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by MrPowerGamerBR 483 days ago
> One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods.

Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.

For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!

And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.

Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".

Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.

I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.

Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".

2 comments

Factorio has an extensive modding community - one of the community mods was adopted and became an official expansion.
The official toolkit for modding Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely extensive. You can make an entirely different game on top of the game if you wanted
Really? Officially they don't even support modifying or creating new levels: https://baldursgate3.game/news/community-update-27-official-.... You are mostly limited to visual changes, UI mods and balance / tuning changes.
That seems an easy fix until one gets nervous about working a month just to release a single -purchase game engine. That's a journey that you can take but you might at least consider a license.