and yet many of them do anyway.
Thatâs why most companies donât allow this. As a non-patched game might break the game balance or game integrity, especially if itâs a multiplayer one. Not all games have to be offline, single player or neglecting human interaction. To look their best to the investors, companies and game studios always ought to take control.
You havenât been playing most modern games? Itâs all over the place.
I have done my level best to stay out of this thread, but threads like https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/tired-of-diablo-3-fan-boys-and-d2casuals-trying-to-ruin-this/41348 make me wish ignoring the OP had a longer time frame option than âForeverâ. so toxic AF.
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Most companies do âallowâ it. By far most games are playable offline. Also if we only count new games.
In any case, the topic was about modding (to be exact; patches breaking mods). Very close to 100% of moddable games are offline
Not really. Not even most online games patch unless you allow it.
I think thatâs intentional though. Most of the time, developers have the statistics already; why community likes something and know how the mod operates. Alas, they chose to step on the sandcastles to smash it down. This occurs 90% of the time, it canât be a coincidence.
As you said, there are offline games out there which got their fame from the modding scene and community, thatâs a way to create human interaction in the game even if itâs not a multiplayer game and developers ruin it every time.
Which ones exactly? I can only think of Zenimax companies like Id and Bethesda, and perhaps Valve software because they started their carreer with modding. Anything out there simply does what I describe above. There are modding sites, and I donât think Iâve seen many names that has a strong modding community.
Which games allow offline play? Nearly all of them, find any list of games released in the last 5 years, and the vast majority will be playable offline.
That was the point; in an offline game (as in, the games that would be possible to mod in the first place) it will be impossible for the developers to do that, since you can just ignore their patches.
Each big company have their own client developed, you canât exactly ignore anything now sadly. If anything it accelerated after Steam got a wide success and not even Blizzard client were capable of doing such impact. Nowadays, updates and patches get queued; no such luck to avoid anything unless youâre pirating things.
All big companies induce control but so little of them not forcing it to cut ties in community. Even an online game can be modified if developers allow the client side to have access to some data but thatâs not even a question now.
With the vast majority of the games still playable offline.
The vast majority of games on Steam can also be played offline.
And it is no issue at all to stop patches on Steam either. I mean, it is literally in the settings. You dont have to do anything shady.
I completely skipped that part I guess? My bad. I was completely fixed on multiplayer. However, I just checked the Steam, and apparently I canât really evade updates for long. Eventually youâll be online on Steam and any queued update will apply. Give it a try yourself and let me know how you block updates on Steam. From Properties of any game, the Update tab doesnât give you such opt-out, only gives you to attend to beta test version if available.
Difference is that some developers update their game and it doesnât break anything even if itâs a multiplayer online game. Some developers update and everything gets janky or broken regardless of online or offline.
There could be an exception somewhere but letâs look at my examples. Zenimax and Valve are private companies and they allow modding also encourage it. Blizzard is a public shared company and they never really allow or encourage modding at all. Perhaps this is only for their Starcraft 2 but I guess that would be a given because of how narrow the genre is. World of Warcraft community had to dig everything themselves for creating private servers.
Thatâs how I see it simply, any public shared company, which you can find many, will never encourage modding. You can name it anything in my opinion; envy, fear of losing control or fear of losing stocks because of a debacle with modding community and so on.
But do I think they should change their approach and model? Yes. Consoles are a great place start this, most of the time different teams and companies handle console games but this worths a try.
By hardware, the limitations of consoles are open for offline play and give a cozy gameplay environment. Not like you can evade that 12 gb update for too long if youâre in a live service but still, youâd be able to plug and play whenever you want it. I think itâs a great platform to experience this.
Modding being possible doesnt require them allowing and encouraging it. Pretty much only requires the files are accessible on your PC. And arenât encrypted like Microsoft has been trying (but luckily seems to have started moving away from again), and yeah, MS is very much a publicly traded company.
Many of EAs games are very moddable, they are also a publicly shared company. CDPRs games are moddable. Publicly shared company. FromSoftwares Souls games are moddable. Publicly shared parent company. Resident Evil etc. are moddable, Capcom, publicly shared. Take-Two, publicly traded, some moddable games, that are even encouraged, such as Civilization series. Square Enix, lots of moddable games, publicly traded. Paradox, extremely moddable games, and encouraged, publicly traded. I could go on and on.
And beyond all those, most games released are not from publicly shared companies.
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Not very indepth but yes. Itâs a multiplayer game. Thatâs nice of them.
Single player games or co-op where player experience wouldnât differ much or wonât matter.
Thatâs a good example. Sims and Fifa seriesâŠ
Okay. Okay⊠Point taken⊠I was expecting less âexceptionsâ and you hit me with a list. No, Iâm not against modding. I may have look like Iâm trying to justify because the reasons left in the list for their approach somewhat nonsense.
What Iâm saying is multiplayer online and being stuck with investors donât really allow them much space to experience. Let along I start to think developers have some sort of âI know betterâ attitude.
I still gonna repeat it, if multiplayer and DRM is preventing them in any measure, then console version is a really good start for encouraging modding. People gonna figure something out if you put out a good game. Not even pulling a game with a very strict DRM should stop the company for encouraging such thing.
Also singleplayer, and offline game.
What do you mean by not very indepth? There are some fairly crazy mods out there for those games.
Btw, another FromSoftware game; Sekiro, published by Activision. Moddable.
Doesnt seem relevant for their ability to be modded though.
Some publishers certainly do. Probably some devs too. But since only Activision seem to be strongly on board with online-only, vs. all the ones I just mentioned, I guess most publishers/devs dont have that attitude after all 
Investors dont care how you make money for them, as long as you do. If you are making lots of money on highly moddable offline games, they will be very fine with it.
Investors were quite fond of CDPR until they released a bad game setting their brand on fire. None of which was related to it being offlline or moddable.
Modding is inherently more difficult on console. Not impossible, but certainly not the place to be if you want to outright encourage modding.
PC is the place to be for this.
I was expecting that too. Yeah, I just saw that.
Investors also would like to see Monthly Active User numbers for online games. Thatâs usually why most developers donât allow indepth modding as gathering the entire community at one place is much more⊠eh⊠profitable and beneficial for them.
Yeap. But hereâs the crazy idea, if people took the effort to create a mod for your game, then create an official monetization shop and allow community made mods to be sold there with a commission to the creator.
Valve has been doing this for TF2 for years and traffic is immense. The Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim has tons of mods for their console version of the game as well.
A highly restrictive DRM on a multiplayer online game would absolutely ruin this. To add, more mods in a multiplayer game usually deems trouble for performance and itâs fitting for offline games. For modding scene to flourish on PC, first companies have to drop their MAU numbers or online game directives for a while which they wonât. They will also see any sort of modding as a âthreatâ to the integrity of the game. Iâm not joking.
Whereas they could not care less about such a number for offline games.
Heck, I would say that they dont particularly care about MAU. Sales numbers just dont work as well for free to play games and GaaS, so MAU is what they are stuck with for those. Investors care about the profit. MAU, at best, is just an indicator for potential profit.
Seems like making offline games are very profitable for a lot of the companies mentioned above.
Not all Skyrim mods work there afaik. You just dont have the same file access on console.
And yeah, Bethesda got burned trying to monetize mods. Not a great idea. Thankfully.
If the game is also playable offline, then it wont matter. Mods will in all likelihood be possible.
if the game is only playable online, then they are fairly irrelevant for modding, since it likely wont be moddable.
But as said, the vast vast majority of games on PC, and elsewhere, are playable offline, so online only isnt ruining anything in general. Just ruining something for Activision Blizzard games, and a few others.
The modding scene already is flourishing on PC.
Didnât we just confirm and agree that the vast majority of games, including games from publicly traded companies, do not have an online game directive, and likely no MAU obsession either.
Oh, I forgot one publisher. One that has once tried to make all their games online only.
Ubisoft. Their newer games are also often moddable.
Only Activision seem to have a fairly hard stance on online only and no modding.
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I mean with online directives, harsh DRM and Monthly Active User obsession that Blizzard always have⊠I donât think they can any tricks after this point, nor they ever gonna care.
Yeah, it wonât be like PC. However, allowing fans to get a commission cut from sales would definitely encourage them. I believe Team Fortress 2 just did this right.
You can type Call of Duty mods on any web search engine. Even Activision is open to this, as you just saw in Sekiro.
To be specific, I guess itâs latest fashion in Blizzard only. Decades ago, Diablo 2 was very hard to mod and even they changed some variables for it being easier to modify after v1.10 patch. It was a great game for its time and allowed some really good mods to rise, which some fans held highly above the classic game.
Then Diablo 3 released with full restriction DRM which they can not monetize freely due backlash and left it in the dark.
Warcraft 3 was highly moddable and created DotA which they ignored and shoved IceFrog the door because they were making âBlizzard DotAâ at that time and lost copyrights to Valve. Then as you remember Warcraft 3 Reforged happen and they were simply forced to block off all copyrights for any attempt of modding the game. They couldnât avert the crysis and paid it badly.
Starcraft 2 is moddable but it takes ages to do something with a limited engine to begin with. I havenât heard anything remarkable from it besides that Diablo 2 remake. I fear they will remaster it soon as well.
I donât think Blizzard will ever consider modding after this hour. Not like there arenât any successful stories but they have a very bad attitude in handling it.
Afaik, the most recent CoD games have tried to be online only. Donât know how successfully.
Yeah, this is an Activision Blizzard issue more than it is a general issue. Not only them of course, Rockstar is the same (but interestingly, their publisher/owner is not). They are still a tiny minority.
Just to lead back to what seemingly started this; A response to someone claiming that most devs tried to prevent modding go and forced patches on players.
Most games, by far, are a playable offline, and thus potentially moddable. Patches can be avoided for offline games if you want to.
That is all I was saying, since the âonline onlyâ fake news story keeps popping up every few months.
I wanted to say something smart but I went off in a tangentâŠ
Modern gaming just started to push mods aside or cornered them by use of DRM. Iâm not saying modding wasnât a thing years ago, nor it was any bad for the game. I just said the habits of modern gaming simply tossed them aside. Companies donât hand mod tools to their community like old times besides a few and they end up creating plug-ins, addons or model/texture changes but not drastic gameplay mods. Even if itâs a single player offline, you may have no such option when developers donât allow anything.
I failed to find any option to opt-out from updates on Steam games though. It gives you three options; always keep it updated, update when I run it or high priority update over others. You may have to disable your internet connection as you run it every time.
I was very wrong on piracy part, that was uncalled but any retail copy can easily avoid it as long as you cut connection but most retail games forces you to connect to the internet for activating the key and auto update.
just add /players command to realm⊠i solo anyway i refuse to party so my kills and drops are not hijacked by players not contributing at all⊠or make it so if u kill its your drop and no one else can pick it up ever. best thing to do is add players command so we can have a fair chance at drops that bots and their followers/users have.
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First big wave who will leave will be the new players to this game/genre (when they see that playing as a group is dumb outside of exp runs) and the 2nd are those who wanted the game to be good/better without cheating subhuman scum.
You think people are going to participate in free for all loot?.. lol
Really??? âŠlol!
Of course not! Theyâre going to either stop doing damage to the boss just before he dies so they can be in close madly clicking on the ground to try and hover up the loot, or, if theyâre using Pick-For-D2R just hoover it anyway.
In fact, many people who wonât use PickIt and would participate fully in the boss kill are exactly the kind of people youâll never see in game because theyâll play offline or in private games only to avoid precisely the sort of scumbag players whoâll be using PickIt in the first place.
Free for all loot makes for participation? Really?? Stop making me laugh.
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