Articles - Mod DB

Recently, the editor/community manager for DBolical, Kralich/David, was featured in Season 3 of VideoGameTourism’s Modderview interview series. Read on to see the other interviews from the season as well as learn how you can take part!

The Word of Mod

Whilst interviews with game developers in advance of major releases aren’t uncommon, it’s significantly rarer to see community creators given the platform to discuss their own methods, workflow, and attitudes to development. Modders are some of the most adventurous and creative people out there, thanks to the lack of constraint on their imagination and the passion needed to see a mod project through to completion. Thanks to Stefan Köhler, more than a few modders have received a chance at the spotlight.

Stefan is a guest author for Video Game Tourism and previously also wrote for WASD magazine. Though the publication is German, it also runs occasional English articles (and it’s worth noting Google Translate does a decent job at translating all the articles anyway in-browser). He began Modderview with the simple goal of getting a glimpse at what goes into mod development, and the motto, “Don’t like the question? MOD IT!” is all about allowing interviewees to have a permanent effect on the next round of interview questions. With the final interview with myself, Season 3 of his Modderview series is concluded, and we’re going to briefly touch on all three interviews.

Episode 1: Josh Romito - GTA V: Redux

Josh Romito’s GTA V: Redux gives an already beautiful game a great graphical uplift, with new weather mechanics, textures, and more. His interview can be read here and below:

Episode 2: Eyaura - G-String

Starting out as a total conversion mod project, Eyaura’s dark cyberpunk story filled with body horror and unpleasant sexual undertones graduated into a standalone game on Steam. Her interview can be read here and below:

Episode 3: Kralich/David - Raising the Bar: Redux

Raising the Bar: Redux is a Half-Life 2 alternate story mod set in the cut content storyline of the game. The interview can be read here and below:

(I added additional details during transcription too, though the other two interviews don't feature transcriptions:)

1. What gave you the most frustration during modding? I like to learn new skills and in modding that has meant learning new games and ways to mod them. Sometimes the communities around smaller games aren't as inviting and I've had to power through a lot of elitism in my career. (Would like to add that I've also had the pleasure of working in friendly communities of helpful people)

2. Do you know any mods that are better than the game they alter? I think Unification is a brilliant mod for Dawn of War, and I also love Dark Interval for Half-Life 2. I also appreciate patches for games like Skyrim or New Vegas to make them more playable!

3. Do you prefer modding alone or as part of a team? I definitely prefer teamwork. Leading teams is a real joy and I love meeting new people. On more personal passion projects though I tend to keep things smaller and more controlled.

4. Is there any mod you are looking forward to? I'm really looking forward to both Skyblivion and Skywind. I also can't wait for the next release of Black Mesa: Blue Shift.

5. What was the most difficult part of developing your most recent project? A few years ago we suffered a malicious leak trying to kill my main project, Raising the Bar: Redux, whilst it was in its infancy. I'd never considered people could be so petty before then. It was a wakeup call to much better vet new members of the team. (Would like to add, some of my closest friends are people I met on this team. Teamwork is worth it even for times like this when one person tries to ruin it for everyone else)

Get Involved!

Stefan is always looking for suggestions for talented modders to take part. If you’re an experienced mod developer or know someone who is, check out his ModDB profile, drop him a PM, or comment down below on this post (as he’ll be checking the comments here too!)

Special thanks to Stefan for the opportunity to be a part of Modderview! Don’t forget to check out Video Game Tourism’s other Modderviews of the past to see more glimpses into the modding community and what it brings to the table.

In August, we started a new tradition of weekly Twitter polls asking you about mods, gaming, and the sites. This month, we’re kicking off our monthly analysis articles on the results of those polls. Read below for insight into the communities of both sites and our take on the results for both ModDB and IndieDB!

Week 1: What kind of user are you?

Analysis

This question starts things off very interestingly - from the results, we can see the demographic on IndieDB is weighted much more heavily towards developers, whilst ModDB’s features more players and users of mods than the makers of them. This result is interesting, though not surprising - ModDB generally sees use as a hosting platform for playable content, whereas IndieDB’s main appeal to indie developers is as a development blog, with the bulk of released indie games making their way onto Steam, itch.io, or other similar platforms. There are a number of indies however that ship alpha demos on IndieDB, even if they later delete these demos and ship full releases elsewhere. For content creators on both sites, the takeaway is this: On ModDB, you’re marketing your work to players, whilst on IndieDB, you’re marketing your work to other developers. That might mean mod authors need to stay away from technical descriptions that will go over the head of their audience, whilst indie developers could get stuck in with the details, assuming their viewers are as technically minded as them.

Week 2: How important do you think official mod support is for games?

Analysis

Both polls - thankfully - indicate the users of the sites place a lot of value on user generated content. It is interesting to note, however, the significant divide between the 1st and 2nd place results in both polls. Overwhelmingly, indie developers consider mod support a secondary concern to making the game itself; mod developers, however, are more inclined to believe mod support is a crucial attraction in a game. Whilst supporting UGC is a difficult task for smaller indie developers, the takeaway from this poll is to always be open to the idea of mod support. Community contributions can play a significant role in the long-term success of your game, and help generate hype in the short term. You can only make so much content for a great game yourself; so why not open things up and let your community create great content, too? A significant audience of talented mod creators exists that is ready for you to tap into.

Week 3: What is your favourite type of mod?

Analysis

This is the most divisive of the polls after the demographic options. Mod developers - and players - appear to enjoy pouring their time into large-scale, ambitious modding projects. They aim to push the boundaries of what’s possible with the base game, as well as delve deep into fresh new experiences. Meanwhile, indie developers and the audiences of indie games appear to prefer the base game with added bells and whistles over a totally new experience. As a modder, I tend to use very moddable games like Half-Life 2 as a basis for my own ideas as I’m not experienced enough in modern engines to create a totally original indie game. Creating total conversions for games I’m familiar with is more achievable on a hobbyist basis, and it might be for this reason that mod developers prefer total conversions, as they are effectively using the game as an “engine” at that stage for their own ideas. Indie developers working full-time, in that situation, might instead make the game from scratch. The takeaway? Be open to making smaller, “definitive edition” projects too.

Week 4: Why do you make mods/indie games?

Analysis

This result is pretty uncontroversial across both sites, with the majority of the user base looking to bring their creative ideas to life. All things considered, more votes for the “create a portfolio” option were expected on the ModDB side of the poll, as the modding community has traditionally been a jumping-off point for many hobbyists to break into the industry and go professional. Many game companies - CDPR as recently as last week, for example - hire from pools of talented modders on the regular. Nevertheless, learning and creating content out of passion is likely to lead to great portfolio results anyway, and that passion will certainly come in handy in the course of a 9-5 job. Whilst the poll results are mildly surprising, they’re exactly what we like to see from the community - passion!

Conclusion

We believe there’s a lot of interesting takeaways here not only for the users of the sites, but also for us, the site staff. As long as we can keep proposing useful poll ideas we will continue them, and also will continue these analysis articles as a way to round-up our thoughts.

Follow the ModDB and IndieDB Twitters to take part in future polls!

If you have any suggestions for future polls, or thoughts on the analysis here, feel free to leave them in the comments down below!

We’ve got exciting news for mod developers and indie game makers alike - as of today you can submit your mod or game trailer to us to go on the ModDB YouTube! We feel this would be an awesome way to give promising mods and games a little boost, and we’d love to support the work of other developers with the channel.

How to submit

It’s very simple to submit a video - just email david@dbolical.com with your trailer! We’ll be picking ones that show off a lot of interesting concepts, so make sure to get it looking great! We may also reach out to certain indie and mod developers to cross-post onto the channel, so if you’re a watcher and not a developer, stay tuned for great new mods and indie games on show!

Exceptions

Please note that whilst we will be happy to show trailers for games/mods aimed at a more mature audience - violent or scary, for example - we won’t be airing trailers for games with sexually explicit, racially charged, or otherwise unsuitable content. If in doubt, check the ModDB terms of use. Also, your game/mod must be hosted on ModDB or IndieDB - we won’t be doing outside promotion. It’s easy to make a page on either platform - you can reach out to me via the email above or on the website if you need help setting up a profile.

Closing

We’re looking forward to seeing all the awesome trailers you guys submit! Don’t forget to check out the other videos on our channel for quality mod countdowns if you’re looking to spice up your mod catalogue. See you soon!

Origins of a Long-time Gmod Player

It’s 2012. I’ve started up Garry’s Mod for the first time and looked round the menu, and settled on gm_construct. Up to now, the only Valve game I’d played was Portal, and the classic mod Portal: Prelude. My dad was adamant the zombies and themes of the Half-Life games weren’t for a twelve-year-old, and whilst I would later sneak in a bit of Half-Life one summer when he was away, I spent most of my time in Garry’s Mod in the singleplayer, in Sandbox, on maps my dad had checked over via the Toybox, not allowed to spawn zombies or antlions. The first thing I did was pose the Spy from TF2 kicking the Heavy in the nads.

At its simplest, Garry’s Mod lets you make outrageous scenes using whatever assets you have mounted

What followed was a few years of messing around with cousins before finally venturing online, playing the usual suspects - Trouble in Terrorist Town, DarkRP, and Prop Hunt - and veering off course into Star Wars RP (on the DarkRP base). The last gamemode hit a chord with me on a lonely summer in 2014 and I made some friends - one of whom is still one of my closest friends today - whilst having a lot of fun. It’s here I got my beginnings in modding, learning how to create playermodels and reskins, and then I developed my skills. Garry’s Mod was a formative part not only of my modding career, but of my actual career, as it gave me a lot to talk about in job interviews over the years. It was a phenomenon that affected an entire generation of players, and probably still works influence over kids today that aren’t drawn in by the likes of Apex Legends and the annual CoD.

Trouble in Terrorist Town is one of the most popular gamemodes created for Garry’s Mod, a “whodunnit” experience that is great fun with friends and often frustrating with strangers!

Jumping into S&Box

Fast forward to 2021, and I got access to what a lot of people are calling “Gmod 2” - S&Box, the newest project by Facepunch, the studio behind Garry’s Mod and Rust. Built upon Valve’s Source 2 engine this time, it looks like a cut-and-dry case from the outside - Garry’s Mod on a newer, more powerful engine. Having now gotten to grips with S&Box - some of the tools, and mostly the online play - I think that’s not an incorrect assumption, but it misses the mark.

Garry’s Mod’s insanity is alive and well in S&Box. Pictured - Terry the Hotdog, by Omega; a Sonic the Hedgehog spoof on the village map ported from Wii Sports Resort

The easiest way I can describe the difference is this - Garry’s Mod was a game you built on top of. S&Box is the platform you build the game on. If you had nothing else - no other games besides Garry’s Mod and Half-Life 2 - you could play through the campaign, spawn zombies, multiple friendly NPCs like Alyx, and make funny scenes in the background as Breen delivers his final speech to the player. If you had more Source Engine content - the episodes, TF2, and even third-party releases like Dino D-Day and G-String - you could mount those, and access all the unique content within them. S&Box isn’t going to work this way.

What to expect

The main reason is no mounting, as far as we’ve heard - you won’t be able to mount any previous Source project, or even Valve’s own two releases on Source 2 - Half-Life: Alyx, and Dota 2. Secondly - right now at least - there doesn’t seem to be dedicated servers. Instead, games are hosted peer-to-peer, building on the system introduced during Garry’s Mod’s time in the limelight. You can pick any user-generated gamemode or map and start up a local server which anyone playing the game can later join. I would expect this would carry a few more restrictions later to prevent trolling of people’s games - private games and passwords and that sort of thing. The reason for the limited key rollout becomes increasingly apparent as you “play” S&Box - it’s reliant on creators, with a very limited foundation of content.

With a lot of placeholders, it falls to the current pool of developers to fill in some basic features - like hostile zombie NPCs in a prototype zombie survival mode, by Gvarados

In a few months, S&Box has already brought in gamemodes that would’ve been exceptionally difficult to create in Garry’s Mod, thanks to the more advanced scripting tools. Some great looking maps are playable, and, being on Source 2, VR support allows you to explore your creations more closely and easily than Garry’s Mod allowed (where several community-made plugins eventually were made. One exists right now for S&Box). The comparison between Garry’s mod and S&Box, for me, feels less accurate. From what I’ve seen, it looks more like it’s going for the “Roblox” style of content creation. You’re not building on top of a foundation - you’re building the whole experience. The potential is insane - some early prototypes feature procedurally generated, practically-infinite landscapes with RPG mechanics, whilst others mimic high-octane arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament. All are playable with a handful of mouse clicks, and a fraction of the download/installation time that some of Garry’s Mod’s most ambitious gamemodes had to contend with.

Roblox has very little actual “game” of its own, and instead relies on community content - called “experiences” - to provide value to its players, along with a mod monetisation system

Summary

But - at its core - S&Box remembers its roots. I joined a random sandbox gamemode - not to be confused with the name of the game, it’s the standard gamemode for Garry’s Mod veterans - and met with three other people. One was silently welding balloons to the ceiling in a TF2 spawn room recreation; another was staring at the floor, looking around every so often as they got used to how you moved. The third was more chatty - and as we spawned thousands of boxes to create a fort out of, we discussed Roblox, Garry’s Mod, and the future of S&Box. He’d made an ambitious and successful map for Half-Life: Alyx; I’d made a bunch of Star Wars models for Garry’s Mod. I met another developer in a prototype zombie survival gamemode working with a popular development team in the Half-Life community, Eagle One; and one of my friends who also has S&Box access claims he was on a server with Garry himself who, like a deity overseeing his creation, occasionally jumps into a server to see what people are up to.

Some S&Box waiting times have been causing a lot of jokes in the community (credit: Randomcatdude)

There has been much concern about the waiting time for S&Box access - people expressing disappointment their waiting time can be as long as eleven months. All I can say to those people is S&Box is, right now, not really made to be played. It’s given to developers and those with a track record for UGC to make sure that when S&Box is released to the general public, it’s already got a substantial base of user-made content to try out. It’s a clever move to make sure S&Box’s greatest draw is already present the moment it launches, and will blur the lines between the ‘platform’ and ‘game’ terms I’ve been using so far. At the end of the day, if nothing else - you can still pose one character kicking another in the nads.

Classic.

Hi everyone! I’m David from DBolical and welcome to another ModDB countdown article - the Top 5 Recent FPS Mods on ModDB. The response to the last video and article was amazing and we really appreciate all the support you gave us on our return! Rest assured more content will keep coming as long as you guys keep supporting it! Remember check out the video below, and to like, comment, and subscribe if you enjoyed this count-down, too!

Whilst EA and Dice revisited Battlefront for their newest games, there remains a significant amount of people committed to and nostalgic for the older games in the Battlefront lineup. The gameplay holds up well, but their visuals - especially compared to EA’s titles - doesn’t so well. This mod project rectifies that with a vast array of visual improvements and gameplay updates to bring Battlefront 2 closer to the modern day. Featuring almost every map overhauled with new visuals and gameplay elements, customizable clonetrooper options for the Republic faction, and a packaged in shader setup that brings that extra pzazz to the game’s lighting, the Battlefront 2 Remaster Project makes returning to this old classic a real joy. If you download this mod, Endor’s space combat map is a solid start to a brilliant experience. The mod also comes with a handy document for installing other mods on top of this one, and the shader has compatibility with other SWBF2 modding projects, so you can take these visual improvements into other projects, too!

MMod is part visual overhaul, part gameplay overhaul - and all action! Playing through Half-Life 2 with vastly improved particle effects, animation quality, and additions to gameplay like detached emplacement gun turrets is a wicked time, and the project gives you a great excuse to go back and play through the episodes again. New weapon models and visual effects add real kick to the combat, and meanwhile, it is highly compatible with many Half-Life 2 mods, so long as those mods don’t make code changes of their own. It comes with built in support for other projects like Minerva: Metastasis, and the community regularly creates quality submods and addons like MMod Tactical to enhance the draw to this project even further. The author’s other works, like Half-Life: MMod for the first game in the series, is also indicative of the attention paid to satisfying feedback in your arsenal. MMod opens up many new avenues of play across projects reaching far beyond Half-Life 2, and with further updates planned in the future, what MMod brings to the table will only increase over time.

Amongst the longest running mods on this list, Project Reality for Battlefield 2 is a marvellous and deeply tactical revamp of this classic shooter. Now fully standalone with their own built-in and maintained multiplayer service, there’s never been a better time to get to grips with this mod! Right out the gate, an installer and built-in launcher make this mod easy to setup and play. Then, it’s into the action - and built upon Battlefield 2’s foundation, it’s not hard to see why this mod has stood the test of time. New vehicles and new weaponry vastly increase the tactical options in every gamemode, resulting in clever, thought-out engagement betweens squads of organised players. A co-operative mode allows you to test these weapons in the sandbox against competent AI before moving out into the online and testing your skills in player-vs-player combat. The technical and visual mastery on display here is just enthralling, and with regular updates to this day, Project Reality isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

This next mod’s not for the faint of heart - but below the difficult surface lies a deep and immersive experience. STALKER: Anomaly - also standalone, and thus also exceptionally easy to pick up and play - is an incredibly customizable experience. This mod is not a casual play, but for the less hardcore players, options exist as well as helpful in-game guides that soften the initial introduction to the strange and dangerous Zone. For players already familiar with STALKER’s unforgiving gameplay loop, however, there are literally dozens of options for changing your playthrough before it even starts - with different starting loadouts, associated factions, and difficulty settings to map out your perfect STALKER experience. Very stable thanks to the team’s own fork of the X-Ray engine, the mod features new gamemodes like survival and warfare modes that greatly change up the gameplay loop, and on top of that, much improved visuals, effects, and models, as well as updated functionality like the 3D PDA, give the game a refined, polished sheen. If you fancy a story-focused experience, the Anomaly team thought of that too, with a four-chapter storyline to follow for narratively-minded players. The Zone is still just as hostile as ever - but STALKER: Anomaly is as good an introduction to it as you’ll ever get.

Last on our list is the ever-present, ever-gory, ever-destructive Brutal DOOM, a mod for the original DOOM that works on many source ports of the game and versions of the game’s WAD file. Brutal DOOM’s legacy is one that speaks for itself - with ten million visitors on their ModDB page, it’s earned a reputation for turning up the action a notch in the already finely-aged DOOM. This is a reputation well-earned, for the moment to moment gameplay of Brutal DOOM is nothing short of exhilarating. Vicious amounts of gore, new weapons that cause absolute anarchy, and alternate fire modes for many parts of your arsenal make even E1M1 feel new again. Meanwhile, new visuals powered by the various sourceports Brutal DOOM is compatible with give a unique flavour to DOOM’s 2.5D aesthetic. Much like Half-Life 2 MMod, however, one of Brutal DOOM’s best draws is its surrounding modding community. With patches and compatibility modes for many of the most celebrated WADs over the years, as well as submods that add yet more new weapons, enemy types, and functionality, Brutal DOOM has created its very own modding community to follow. The new update continues the author’s history of keeping Brutal DOOM in the limelight, and with this level of content on show, it’s simply not possible to resist going back to Brutal DOOM and tearing up demons again, and again, and again!

Conclusion

That’s all for this action-packed countdown! As before, links to all mods mentioned in this article are also in the video description, and you can also go straight to the mod pages of these games through this article. If you enjoyed the countdown, please remember to share and leave a comment down below about what you think the best FPS mods on ModDB are. We'll see you in the next countdown article!