So I decided to install and play on a private server for Need for Speed World, a f2p game that I played for a time way back in the day and enjoyed my time with it back then. Apparently the server I had pick to visit my nostalgia was the wrong one, as the server runners had decided that they needed to make massive sweeping changes to the gameplay, especially for the cop chase parts of the game (admittedly they were pretty easy in vanilla).
So imagine my face when I go to do a pursuit/team escape with my racing car to break up the monotomy only to find out that the cops were made to be infinitely more bullshit, enough that it made me want to go on their discord and make a complaint that they ruined it. Then I found that someone else was making the same complaint, and the ‘devs’ of this server were just going “Lol that’s the point, you’re supposed to be a cheesedick, using the best car modded this exact way for the event 24/7, because we balanced it around you cheesedicking because the vanilla game was so easy. You’re just mad cause bad.” Okay, they weren’t saying that exactly, but you get the point.
Jesus christ man, I don’t get why when modders decide to go fix legit problems with a game they almost always end up thinking the lack of difficulty is an issue then proceed to overtune it to an absurd degree.
Any time you see a modder use the word “balance” you know something fucked up is going to happen
The thing is for the game in question, rebalancing large swaths of the game, namely all the cars, needed to happen for any private server to take off or else it would just be reenacting every single problem NFS:World had before the game shut down just without the microtransactions.
Most modders are making games for themselves and their friends, they barely care about anyone else that uses their mods. Naturally this makes them bad game designers, they’re designing a bespoke game for a very small group of hyperfocused nerds.
We just have this antisocial hustle culture where everyone feels like they need to publish their homemade content for exposure.
I don’t think it’s antisocial to publish something so members of a niche audience who would like it can play it.
The antisocial part was them reacting like that to OP’s complaint.
Can’t even discuss things, everything has to be a fight to put the other person down.
That doesn’t really look like your original statement, but regardless I think it’s very difficult to evaluate something like that when OP themselves adds:
Okay, they weren’t saying that exactly, but you get the point.
Like, obviously “git gud” people exist and are antisocial shitbags, but so do people who get very offended at difficulty mods, as the post demonstrates regardless, and so when I see that admission I don’t definitely conclude that the devs did nothing wrong, but it really comes off like they said “you need to optimize to beat the mod” and OP felt attacked.
it’s not bad game design to make something that isn’t seeking the widest possible audience. that’s some capitalist brainworms
The capitalist brainworms are what force them to publish their niche hobby project for exposure and recognition, and then get defensive and mean when other people don’t like it or have criticisms. They expect the widest possible audience, but then don’t expect to face the widest possible critique.
Modders tend to have min/maxed the game already and are making an experience they want to enjoy/be challenged by, not a general audience. If you don’t like that you’re free to mod the game yourself instead of shitting on somebody else’s work.
What’s fun for some people doesn’t necessarily have to be fun for everyone. I’m sure the modders/devs enjoy the world they’ve created, or at least enjoy the process of creating it. Probably they don’t care that their design doesn’t work for anyone outside their team.
Need for speed games are now having a modding phase because EA is likely not going to publish any new one ever.
cons is that the games get nonsense like this and other redux mods.
pros is that we get stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRTsFawmkFo
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Every modders a bad game designer except for me
I always notice this with open world games. They always want to add cities and locations that are extremely large, closer to what they are in the lore. But they never justify that vastness with anything interesting. They don’t have hundreds of quests packed in, tons of NPCs making the area feel lived in, etc. Its just huge and empty and boring to traverse.
this is “modding megalomania” to use the scientific term; one person (or member of team) has a specific skillset and goes buckwild heaping on a specific aspect or system of the game, leaving other parts of the user experience behind.
a single, interesting npc that’s well implemented is a more complete package from a gameplay perspective, but if your modder only knows how to do the environment design that’s usually what they stick with. there’s not a huge incentive for cultivating holistic knowledge of development in a hobby environment
It just takes too much creativity, effort etc to add all that stuff for one person or even a small team, so the project ends up being left incomplete. Also mercurial fever dream project is going to fall short of something with vision and accountability of some kind.
Long War gets so much credit but it is literally just making the game worse in every way. What if everything took longer, what if you didn’t get anything out of combat, what if each mission had a billion enemies.
If you liked their style of game design you would’ve supported their original game, but you didn’t, no one did, because no one likes a game that takes 30 hours to introduce the premise and lets you lose in 5 seconds.Long War 2 is such a slog, I don’t understand why so much of the XCOM fanbase loves it so much. Absolute misery to play.
Like, they even added medium to the process of picking missions.
The vast majority of people will finish 1 (or 0) XCOM campaigns, Long War is for the sickos who finish 5+ and are still looking for more. These are also the people who’ll notice balance errors in the base game and want them fixed/changed. For example, idk if it’s still the case but around launch you could trivialize XCOM2 with a full team of grenade launchers. Most people would never realize this because the game guides you into running balanced teams, but once you picked up on it you couldn’t forget it.
FWIW I also think LW is a massive slog and have 0 desire to play it lol.
i enjoyed long war and lw2 once each
eh I think it’s just because modding has a lower barrier to entry than making an original game that you have a higher proportion of amateurs doing it and it also has a much lower barrier to entry for publishing versus a full game so they’re a lot more mods released that are incomplete, ill-conceived, etc. Most commonly what I’ve noticed is that the most popular mods tend to just stack tons of stuff on top of the base game, I think those are the most popular because the most eye-catching thing you can do is add a bunch of new things for players who are familiar with the original.
There are some mods that are genuinely great. My go to example of this is the mod Movie Battles 2 for Star Wars Jedi Knight 3: Jedi academy. that mod is a genuinely brilliant class-based Counter-Strike style game, and a lot of it’s unique mechanics are now super common in hero shooters.
I love mods :3
Not the ones on Hexbear though
Yeah, I hate mods too.
Everything wrong with the modern world seems to circle back to mods somehow. And everyone’s pretending it doesn’t.
Yeah the worst is when someone does a decomp/reimplementation of an old game, but decides to randomly change original functionality for no reason and doesn’t add a toggle or anything. Looking at you, Vic 2 rewrite ‘Project Alice’
a very common amateur mistake i’ve seen in many mods is randomized misfortune, rolling a dice for a negative result every so often will result in a more difficult experience and can create emergent gameplay, but a designer needs to have one (1) conversation outside the dev team to understand why this is bad design.
also optimization, to a certain extent modders don’t “play” the game for extended periods (and/or have unaccountably powerful computers, but this doesn’t even help some games) and have no idea how much they’ve borked the game, like yeah it might just be a couple fps drop but that shit adds up over a long session. you might be fine slogging along in this game till your bones are brittle (i mean you mod the thing) but players do it fact need to get through the heap of content at a reasonable rate
a f2p game
I mean…
