A lot of ado has been making the rounds about how a significant chunk of the CD Projekt Red’s dev team on CyberPunk 2 is made up of former mod makers. Developers who got their start diving deep into the underbelly of the tools and sometimes the code itself of their favorite loves in gaming. And discovered via that path a route into actually making games for a living. And despite all of the hallelujah’s that the PC platform curates for its flexibility in accommodating modifications of games…tailoring those experiences or in some cases expanding on them…I personally find mods uninteresting.
As much of a PC main as I am, people often assume that I am in on the mod culture. How could anyone who shouts the values of the PC regime, with its winning characteristic being choice and the power in that freedom that it grants to its users, possibly be uninterested in mods? Most people think that I am one of these gaming blacksmiths whose install of a given Bethesda or CD Projeckt Red title takes hours to install and configure b/c it is packed with dozens of mods. I see people living that gaming lifestyle and I put them in the same category as the people who can’t sleep at night without meticulously hiding every single cable in their case. Like the nuts who used to put sound-absorbing foam in their cases to reduce noise. All that stuff is way overly.
Don’t get me wrong. I render no judgement on those people who gain joy from aligning with that ilk. But it’s not in my interest-lane. One, I do not finish a lot of games. So I am unlikely to be so inclined to do a second run-through in the first place. That also makes it unlikely for me to expend the effort figuring out what the best mods are to incorporate into an install.
Regardless of the fact that it takes me forever when I do finish a game, I am insistent, in one of my vectors of OCD, to play it as originally intended by the creators. Much like I am always most enamored with a song the way it was recorded, not the way the artist performs it live with a variant arrangement order and riff. And how the movies I am in love with I fell in love with as the theatrical release, not the extended version. And not the one Lucas come back and put his fingers all back through the dough that had already been kneaded.
I do use ModStation on World of Warships. It is almost a necessity to bring the UI up from being anything less than barebones. For some legacy games, I have also used patches / mods that just made them playable and stable. I did that with Falcon 4.0 and the original Max Payne, once it had past on from prime time. I’ve never been enamored with UGC, either. I can’t be bothered to go out of my way and spelunk Forge maps in Halo the MCC or Infinite. I’m only going to play those maps because 343 inserts them directly into the Team Slayer playlist or some other mode. I guess when you consider packs made by other developers…such as aircraft and airports for Microsoft Flight Simulator…those things are on the menu. Mainly, I am just not one to spend a lot of time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to UGC. It needs to be curated, and I am more prone to trust something I pay for.
Still, I am very happy that millions of gamers have come to love the mod lifestyle. And I’ll never say never. Eventually I’ll get down to playing fewer games. And eventually just a handful total. Maybe that will be the time to go beyond retail and what the original devs provide.
But until then, I’ll stick with stock mostly, with a small group of exceptions.
Drafted on an iPad 10th Generation 256GB w/Pages
Rounding Off Infinity 