4 réponses à ce sujet

[Talin Cousland]

I've been a Bioware fan since Baldur's Gate.  Oh, those were the days...

I recently finished Bethesda's Skyrim.  This was alot of fun and got many, many hours out of it.

Then I found out about the player made mods.  The  Skyrim nexus has over 23,000 mods.  The Dragon Age 2 Nexus has 900 mods.  Yeah, Skyrim did outsell Dragon Age 2.  But I also understand that Bethesda does encourage modding and creativity.  Does Bioware encourage it as well?  

What a great way to find new talent.  I even tried my hand at it.  What I learned is that I cannot mod, and a new appreciation for you developers.

I understand that Blizzard does not like player made content and tries to make their code difficult to break.

I was just wondering if Bioware, and EA were going to make it easier for modders to customize certain elements important to players in the new Dragon Age 3 title.

On a side note, One of the mods created by Emma and her team on the Nexus did exceptionally well.  It's Vilja in Skyrim, a follower.  This is where Bethesda dropped the ball for me.  There are no deep character development in for the followers in Skyrim.  But Emma and her team created a terriffic follower companion.   Maybe you can send Emma an invite to do an expansion "add-on companion" at release for DA3Inquisition.  Just food for thought.  337,000 unique downlods is nothing to sneeze at.

Steam even put out a workshop for their player made mods.  Is EA interested in something like this?

Modifié par Talin Cousland, 11 octobre 2013 - 01:17 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Overall though, the Bioware staff that have talked about modding in the BSN seem to approve, recognising that it increases the life of the product (which is certainly to their benefit as well as the players'). It is not a question of whether they WANT to allow modding, but whether they CAN. They're in a postition where they can't provide 3rd party tools (eg: the toolset) to mod the game because of licensing, so eith they charge (fans boo) or they strip it down (editors boo). Like Mass Effect, I imagine coding-capable fans will end up providing the tools, like Gibbed.

There is this, and even then DAO's toolset required a separate group of programmers and testers to work on it to strip out licensed middleware and other such things, and even then it still provided an extra challenge and there were several issues that came once the toolset was available (particularly with it reseting people's plot states of their already existing game because whoops).

BioWare has released two games with end user toolsets, so we do recognize the benefits that can come with it.

I think more developers will begin to appreciate modding over time. The Elder Scrolls series wouldn't do nearly as well without the modding aspect. I can honestly say that I would never have bought Skyrim or even attempted to complete Oblivion if the modding tools weren't a part of it.

I see this come up, and I haven't played Skyrim but I have to ask: can you mod the console version of Skyrim?

[Allan Schumacher]

People took the commentary about whether or not mods on the consoles in the wrong direction.

I'm not interested in discussing the legality of it. I was inquiring because maybe the credit for Skyrim being successful is because it's a game that had a wide appeal.

Here's the unfortunate thing about the situation though: we can't know for sure how many people would've just not bought the game if the modding kit wasn't available.

It's also not as if BioWare doesn't have experience releasing and supporting an End User toolset, as it was done both with Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age: Origins. A decision to not release a toolset isn't simply made in an ignorant vacuum where we're clueless as to the advantages and disadvantages of what it may take to bring the Frostbite editor to a state where we could release it without having to deal with licensee issues and how much potential benefit we'll get from it.

The best way to release it would be for us to replace the third party middleware (which EA studios has slowly been doing... there's less 3rd party middleware in Frostbite now than there was in Battlefield: Bad Company, for instance) with our own in house technology. Once it's 100% ours, it becomes a lot easier of a decision.

[Allan Schumacher]

Tup3xi wrote...

Let's put it this way: Would you think that Skyrim would be anywhere near as popular as it is now without modding tools? I don't think it would. I can guarantee one thin: There would be much, much less Skyrim videos in YouTube. Mods and the attention they get are free advertisement for the game too.

I have no idea if Skyrim would be as popular as it is without modding tools.  I am not sure how one disassociates success due to toolset and success due to Skyrim being a quality game? (which for all intents and purposes, many seem to feel it is a quality game)

BioWare has released two games that have had an end user toolset.  We're aware of the benefits and costs associated with releasing an end user toolset.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 11 octobre 2013 - 10:28 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Thread closed. Learn to be a bit more respectful of each other even if you disagree with each other.