Modding is one of the better ways to get into coding. I myself have fond memories restoring cut content to Fallout: New Vegas.
It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard, in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad either. But nothing since then.
Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying.
Recently, CD Project did make some moves in that direction, but nothing close to what Valve is offering.
And of course, I wonder how many programmers today owe their jobs to Minecraft modding - Java modding is amazingly well supported, even if not always directly by Microsoft/Mojang.
That’s an amazing project. It’s kinda sad that nowadays most AAA games are so locked down that the player will never get into modding.
For myself it started with Jedi Knight, and then eventually mods on the Source engine (CS:S / HL2). To me it’s a good way to get people excited about the possibilities of programming at a fairly young age.
Nobody locks the games down. Most games with highly active modding scenes were never supposed to be modded, they all had to be reverse engineered or the source leaked. No tools, no engine modifications, nothing. DOOM, GTA, Mario 64, STALKER, Minecraft, the list goes on and on. Games like TES, ArmA, Quake, anything Source/GoldSource based are exceptions. And even then all major Bethesda games are heavily reverse engineered, the Morrowind engine got rewritten basically from scratch and the other games have a ton of fixes and sideloaded code. There's even an entire vehicle simulator (!) strapped on top of Fallout: New Vegas, which is absolutely insane if you know anything about its engine.
It all comes down to two things, player interest and the range of expertise/amount of work and coordination required for your mod to fit the base game. For example STALKER SoC has a lot more story mods than, say, Skyrim, because SoC is pretty janky: it has few animations and voiceovers are reserved to key plot moments, so it doesn't take much to match the quality.
Modding has always worked like that. Mods have always been unpayed work for the benefit of the game community, which ultimately also works to the benefit of the game publisher.
Yes but it’s typically a subset of players making/using them and not the cornerstone of the entire product. They also dangle the promise of making money in front of people, but when you dig into the specifics it’s actually very hard to get paid. You have to cross a certain threshold to even eligible for a payout even if you have accrued a little cash.
The relationship of kids making stuff (the vast majority with little to no compensation) for a private, for-profit company is incredibly direct. That’s why it leaves a sour taste for many of us.
In the past, Valve has hired some of their most longest-tenured employees from modding, although not necessarily on GoldSrc - Counter-Strike and QuakeWorld Team Fortress come to mind. (But of course never Richochet.) The Narbacular Drop team came straight out of DigiPen with a noncommercial thesis project as well.
That's what the marketing materials say, and that's what they want you to think. In practice it's very difficult to break even on it, even if you have a "successful" game.
That is how I became serious about programming. I played around a bit but I never really wrote anything useful until I started playing Asheron's Call. I learned C++ to write bots and other plugins for Decal (an embedded mod framework).
I wondered if this would be about PokeMMO, which I've recently started playing. Basically, they made a commercial Pokemon game by gluing the first five ROMS together, and they get around intellectual property by making players supply their own ROMs (which they assume you've acquired legally) for copyrighted assets.
It's incredibly fun. I'm pricklypears2 if anyone wants to play together. And if the devs read this, please add Mimikyu somehow I beg you <3
Similar to Deus Ex with GMDX (no, the high res textures from one of the mods were atrociously bad with nonsense Hanzi/Kanji everywhere). It expanded the world with little touches here and there making the environment more believable and the game would still run under 64MB video cards at 800x600 with ease once you got 512MB or 768 to run the improved environments. Yes, the game would perfectly launch under 256MB... but, let's get real, 512MB of RAM are the bare minimum to run GMDX at the lowest playable settings (800x600).
The Nameless Mod was a great game yo play too, with tons of details to explore.
It's unfortunate that modding support is relatively rare among game developers. Blizzard used to do quite well in this regard, in their W3 era. And tools they packaged with SC2 weren't bad either. But nothing since then.
Obviously there is Valve, that goes without saying.
Recently, CD Project did make some moves in that direction, but nothing close to what Valve is offering.