It could be said that there are two parts to experiencing a game. The first part deals with buying it, playing it through, and learning it as a piece of interactive art. The second deals with customizing it to your needs and making it suited for you individually.
Welcome to the world of game modification, which has boomed in the past few years with more modders, more mods available, and more recognition from developers than ever before.
Modification can be anything from rebalancing things in-game- say, the rate at which a weapon fires or drops from an enemy, or the addition of custom content like new items, areas, or enemies. What it comes down to is the creative participation of people who love a game and are willing to pour energy into really making it their own – for free. Developers have increasingly encouraged this sort of participation and draw inspiriation from it in their games. Areas like STEAM’s workshop, which is an open space for players to upload content they’ve made for the game or have created using in-game tools, have made it clear that modders are a welcome breed. Games do not always come out perfect and there is a gap to bridge between the testers, the developers, and the players. Glitches get missed in beta and small details that matter more to players than previously understood by developers get looked over, so players have taken to fixing these things themselves. It takes time, skill, and passion to go into a game and start tweaking, but the rewards come in the form of recognition, a programming portfolio, and occasionally, a little cash.
The changes aren’t always small. Skyrim is one example of a game that has mods that nearly completely overhaul it. ‘Amazing Follower Tweaks’ changes your followers to be smarter and more efficient at serving you, as well as a mod that retextures almost everything in the game to be HD and hyper-realistic. ‘Tamriel Reloaded’ overhauls the design of nearly every part of Skyrim, with unique textures placed in cities such as Whiterun and Solitude, lending a new and unique look to each corner of the world that adds to replayability. Another one, “Relighting Skyrim”, reprograms the games light sources to be more realistic. What you get is light that shines from logical areas, such as from fireplaces, stars, and lamps, which lends a beautiful warmth to a lot of the areas. ‘SkyUI’ makes the game more intuitive to play for PC users by rebuilding the HUD interface. These mods nearly change the whole face of the game and can bring a players’ experience from merely enjoyable to jaw-dropping.
The best part? This is perfectly legal, oftentimes encouraged by the developers, expanding all the time, and, for the most part – free.
STEAM’s Skyrim mod gallery.
Joshua Marshall is a Skyrim modder from Michigan who has been programming since age twelve. Now 23, he’s pursuing a degree in computer science at Wayne State University. Although computer science is his scholarly aim, he says he’d really like to go into boxing, which has been a passion in his family.
“I decided to get my degree first to establish a safety net,” Marshall says. He aims to eventually go into game development – maybe after a boxing career – but for now, he’s working on making Skyrim a bigger, better, and more challenging place. “I’m currently in the middle of three new projects,” states Marshall. “I started learning about making mods thinking I would just improve or replace the game mechanics I disliked the most. Now, three years later, I’m eager to ADD to the game, not just replace or rebalance what’s already there.”
Marshall picked up Skyrim soon after its release and began to mod it after he had finished it. Finishing the game first is a step for clarity – although not required, it absolutely helps to have more of a sense of how things fit together so that any modifications can be integrated seamlessly. Not all modders bother with finishing a game before they start finding things to change- with an expansive game like Skyrim, it may be hard to find the time to finish once you’ve noticed things that need changing.
His first mod was ‘Better Wards’, which reduces their cost, their charge time, increases their strength, and adds a chance-based stagger effect to attackers while the ward is up. “In vanilla it took nearly 2 seconds for a ward to become effective. Who has time for that? The only way to use one was to charge it from behind a wall, and if I have a wall to hide behind, why do I need to waste my magicka on a defensive spell? That alone caused nobody to use them. I just wanted to make them a viable choice, and that’s where my modding journey began.” His second project was Attack Speed Mod (ASM), which he plans to update soon. Attack Speed Mod, (soon to be called Attack Speed Fix), fixes the way Skyrim handles attack speed buffs. It also enables attack speed debuffs, which didn’t exist in vanilla. Marshall is currently working on mod that gives balanced racial abilities to all the races, as well as another mod that makes mixing different types of armor viable. His describes his third project as one of compatibility. “I would like to make a user-configurable SkyProc Patcher that can make uniform changes to many objects within the game, but without depending on an overhaul,” explains Marshall.
“If you’ve talked to other mod users you may hear the joke that “I’ve spent more time changing my game than actually playing it,” says Marshall. “This joke is true for me, and true for a many other mod users as I’ve heard. Some people look at that as a bad thing, like an unhealthy obsession with modding, but I think otherwise. The way I look at it is that changing my game is just as fun. Skyrim is this huge world and I’m trying to add things, and change things, and move things.”
He says that one of the many things that drew him to modding was the need to find more of a challenge in the games he loved. “That’s why I like the idea of user-generated content and highly modular customization. Typically games allow you to change some things through the settings like difficulty and music, but the options are limited. Giving the player more choices to customize their game experience with is a lot of work, and is very expensive and time-consuming. But building something that makes it easy for users to add, remove, or modify content is the gift that keeps on giving. They can take the original game experience as it is, or they can make it a little more cozy for themselves if they’re willing to put some time into it.”
The idea of opening a game up to its users is, in theory, risky for the company. After all, there is no predicting what insane things people are going to make or how different the game is going to become from what you made – but as Marshall stated, it enables the game to simply sprout and go fractal. What it also does it hand off a lot of power to the fans. It’s not like Bethesda can shut down certain mods or ban users – there’s no userbase to ban. Those who know how to mod have full reign over their own game and whatever changes they want to add, as well as where they upload them and whether or not they charge. In a landscape of games that require online connections and user responsibility for their in-game actions, this is a lawless and exciting breath of fresh air.
One question that has risen because of the popularity of modification is what degree developers should keep an eye on popular mods, learn from them, and encorporate something similar. The Sims franchise has seen a suspicious lack of in-game content with its newest release compared to older games and fans are speculating that the developers are learning on modders to make game content for them. This would mean that the developers get fans working for them unknowingly for free, because they’ve noticed the trends in modding previous games and they know it’s going to happen either way, so they’ve purposely left content out. EA has made no comment on the lack of items – some as basic as certain doors and dishwashers – except for saying that the omissions were necessary.
Naturally, if this is what’s happening, this is a very disheartening way to incorporate modification and is arguably not the way to go. On the other hand, Steam has noticed modders and welcomes them to add content to their games, going as far as to incorporate a workshop for them in their platform.
“If game companies include things that fans want it will sell better, they will play the game longer, and they will have a better experience,” advises Marshall. “I think it’s not done as often today because it can be difficult to get a feel for what fans really want. Any company can read fan-suggestions, but you won’t know if you’re changing the game in a way that will appeal to the majority of your fans unless you’ve done some serious research. The people that want the main character to wear a rubber duck suit might only represent 3% of fans, but such a change might upset the other 97%.”
Look for Part II in the following weeks, which will detail even more about what it’s like to polish your favorite games.
