Modders for the win!

PC gaming and modding have gone hand in hand since time immemorial. What started out as a way for up and coming mappers, coders and artists to tweak certain aspects of the game that may have been overlooked by the developer during the development process, has today grown into a full blown occupation.

The modding community today is as integral a part of the gaming community as the developers themselves. Gone are the days when they tweak little aspects of the game. Today’s modders add entire stand-alone experiences that help prolong the life of a game well beyond what the version offered.

That’s not to say that tweak mods are not essential either; one of the best examples of how tweak mods have helped a gaming community can be found in Sloth-Squadron’s and 3Kliksphillip’s work in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The vanilla version of Counter-Strike, funnily enough was a mod of Half-Life which was so successful that it got picked up by Valve and turned into the FPS phenomenon that it is today. Their relentless tweaks to maps, gun recoils and movement have helped Valve identify a ton of shortcomings with their game and change them in successive patches.

However the game that really pops into one’s mind when discussing mods is Skyrim. Bethesda has been known for their vocal support of the modding community and it is plainly apparent in their games.

Skyrim possibly has one of the most extensive mod libraries to date with the most extensive and exhaustive one definitely being the recently launched Enderal mod. This is essentially a whole game placed within the Skyrim universe, complete with its own story and voice acted characters in German and English. Much more recently there is the Fallout 4 mod, Valut 1080 by NVIDIA themselves features over an hour of brand new created content set in a dark and dingy new vault..

Essentially what is being said here is that modding, an activity that started out as a simple hobby for a select few to pursue in their free time has developed into a full-blown industry, to the point where talented modders are actually being picked up by developers as full time employees, as was the case with the Long War studios that made the Long War mod for XCOM. The mod was so well received that these guys actually ended up working on XCOM 2 itself by collaborating with the developers to create ‘official’ mods for the game.