Have you looked up anything to do with GTA 5 recently? If you have, you likely found images of Harry Potter riding a broomstick through downtown LA, firing at cops in pink tanks and a whale with wings. Yep, GTA 5 has really changed since that initial release in 2013.
But you should know that those images have nothing to do with Rockstar. They didn’t decide to patch up bugs in GTA 5 and realise it needed a completely new direction. This is actually the result of modders – players and fans that have completely altered the game themselves.
The Case Against Modding
Now, for some people, the process of modding isn’t something to be encouraged, especially if games don’t need it. In their eyes, games can be entirely successful without the need to add in new features that were never supposed to be there in the first place.
Similarly, the process of modding is a plague that might destabilise the art of console gaming – if developers know that fans are going to rewrite the rules, they’re not going to put as much effort into perfecting the game in the first place.
In a way, it’s hard not to be drawn into this argument. One of the most successful sectors of the gaming industry is iGaming, which sees millions of gamers play slots and casino games every month.
These games are developed and held to the rules and standards that have been developed over the course of centuries – and they’re tremendously successful. There is, for instance, a careful balance to be achieved between skill and chance in a game like roulette; if a player chooses to spin the Vegas roulette wheel then that player sacrifices a great deal of control to the rules of physics governing momentum and velocity; black or red, odd or even, the ball can really land anywhere. Experience hones the roulette player’s edge, but cannot lend more control over chance. Similarly, experience can make the poker player great, but it cannot ever influence the cards that are dealt onto the table. That’s just the way it is, and it’s part of the reason these games are so compelling. Why then, do things have to be different in the console gaming world?
The Case For Modding
On the other side of the coin, however, there’s a lot of creativity that goes into modding. If players play their games to escape for a while and experience a different world, why not give them the opportunity to transform that world into whatever they like? As well as this, the process of modding could potentially even aid the most ambitious of games in the future.
Take Starfield, for instance. Since the game’s release in early September, there has been a rather lukewarm reaction to what exactly it offers. It’s full of bugs, for a start, but the automatically generated worlds are also said to lack feeling and atmosphere, and with little to no NPCs to get to know. This is due to the game’s incredible scope. While playing Starfield, you have the ability to explore more than 1,000 planets, which probably would have taken developers around 100 hundred years to design and fill.
With this in mind, many gamers believe that Bethesda Studios didn’t overextend their capabilities with Starfield, but actively created the game with the process of modding in mind. Over the next few years, Starfield is going to become a modder’s ultimate playground, with so much to create, manipulate, and alter, it’s almost too good to be true.
So, yes, the case against modding is a convincing one. Games like GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption 2 don’t exactly need mods or modded accounts, and having mods carve up their creativity by carving up an already great game can be seen as a bit tasteless. But that doesn’t mean modding should be stopped altogether. If modding paves the way for studios to become more ambitious – and effectively create sandboxes for gamers to play in – then there is a pretty unique place for it going into the future. Either that or Starfield genuinely was a failure and not even modding can save it. It’s hard to tell at this point!