbitrary position).
Likewise, grinding/life systems were made in times where games realistically only had maybe 5 hours of content. Dollars per hour is still an important metric to many gamers today, so developers needed ways to extend that playtime. The arcade style of forcing a high skill floor to see the end of the game is one such result. MMO grinds to give activities for guilds to bond over is another.
I'm all for doing your own thing if you so help it. But a key rule in UI/UX is that people stick to the defaults. Game designers try to ultimately make good enough defaults to satisfy the most people (including people so enamored they feel a need to take the time to modify the game).
Someday I might rescue Shawn from the Institute. But right now I've got a few dozen settlements to manage and Raiders to wipe out again. Thought you could retake Corvega Assembly Plant? You thought wrong...
I like to think I'd still be playing Warcraft 3 if blizzard hadn't completely fucked everything up with that dumpster fire they called "reforged".
They even released Forsaken Kingdom without fixing Reforged. You still can't play the original campaigns without a plethora of issues.
My first swing at modding a game was the old Macintosh System 7/8/9 game Escape Velocity from Ambrosia Software.
I got tired of getting wiped out every time a pirate showed up in the system, so I made a weapon called The Big One, which had a detection range of the maximum system size, a payload powerful enough to wipe out the most powerful ships in one shot, and a range that would extend to pretty much the entire system. I also made it have an outfit size of 1, a weight of 1, and a price of 100 credits, then made it available at every single outfitter (that took the longest time as I had to work through a list of the outfitters in the game and laboriously input each one by hand). By the end I could take my little starting shuttle and begin taking over the entire known galaxy just for shits and grins.
I know that making an all-powerful weapon is supposed to make a game less fun, but I think when you build it yourself from concept to final product, it becomes a more interesting endeavor and even if it breaks the game you still feel a sense of pride and accomplishment (Jakey actually addresses this point in the video.)
In addition to learning how Escape Velocity worked under the hood, I also learned a ton about the 2-fork system of the MacOS System 9 stuff, where you had your data fork and your resource fork. This led to me learning AppleScript and automating my system, something I still use to this day on my Mac. It just makes using my systems that much more interesting to me.
If nothing else, I encourage modding so you understand more about what goes into the games you like so that you can understand why programmers made the choices that they did. To quote a tweet I once saw:
I think this is my first time encountering EV in the wild after all these years. Probably the first game I really loved. My dad tried to ResEdit the pilot file so I could afford the Kestrel, but in the end I think it was the ship prices you had to modify this way. Pretty sure he cracked the game so I didn’t have to deal with Captain Hector. If there’s one thing he taught me it was how to crack software.
Only made maps, never released a mod myself but I first learnt about them in Total Annihilation. The devotion of the community amazed me then as it does now.
Also that tweet was surely referencing the classic XKCD, Tasks: https://xkcd.com/1425/
Things have certainly changed since identifying a bird required a research team (2012), let alone Mac OS 9!
Ah, many a gameplay session of mine ended at the hands of Captain Hector. In later games he didn't do anything but fly into the system and nag you to buy, but I recall in early games he'd annihilate you.
I never did end up paying for it, and honestly I might've cracked it myself, I can't recall. When I get the itch/urge to play EV again, I turn to Endless Sky: Steam / Github -- I have 265 hours logged on Steam, but I've probably got closer to 500 hours in the game across Linux / Mac / Windows. It's a very faithful recreation of the EV series as a whole, with a lot of Quality of Life improvements that game in later iterations. I still haven't managed to explore the entire galaxy.
As a fellow xkcd quoter, I usually find myself quoting 927 or 1053
Edit: Also I just noticed your name is Maelstrom. Did you know that game is available on Linux?
I haven't watched video, I'm commenting on mods as they are.
I'm not entirely anti-mod, but I have the philosophy like this:
The game MUST be good by itself without any mods. If it isn't, I don't care how it is with mods.
Some examples of applying this.philosophy:
Mods are enhancing games, making them sometimes better, sometimes more specific for each player, better for roleplaying etc. But mods don't change for me how the game came out all on its own. I don't like bad games and even if you polish them with mods, I still see them as bad games.
To be honest, Skyrim is everywhere and honestly it feels half-baked. Maybe three-quarters baked. It's a game where, in order to make it minimally viable, I have to:
And that's just to be able to dink around in the game. The only other character type I can play is Nord/Orc/Redguards that sprint into battle and tank a ton of damage and bash people to death with war hammers or long swords. Nothing else can handle melee combat. I recall trying to make casters in the past, but basically if you don't burn/ice someone down before they reach you, in the early game you're basically glass and you'll go down in just one or two hits. Many is the time a low-level bandit one-shotted my mage.
But none of this, absolutely none of this has stopped me from pouring about 350 combined hours PC/Xbox into this game. It's an affliction, I don't know why I am like I am.
See? This is what I mean. I played Skyrim on PS3, which was really bad port of the game. It was almost as bad as Cyberpunk on PS4 or Xbox One, but weirdly - nobody cared as much as they did about Cyberpunk. Playing on PS3, I had to endure the game without mods, this is why I don't make compromises when talking about it.
I actually finished the game two times on PS3 and played once more as mage. First playthrough was stealth sniper and I got all the trophies (achievements) and finished all quests there are in the game with this one character. After finishing it, a question was raised in my mind: What now? And it got literal - I played the game, I did everything that could be done. What to do now? How to enjoy it more? There is nothing for me to do anymore.
But I tried. I started pure mage build. Damage dealt would be only from spells or using Thu'um (or whatever). I also bumped up difficulty one notch, which means, if I remember correctly, that enemies deal 3x damage and you deal 1/3 damage to them. Basically - if I saw bear before it saw me, I had a chance to kill it. If it saw me first, it was load game. I managed to get somewhere, actually, but I left this character to dust.
Then I said to myself I will try once again on normal difficulty and I will use only warhammer through the whole game as my only way of dealing damage (apart from Fus-ro-dah-ing enemies off the cliff). Yes, in the game where your main enemies are flying dragons, I chose warhammer. And I finished the game. That was it - the game is flawed and this was the last thing I needed to see to be done with it.
Another thing that is straight up bad is the Whiterun battle. No matter which side you pick, you end up fighting over Whiterun. This is not how you do games. You simply choose one way and make it so no matter which side player chose. That way player would have to play again to see the outcome from both sides. Having played the game twice, I saw there is basically no difference in what side you pick. Hell, there is no difference in anything! I don't want to play such game.
And mods? I couldn't install any. And this is why I hate the game even though I loved it at the beginning. I even went on the midnight start of sale in chainmail and with sword in my hand and sack of coins to pay with in the other one. While this was fun, the game ultimately isn't. I understand why people mod it to hell. I even understand they enjoy it after modding it. But that doesn't change the fact the underlying game is shit.
My first thought was forum/reddit/etc Moderators. Lol