Says him. What a fairly stupid statement for him to make. Modding is on a declining trend because none of the big guys give out mod tools anymore. Any of you modders out there agree with Bach? We'll see how declining it is when some of the sweet new indies come out and are equipped with mod tools.

Lol..I must admit that does sound like a rather dumb statement..

If Dice and those making COD don't release modding tools then how the hell do they think people can mod..lol

If they bother to visit a great many other dev sites that do release tools for their games they'll find out different...

LOL i agree Modding is declining..... because they are not giving us mod tools..... DICE fail

Battlefield 3 is quickly turning into Battlefail 3.

A while back, Mikael Kalms wrote about the difficulties surrounding mod tools for BC 2 on the EA UK forums. The thread is here: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-bad-company-2-pc/1350772-so-how-about-modtools.html.

The bottom line is that Frostbite 1.5 requires a bunch of interdependent systems just to get the editor to run correctly, and even when it does, it's still "flaky." Kalms says "this is approximately where the industry average is at for game studios' internal game engines."

I have a problem with that last statement. There are several commercially-viable engines out there (Source, Unreal 3, CryEngine 2, Id Tech 4, Dunia, and Gamebryo, just to name a few) that feature robust, consumer-grade editors. BC2 had above-average visuals, but many games built with the aforementioned engines were at least competitive with, and in some cases, superior to BC2 in the graphics department.

If mod tools are on the decline, it seems to me that it's because certain AAA developers are using unnecessarily complicated and inefficient tools to create their games. It's hard for me to accept the "advanced technology" excuse when those same developers are driving the very trend they're so "sad" about.

I disagree.

If mod tools are on the decline, it seems to me that it's because most "AAA" (sure turning into FFF) developers (or rather the publishers) see mod tools as lost revenue. They want you to buy their overpriced map-packs, things that we were provided for free by modders in the past.

I don't see how developers and modders see that MODs or other content created by the community will harm DLC. People will still buy DLC from the developer because developers can probably produce the content quicker in the time it takes for a modder. Developers work on the game day-in day-out where as your modder will probably work on content in their spare time. Plus the fact by the time they release tools they could have had content pack out anyway. People would still buy it.

As for overprice map-packs I tend to disagree with that statement. BO was sold for about £10 here in the UK. It had 4 MP maps and a zombie map. So that works out at about £2 per map. That isn't a bad deal at all. Now I haven't bought the map pack myself because I am just tired of the CoD series now but I by looking at what is on sale and from what I have heard about the maps then it has been a good deal. Even BC2 NAM expansion pack was a good price as well plus around Christmas time they were selling it for about £2 or something ridiculously low price. The spectat kit was also a great price at about £2 - £3.

If AAA houses decided to follow Valve's example with TF2 and start charging for community made content then I would be for that as well. If the modders are putting in the effort to make content then I see no reason as to why they cannot make a little bit of cash. Plus this gets their content out to a lot more casual gamers who probably wouldn't even think twice about installing something that is not officially from the developer.

That's because it won't Neil. DLC has nothing to do with it. It's just wasted resources from the developer to create them. I would rather they spend the time on the game or more maps.

Patrick Bach just stated the obvious that most of us have already come to know.

Only very few people buy DLC for games that have full fledged modding support, at last for games that lock out people who don't have it. Now, there is a way to do it right, see ArmA 2, where the content packs contain roughly the content of an individual CoD and which don't lock you out.



Only if the developers artificially hold back the mod tools. An SDK is rather easy to produce and push out. For games that had the SDK released on launch or very shortly after (something that was the norm a couple of years back) high quality community maps started popping up within 2-3 weeks.

You know why the CoD community received the map packs of CoD4 for free? Because there already were tons of community maps and nobody would have bought 5 pathetic maps for 12-15$. Releasing no SDK at all removes this problem. Now ask yourself why you guys didn't receive the Blops mod tools yet?



Uh, the best of the community maps are often times tenfold better in quality than official maps. Not because they're ALL better, but because there's HUNDREDS of maps made by the community, and some are simply brilliant.



You DO realise that in the past we recieved maps for FREE?
And in addition to that we had mod tools that allowed the community to pump out hundreds of maps!

Tell me about overpriced, most developers have the DLC ready at launch and even include the files on the disc.



That's because it was an EXPANSION PACK, not a DLC with 5 maps. I don't oppose real expansion packs ala BC2 NAM, CoD UO, etc.