More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Counter Strike, Warcraft 3 DotA, ARMA 3 PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Momentum Mod, … All of these were mods that became so big they became their own games.
If you’re strictly talking about platforms though, you need support from the original developers,or the source must be easily editable (like the minecraft java edition). At that point it becomes pretty common for huge mods to be made which eventually end up managing themselves. The problem is that you need a lot of money to actually make new feeling games. And developers can’t easily ask for money for mods, so development time is quite limited.
I am talking even lower. Like a made for modding framework that is totally open source. And yeah, that means games will end up with a somewhat common look and feel. But a lot of games end up that way anyway after mods. I am not sure that players need tons of unique games. I think they want games that are comfortable and replayable. In many cases they just want to hang out with friends, and the game itself is almost a pretext. Fortnight is actually a decent example of that. It leaned into that with lots of events that weren’t really much more than window dressing. But if it is completely opensource, you can end up with a ton of flavors to try and a lower learning curve for each.
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Well, if you lower the barrier to entry. More people are likely to use the stock offerings. But that isn’t really a plus. Ideally the games would be visually different. But if you have a simple mechanic like inventory, it could and should generally be similar to others, unless that is what is supposed to be different about your game. W, a, s, d at least is pretty standard now. But it wasn’t always. I have noticed games solving the same problems as many other games, but doing it much worse. And clearly not by intention to be different, just because that wasn’t thier focus. So for those cases, it would improve those games.
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What I was saying is that if they aren’t intentionally breaking the standard, then there is no reason not to use the standard. But what I see is games that are focused on where they are trying to break the standard and be different (which they should) and then leaving basic functionality half assed. It’s that half assed stuff that reduces the quality of the game, and also even though it was half assed, it still took dev time, and may even be a thorn in their side that they just never get to. Having off the shelf plugins for that kind of thing means they can focus on what they are innovating, and still produce a game that has decent polish in the other areas like inventory and such.
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I don’t work in games, but I do work in software. I do understand that there are already libraries and plugins. I am just talking about increasing the level of abstraction. An example of something I see in crafting games may help. So you go to craft something, and you are missing a component, but you are able to craft that too. In some games you can click on the missing component to go to the interface were you would craft it. But in most you have to go back to the crafting search and type in the name in a search bar then click on it in a list to do the same. This is a simple QOL thing. Further, after you crafted the component, a back arrow to take you back to what you were trying to craft originally would be nice. But you won’t see that in 90% of crafting games. But you will find mods for this kind of thing. My assertion is that devs don’t implement these sorts of things because they would rather spend thier time on the things that make their game different. So if this sort of thing was a plugin or what not, they wouldn’t need to spend time on it, and the overall quality would go up. Plus people who want to make games today, but are overwhelmed by how much they would have to do that isn’t related to the idea they have, my feel less overwhelmed, and we would get more games with more innovative ideas.
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