Battlefield 3 won't get mod tools
While Battlefield 3 is being targeted towards the high-end PC market, developer DICE has made the decision to omit modding tools for the upcoming FPS.
While Battlefield 3 is being targeted towards the high-end PC market, developer DICE has made the decision to omit modding tools for the upcoming FPS. “As of now, we are not going to make any modding tools,” DICE's Patrick Söderlund told GameStar (via PC Mag). "If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things... it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod."
The Frostbite engine has been largely praised for producing such impressive visuals for Battlefield 3. Undoubtedly, the enthusiastic modding community would love to get hands on that tech--and it's likely they will, regardless of a release of an officially sanctioned mod tool. For example, the community eventually released new maps for DICE's Mirror's Edge. (Although that title used Unreal Engine 3.) Söderlund's statement seems like an invitation for the community to open up the game.
In an interview with Edge, lead multiplayer designer Lars Gustavsson said "we could probably do a ten base Rush map! It’s definitely doable." He added, "there’s nothing preventing us, if people had the time and the will." That sounds like a challenge for the dedicated mod community to tackle, doesn't it?
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replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Battlefield 3 won't get mod tools.
While Battlefield 3 is being targeted towards the high-end PC market, developer DICE has made the decision to omit modding tools for the upcoming FPS.-
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have you seen the PC videos? it's most definitely going to push hardware.
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That isn't the reason behind not releasing tools. BF2/BF2142 had expansion packs you could buy. No different.
They have already given reasons why BC2 would have no tools. It was something along the lines of the conplexety of the tools and destruction system.
I think it sucks as well, but I woundt blame it on map packs. Engines today are waaay more complex then they used to be.-
Do you honestly think the in-house programmers are any more intelligent or competent than the people out there making game mods? RAGE (id Software) isn't exactly simple, neither is Skyrim ... yet both are receiving full mod support. Hell, at least in the case of RAGE, you're given exactly the same tools that id used to make the game.
Do you know why? Because people are fucking creative. They're smart. They're motivated. They turned games like Fallout 3, Doom 3 and Oblivion into games worth playing. id Software knows this ... and they also realize that allowing modification will increase the longevity and retail staying power of their game.
Engines are complex, yes, but so are the people hacking away at these things. It isn't a one-sided affair. As technology evolves, so do the people who work with it. If people make an advanced engine, there will be other people who can hack it, mod it, improve it, change it.-
Sorry, I meant to complex for them to make them :P
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Heh, gonna rephrase this, having a bad day explaining my point. To complex for EA/Dice to develop mod tools :P
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I could buy this as being the real reason. Not wanting to devote the time and resources to developing the tools for the community to use. But telling people they're not smart enough to build mods for the engine sounds like a silly cover for the real reason that they'd rather not admit. I mean how many stories do we read every day on the internet about crazy user-made projects that can exceed or match the brilliance of studio made work.
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Yea, the excuse of complexity is a bunch of BS. There are a ton of talented modders out there that could make cool stuff with the tools. As to those that point to BF 2/2142 DLC wasn't that common when those games came out. In 2011 Its a big part of commercial games and the publishers dont want anything taking away from them making more money. This is all about business.
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I agree with you, but the only thing that doesn't add up is that Dice continued to release additional maps for BC2 that were packaged with the major patches and they didn't charge for those. The only DLC they released was Battlefield Vietnam and that was understandable since it went above and beyond the kind of content you expect to be free (except for the recycled gunshot sounds).
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I remember reading that for BC2. Sounds honest and true. This roughly translates to: "we built a really painful and convoluted development process. Most modders wouldn't be as crazy as we are to actually attempt to make content for this game." Admittedly when this came up for Bad Company 2, they had said it *might* not apply to Frostbite 2 (BF3), but considering the further complexity of the game, I'd imagine it might even be worse
A favorite quote of mine from a dev regarding BC2
"Pipeline issues- So how does this work in practice? It's not ideal, but it's good enough for us to ship games on it....The pipeline will normally crash about 2-3 times during a full rebuild."
It goes back to something I've been thinking about lately, we don't just need to make the tech of games better (better looking etc), we need to make the tech (not just software, but the entire process) of MAKING games better. Easier said then done obviously. But we need to get more efficient at making games so that issues like this are reduced as much as possible.-
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Precomputing lighting data can take upwards of 24 hours with a large render farm for some games. It's pretty insane honestly.
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Lighting is usually referred to as baking. Cooking usually refers to the process of taking tens of thousands of files and intelligently packaging them into small, compressed, bite sized pieces. This is required for numerous reasons. Fitting into memory, load times, and avoiding fragmentation being some of the main ones. Changing code or data can require a full recook, but unless you changed graphics code will not require re-baking the light data.
Both baking and cooking can take a long-ass time. It sucks. No one likes doing either but its the world we live in.-
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Cooking/Baking are pretty common for almost all engines these days I think. The terms vary slightly engine to engine, but the process is there. For consoles it pretty much has to be.
MNC PC vs Xbox are two separates beasts. On PC we can make you redownload the entire game everytime if we want to. That makes things super easy! We try to minimize download size, but it's still usually a couple of hundred megs. There is a patching process after each download where files are modified.
On Xbox we were able to do a couple of title updates and a free DLC, but that's it. What we could change in the title updates was very limited due to a 5mb download limit. There were also technical limitations on what we could add. That was mostly related to content (textures, meshes, etc) rather than code (I think). Being able to do what we could was thanks to Unreal Engine plus a few modifications.
In the free DLC we updated all of the maps. There was no patch process for them. It's just a wholesale replacement. Both copies exists on your 360 hard drive (sorry!) but only one is used. This isn't my area of expertise, but the way Unreal packages work I think that's just how it has to be for levels.
There is a big difference between patching and mods. You can think of patching as static and mods dynamic kinda-sorta-maybe. Technically patches are dynamic, but the content of the patch is a known static quantity at cook time. You know exactly every piece of content the game can possibly use and, ideally, you know exactly what levels use what content. You can optimize the shit out of a game when you know everything. Mods are dynamic as users can do anything. You don't know everything so you can't do that super optimized cooking process. It's a completely different pipeline.
Some day I want to mess around with Valve's Source SDK to see how they structured their engine. They've always had fantastic mod support. It's been on my todo list for a few years now, heh.
Sorry for the scatterbrained reply. I don't know if it helped at all.
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To sum up that article from the forum: The engine started on consoles, we made a bunch of decisions to make console development *easier*, which makes PC development Now much harder.
This doesn't seem to be specific to games though, seems to be a common theme among all software development. "Laziness" that leads to short term benefits, but problems in the long term. The classic "I won't pick good variable names or comment this code, cause I just need this thing to work fast right now, and I'll probably never use it again, or I'll go back and fix it later", except that it's always the case that you will go back to it later down the road, and be all "Why or why did I not take the small amount of extra time then, to save me the huge amount of work it's gonna cost me now !?!". Sadly it's a very easy mentality to find yourself in. Especially with deadlines and other such constraints. "I don't have the time to do it the *right way*®, I just need it good enough *right now*".
We really need an *investment* now on better *systemic* game development methodologies, that will pay off down the road. But no one developer/publisher can justify the investment when "we just need to make this one game now, and get it out by Christmas", and it won't pay off in one development cycle.
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Not sure if this applies for Forstbite 2 though. I think the patch process for frostbite 1.5 was taken from BF heroes or something for consoles. It was one of those "let's save time by using this patch system" ideas that results in spending waaaaay more time than doing it right the first time. I seem to recall that Mikael Kalms said they were going to do things differently for BF3 or he was going to come into work one day and shoot the place up. Ok. Maybe I added that last part.
/Just what I remember.-
fark, I replied to wrong post. whatever. you're smart. You'll figure it out.
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The real bummer is that a "mod" can be such a small and insignificant thing to implement in a Battlefield game and still radically change how the same old maps play. Like adding a chopper or an extra tank spawn or two to this map that's generally heavy on infantry spam and not very interesting with the default vehicle loadouts. There's no new or custom content in those cases, just modifying what's originally there and available to vary the gameplay.
Losing that sort of potential and custom maps isn't a deal breaker in the least, but it could be disappointing in the long run depending on the map design and balance of the vanilla game. Especially when you consider how different things really have be when supporting 64 players on PC and 24 on console, and how DICE probably doesn't have the resources to develop and support two entirely different BF3 games. If they are riding the line and doing the same exact content for 64 & 24 players, both versions might end up suffering. We won't know how good or bad that kind of stuff is until we actually have the game though so it's useless to speculate. They can always tweak and patch stuff themselves after the fact, but it's hard to be so optimistic about something so unknown.
I'm glad they didn't say "never", but I can't really see them changing their minds later after those comments.-
Agreed.
Do you think anybody would still be playing Oblivion or Fallout 3 if Bethesda hadn't give us the tools to improve and add to our experience, give us new content that Bethesda hadn't even thought of? Hell no.
Modding turns a game into an organic entity. It changes and it evolves depending on the players who play it. It can react to player's needs and wants in a way that the official development house never could because of limited budget, time constraints, bureaucratic brouhahah.
Because of all this, I'm not so interested in Battlefield 3 anymore.-
Modding didn't hurt their expansion packs either. If anything it drove them to create great new content, rather than just charging $15 for 5 multiplayer maps ala COD
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User generated content is going to stick around, but it'll be in stylized games like TF2, LBP, and Minecraft.
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That is all the more reason why gamers should support the developers who do encourage modding.
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"Mods, sort of, were traditionally seen in PC multiplayer as a way to extend the life of a product, but... if you can SELL them that content, and it's first-party developed instead... and that's sort of the tinfoil-hatty version, but it's probably kind of true." -- Jake Rodkin, Idle Thumbs 48, 5 minutes, 53 seconds
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meh they did say frostbite wasn't really mod friendly for bc2.
if guess for kids that want to mod pretty engines, the new cryengine should be fine.
and I'm pretty sure skyrim might need a few mods to work right.
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The only positive thing about this is there will be a lot less competition for game jobs in the future because less people will know how to make games. That is good for those already working in the industry I guess.
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Compare this to id Software's answer about mod tools for Rage: http://www.shacknews.com/article/68361/rage-will-ship-with-level
"Pull down the console, type 'id studio', then press enter. Then, bam, there's all the tools we use." -- Tim Willits
And that's in the same article as this statement:
"Building levels from scratch is more difficult," said Willits, "because we have a layer system in some of the levels. I can foresee somebody modding up Wellspring and adding different characters, giving them different voice-over."
Versus DICE: "Nah, not even trying. It's too hard to mod Frostbite." So what would be harder to mod: Rage, or BF3? -
devs don't owe you modding tools
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True, but there's a scale of developers embracing community content:
0: "Fuck off, this is essentially a closed-system console title; we will actively pursue legal recompense for any violations."
1: "Only developer-approved content via approved channels" (i.e.: a 'social club' channel, GFWL title updates, etc.)
2: "Only single-player add-on content through the isolated and approved interface" (i.e. "Add-on content" menu)
3: "Anything except ranked multiplayer."
4: "Here, have fun." (i.e.: Bethesda's stance with Fallout 3)
It's sad when a developer slips down a scale, as did Infinity Ward with MW2, and as DICE seems to be with BF3. Whether they make a mod tools kit is beside the point; most developers don't have the time anymore. All I really care about is what their perception of people who like modding and tweaking, as most developers seem to be treating them like criminals, sometimes even launching legal action.-
Agreed, the mod community used to be seen as a way to extend the life of the game. I know the group of gamers that I played with got our friends into games because of mods like CS, Firearms, Desert Combat, Neo Tokyo, and Galactic Warfare. I don't get the hate from developers/publishers .
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They owe it to themselves.
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At least a map maker maybe?
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Next on the list of disappointments.
Cant run your own dedicated servers, must rent them.
Terrible admin tools.
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Didn't you know that LAN play and your own dedicated servers lead to piracy. We have Activision/IW/Treyach to blame for this. Everyone seems to follow their lead.
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This has been the case since BF2, well, to run a ranked server, and why would you not play on a ranked server?
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Some people dont care about ranks once you unlock everything.
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This isn't new news. This has been DICE's position since BF3 was officially announced, and it's unchanged since the release of BF2.
Since EA wants to take Frostbite to other franchises, it makes sense that they want to keep it locked down / internalized. However, they'll never foster the same kind of community that Valve has, even Activision / Blizzard (imagine WoW without UI mods...).-
you could mod BF2.
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whelp. No BF3 for me.
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I'll put on my flame suit, but here goes: mod tools can quickly ruin a game. There are MANY examples of good games coming from mod tools, but there are just enough mod tools that annoy the F out of me, turning me off the game at the same time.
Case in point: Counter-Strike Source.
Mods made CS, no question. Without mod tools, we wouldn't have some form of FF protection (that was the default and I loved it) for the huge majority of the pubbies to keep the asshats out. At the very same time, it ruined CS (for me) because betting/banking/leveling/constant 16k became a norm Gone were a huge chunk of servers that were vanilla with actually having to save your cash, not buy stupid, etc. "Stock" servers were gone, all I had left were the lesser of the mods available and I hated them all.
The fact that mod tools ruined CS for me, makes me want to keep them out of BF3.
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As many mods as you and I may enjoy, there is enough power to mod out a server and remove the near "stock" gameplay elements. One server has you hunting zombies with unlimited cash, another has you gambling on your buddy's death. It's not a consistent experience and I'd prefer it to be.
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I hate this post so much that if I could travel back in time and murder your mother in order to prevent it, I would.
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And frankly, you should thank me for it.
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But what if his mother was so hot, that instead you fucked her and...well what I'm trying to say is: sukabljat, SockMonkeh is your father!!!
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I'm curious, do people seriously not believe developers when they point out that, short of a 100+ person team, modding a new game isn't anywhere near a practical possibility for 99% of the modding community?
Don't get me wrong, I've supplemented many games over the years with awesome mods over the years, from replacing the Imp skin with Barney in Doom up to Desert Combat with BF1942. But, that said, the development tools for a lot of modern shooter games simply are too complicated or resource-intensive for the vast majority of mod teams to be able to do something with.
Sure, it'd be great if they put the tools out there for the dozen or so groups that may be able to take advantage of them. But, as much as many people would not like to accept this fact, video games are a business. If any other industry decided to not spend hundreds of manhours and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more to appease less than 1% of the userbase no one would bat an eye. But god forbid a game developer make this same cost/benefit analysis lest they be labeled "consolized", "sold out", etc.-
Modding was supposed to die out back in 2004 when everything started to have normal maps and all kinds of super complex scripting. Producing something like Counter Strike on a 'current gen' engine was thought to be a thing that would never happen again, and yet HL2, UDK, and Crysis all became platforms for very complex mods and freeware projects.
And not just mods, but small indie developers who by having powerful tools that streamline worflow and designing games that play to their team's strengths and then slowly developing up and up from there to make something that may not go toe to toe with a AAA shooter but is none the less fairly polished and good looking, and certainly fun to play.
Just because a mod team can't put together a Call of Duty single player campaign doesn't mean they can't put together something cool. It also doesn't mean you have to polish tools or put together a sophisticated SDK - just give us what you got, we'll make it work.-
I agree with you a full 100%, speaking from experience.
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It's not as simple as "just give us what you got, we'll make it work". For a lot of reasons mentioned above in regards to cooking simply providing the tools isn't enough. I wish it were that easy, that would be fantastic. But alas it is not.
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pretty much this, if people really want to do something they'll make it work. I was the most completely useless incompetent coder but i spent so many hours learning uscript and c++ because i wanted to make mods and i did.
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Sure. For some (most?) games at present time if you were handed the exe file for the level editor that would not be enough for you to create a new level, or even modify an existing level, and have that level be loadable by a client. It just won't work. It's not a matter of ease or performance or simplicity. It will not load.
Thus simply releasing the tools is not enough, because without additional changes those tools can't actually do anything.-
Okay fair enough. It depends from game to game, but configuring a game to accept content out of registered content files is not that challenging. I don't know how trivial a task it would be for the Frostbite engine but it's not that complicated to do in Unreal tech.
And this is something that's not like a user SDK feature or something - this is something that's been possible since Quake. Quake's pak structure was just nested folders, and you could have those folders outside a pak to test textures and maps during development as well. It was hardly practical to develop a game necessitating a complete recompile of your archive files every time you wanted to add a texture or make a change to a map, so pretty much every kind of engine supports 'mods' - at least in the sense of allowing any amount of content outside or inside archive files to be loaded. Some engines go further, they will look for mod folders or mod paks especially and provide an interface to load them. Other engines will not, for example the thriving Bethesda modding community had to create their own mod loaders to get the engine to load unregistered content packs in a game's files, and that wasn't hard for them, mod loaders are fully featured and quite stable for Oblivion and Fo3.
So what I'm saying is, it's not like the developer has to make special features for the modder user, he just has to open his engine in its development state to the user. Buggy and unstable as that may be, modders are prepared to cope with a lot. Some developers go further than that, but if a dev doesn't, well that's fine.
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I think it makes sense for developers of AAA games to release mod tools because they're surely going to garner a large mod community where some genuinely awesome stuff could be made. Awesome user made mods and content could only be a good thing for the developer as it can generate more interest in the game and extend the longevity.
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RP:
I don't think anyone reasonable is trying to argue that it doesn't cost them anything to put out mod tools, of course it does, but they're leaving out a part of how to cultivate a large fan base. They're pretty much ignoring potential "Desert Combat"-type mods, and thus an even larger, more long lived fan base.
And *of course* they're prioritizing paying, DLC playing fan base (and thus market) over the un-paying mod playing fan base. That makes business sense. It's also completely reasonable to find the lack of official modding tools lame. -
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