I’m a bit conflicted when it comes to video game modding. On one hand, I feel that modding video games completely ruins the developer’s vision of what the game should be, from the jank that made it charming in the first place to the base aesthetics.
On the other hand, seeing Pokemon in my Stardew Valley farm and Patrick Star as a Tank in Left 4 Dead 2 will never get old. Other than the usual chuckle at wacky mods, implementing modding to your video game opens up tons of avenues to explore, and so I’m here hoping for a direct line to the developers shouting: Please support your modding community!
Quality of Life
Bethesda games are known for making some of the jankiest, bug-riddled masterpieces of our time. Games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls have entire highlight reels for game-breaking bugs, and while they can be charming at times, there’s still an emphasis on game-breaking. Bugs like crashes, FPS stutters, and even missing NPCs are enough to instantly turn fans away. I should know because I almost walked away from Fallout 3, a title that won Game of the Year, after my save became corrupted due to an error.
Thankfully, I didn’t go anywhere in the end, because the modding community has tons of patches that fix most of the bugs that plague fans like myself, and the dev team didn’t have to lift a single finger.
But bug fixes aren’t the only changes the modding community is making; they also have the knack for optimizing some very outdated mechanics in video games. Taking a look at The Binding of Isaac, there used to be a time when you had to play the game with the entire wiki up on your phone or on your monitor because the game didn’t flat-out tell you what each pickup does.
Luckily, we had the help of mods that displayed item descriptions on-screen as you passed them, a mechanic that took Binding of Isaac developers literal years to implement.
Fostering Creative Community
Not only does modding help games play better, it also helps games look better. Stardew Valley alone has such a huge community of creatives who produce alternative character portraits and assets that make the game look like something entirely different.
I firmly believe that if developers leaned a bit closer to just how much of their game can be modified aesthetically, it’d encourage even more creators to support and prolong the game. But I’m also proud to say that even without full dev support, communities can come together to collaborate on revamping a game if they like it enough.
Community creation aside, allowing modding in your game could also bring about some easy inspiration, both for new games and for hiring talent. A lot of the more beloved features brought on by modding, such as the Binding of Isaac item details mod and the Stardew Valley map icons mod, have inspired future developers to add them to their games.
Heck, DOTA and Counter-Strike were franchises that started from small modding communities that Valve picked up and gave free rein to. Having a modding community passionate and creative enough to work with your game’s engine can revolutionize the way you look at games, and could even lead to dev teams making the easier decision of who to recruit for their next project. At least, I hope they do because it just sounds like the most common-sense decision ever.
Extending Game Lifespan
I’m really showing my age here, but some of my favorite video games are the janky Bethesda titles, such as Fallout New Vegas, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Fallout 4. All of which are games that came out years ago, but to this day, they still receive community-made updates and mods that make me want to jump back in now and then. It also helps that the dev team at Bethesda made modding the game pretty expansive, opening up possibilities for entire storylines and mechanics to be added into the game by the community.
Taking a look at a bigger example, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite recently had a resurgence of new players, all because a fan figured out a way to add custom characters, movesets, and assets to the game. Once these modding tools were released into the wild, the community instantly jumped at the opportunity to play with their new toys. Imagine if we had this type of modding power in games like Disco Elysium or Hades, elevating hours played from hundreds to thousands.
With all that said, I do have some sympathy for the developers. These are their babies we’re talking about, and opening up your game to fans compromises its system. It's like Leonardo da Vinci letting someone else paint on the Mona Lisa. But a few strokes of paint probably won’t hurt.
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