Could we enable mods for the long dark?


oplli

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I'll toss my torch in the ring as another software developer long dark player. I rarely use mods, rather preferring whatever vanilla experience the developer cooked up, but I definitely feel like mod support is important. I created my little sister-in-law as a character in another survival game she loves. I could only do it due to the game exposing a flexible scripting engine as well as the assets for the regular characters. Now for The Long Dark, I personally look forward to any tools that would help me understand the mechanics of how the game works. I understand wanting to preserve the "mystery" or "fuzziness" of how things work, but IMO that only fun for so long.

Edited by darkscaryforest
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17 hours ago, odizzido said:

Hopefully it doesn't use the stupid steam workshop. I hate that crap.

its true that steam workshop isnt very good for some things but it groups all comunity work together and that is a plus. of course having a hinterland launcher for mods would be great

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On 3/27/2021 at 8:07 AM, Syraith said:

moose replaced by Thomas the tank engine

After I read this, I can't stop thinking about it. The warning stomp replaced with a scowl and a deep TOOT😆 The chugging of the engine during a charge.

If you kill Thomas, you can harvest its wheels with a hacksaw to build a scooter

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1 hour ago, darkscaryforest said:

The warning stomp replaced with a scowl and a deep TOOT😆 The chugging of the engine during a charge.

Followed by a steamy scene as Thomas is mauling Astrid. Ah, the screams of pain. Poor Astrid..

Now I can't get it out of my head! That would be an interesting mod.

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2 hours ago, darkscaryforest said:

After I read this, I can't stop thinking about it. The warning stomp replaced with a scowl and a deep TOOT😆 The chugging of the engine during a charge.

If you kill Thomas, you can harvest its wheels with a hacksaw to build a scooter

 

38 minutes ago, Stinky socks said:

Followed by a steamy scene as Thomas is mauling Astrid. Ah, the screams of pain. Poor Astrid..

Now I can't get it out of my head! That would be an interesting mod.

😂

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Guest jeffpeng
11 hours ago, Syraith said:

You don’t see games the same or other software properties the same after opening that door 😋

True. Not to stray too much off topic, but I guess I never saw "games" as these mythological things that just make fun since I started to code at the age of 7, and only after that my father let me put some games into that dreaded bread bin computer (aka C64 for the uninitiated), which I still own btw (and it even still WORKS). So, in a way, I was always very much aware that everything "video game" is build on some very complicated foundation of integrated circuits and thousands (or today millions) of lines of code.

Ah yeah, the 80's. I hated them, yet I find ways to miss them now. 😅

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Guest jeffpeng
8 hours ago, Stinky socks said:

Followed by a steamy scene as Thomas is mauling Astrid. Ah, the screams of pain. Poor Astrid..

This is a comically good example of why mods may not ALWAYS improve a game 🤣

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On 3/27/2021 at 6:07 AM, Syraith said:

Yea and no. I would love to see some visual upgrades for things like lighting that the public could do, but when you open that soon, next thing you know you see people hunting bears with M16s and laser rifles, moose replaced by Thomas the tank engine, and zombies running around.

I think sometimes it’s just best to let a game stay true to the vision. The mechanics built in work. They may not be perfect but they make the game work the way it does.

Just remember, we already have a WIDE range of difficulty through Custom Settings.  This makes that range wider, but the premise is the same...

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On 3/30/2021 at 4:41 AM, Syraith said:

@opllii understand that, but when you look at games like Elder Scrolls or Minecraft, the developers openly release their development kits to the public for the reason of modding. Not every company wants to see people open up and tear into their game. It’s just a slippery slope. Yes, mechanical upgrades like lighting and such could be nice but when you open that access, anything else is possible. Sometimes developers just want their vision to be left intact the way they release it so people experience it how they are intended to. 
It’s not an expectation to put on a developer, otherwise almost every game would get open treatment like that. I don’t see a problem with letting the developer control the user experience.

Mods already exist, and have for quite some time, whether Hinterland officially endorses them or not.  Right now, they are rogue.  Wouldn't it benefit all to have them officially supported and managed?

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On 3/31/2021 at 3:06 AM, jeffpeng said:

Let me be devil's advocate here really shortly (yeah, me and shortly ... probably not).

There is this many times proven paradigm that players will optimize the fun out of a game. Modding the fun out of a game is equally true. Let me give you two examples.

The first is.... well, I'm using this quite a lot, eh? .... Skyrim. Which has like a bazillion mods, many of which actually fix long standing issues with the game or even outright bugs Todd Howard couldn't be bothered with. That's great, it really is. It's also something the devs should have fixed in the first place. But I also have a colleague that once told me that despite his best efforts to actually finally finish the game after basically a decade of owning it, he never gets around to do it since every time he tried he's bogged down with trying to get "the best" out of the game with modding it to his liking. (I might add that some of those mods do not strictly represent the original creative vision of the game when it comes to appearances of half of the people in the game. I think you get the point.)

The other one is Banished, which is a very simple yet refreshing city-survival game. It allows mods, and there are a lot of them out there, even such that basically make it a new game (although I would argue not a better one). But even using some of the simpler mods already change core mechanics. For example: if you build a quarry in Banished (to get stones) at some point that quarry is exhausted, and the hole that was dug for that quarry will stick around forever. This is a terrible nuisance, but if you simply make the quarry yield unlimited stones, there really is no reason not to put a quarry next to your town center because .... well... it's not like it's going to be an ugly, useless hole in the ground at some point in the near future - right? Also collecting freely available stones in the world becomes not really worth the effort of sending out workers far from home.

What I am trying to say - as a former Minecraft modder myself (i.e. I actually wrote mods) - is, basically: mods have the potential to greatly improve a game. They also have the potential to greatly ruin it. And, in my experience, the latter is more often the case than the former. Designing a game is far beyond just adding a cool feature or removing an annoying limitation. Designing a game is mostly about designing what the player will experience playing it without actually realizing why they like the game. And that is actually a far more difficult task to successfully pull off than most people think.

Now if I look at TLD I have to shamefully confess that ... yes I tried the forbidden mods. And out of all of them which were available at that time I actually deemed only one of them not making the game worse.

Today I prefer to play the games as they were meant to be. I don't want to bother with two days of having to set up mods and whatnot. If there is a limitation in the game it usually is for good reasons IF it's actually a good game. And if it's not a good game why would you bother modding it?

Just my 2 devil's cents - and thank you for reading.

Good point, but I would like to point out that that is your perspective - that modding ruins games.  Personally (and I'm not ashamed to admit it), I have played TLD with mods ever since their inception.  Has it ruined the game for me?  My 2,000+ hours will attest it has not.   Just the opposite in fact - it has extended my enjoyment of the game.  To each their own.

Edited by hozz1235
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On 3/31/2021 at 5:43 AM, Syraith said:

@jeffpeng my exact thoughts. Obviously they are working on making mods available as mentioned, but I have the same fear. At least TLD has been out a while and has a strong following but my fear would be that a new player would buy it, and start adding mods right away.

With the game so well balanced how it is, as awesome as lighting modifications for example would be, how they would effect the weather elements for example (ie visibility in fog/blizzard) is unknown. Or other changes like modifying damage or behaviors.

I get that people want to play how they want, and I agree that is their right 100%. But this is a beautiful game as it is. I’d hate for someone to miss that experience because they read how much “better” it is after adding mods.

Just my personal view.

Good point.  I agree the game is beautiful as is.  I also agree that I would encourage players to try it "vanilla" before modding (which is what I do with all my games).  But to not allow mods to "force" them to do that is a disservice (IMHO).

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@hozz1235 you kind of went back and forth on my points. They are working on mod support, so in the end it is what it is.

My points were just that there is such a small amount of developers that do have supported mods for their games, that by people making the claim that it’s something more or less “owed” to them is inappropriate. In my opinion, TLD has many mechanics that work together in a very nice harmony, and although I know there are talented programmers out there, I see that balance being disturbed.

Again, just my opinion, I just don’t see TLD in the same category as those games that do get the supported mod treatment.

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On 3/31/2021 at 5:06 AM, jeffpeng said:

Today I prefer to play the games as they were meant to be.

There is one exception to this rule, and that is KSP. Some of the eye candy mods are incredible. I tend not to go for big gameplay changes though, mostly it's info (kerbal engineering redux, kerbal alarm clock, etc) and eye candy (scatterer, eve, stock visual effects, waterfall, etc).

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Guest jeffpeng
On 4/1/2021 at 5:40 PM, hozz1235 said:

I would like to point out that that is your perspective

I'm not "as" harsh on mods in general. I said that I wanted to play devil advocate for a reason 😉

Although I stand by my assessment that the amount of "good" mods really is rather small - for games in general, again.
 

18 hours ago, stratvox said:

There is one exception to this rule, and that is KSP.

I would argue that Cities Skylines is another of those examples as it basically (at this point) a big mod sandbox and the amount mods have driven the development of this game is staggering. Basically, for a few DLCs now, all the devs are doing is implementing polished versions of mods that existed before.

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Guest jeffpeng
10 minutes ago, stratvox said:

I've never played that game... any good? I've thought of getting it to relive the simcity2k glory days....

Well..... yes, if you like building a city and find some joy in looking how things work - and also if you have an intrinsic desire to manage traffic a lot. It's not hard in that you can go realistically bankrupt since for that the economic side of the game is just to darn simple (even on what ever constitutes for hard in that game), but just as real systems become exponentially difficult to mange relative to their complexity, it is rather challenging (and actually compelling) to make a really big city work. And with a few mods they can actually become so big they can bring a modern high-end pc to its knees (regarding memory and CPU).

So ... yeah. Give it a try. It probably is the proper "spiritual" successor to SimCity when it still was SimCity. Just prepare your wallet to be seriously invaded in case you like it, because with all DLCs this easily costs over a hundred bucks unless you get it on some fancy sale.

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Skylines costs about 230 canadian right now. The price is much too high for me, especially when it's a steam game. I do have interest in skylines but I will probably never play it because they won't sell it for a price I will pay.

Edited by odizzido
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1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

It probably is the proper "spiritual" successor to SimCity when it still was SimCity.

That sounds good. But...

3 minutes ago, odizzido said:

Skylines costs about 230 canadian right now. The price is much too high for me, especially when it's a steam game. I do have interest in skylines but I will probably never play it because they won't sell it for a price I will pay.

Yeah... that says that I'm going to not get it now. 230 Canadian... good lord. I'll keep any eye peeled for any good sales, but that's a completely insane price. I don't care that it's steam, but good god that's a lot of money.

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Guest jeffpeng
2 minutes ago, stratvox said:

That sounds good. But...

Yeah... that says that I'm going to not get it now. 230 Canadian... good lord. I'll keep any eye peeled for any good sales, but that's a completely insane price. I don't care that it's steam, but good god that's a lot of money.

Well I got into it basically from the start and acquired most DLCs over time.

This is actually rather good argument against DLCs, if you think about it, considering the Thread here about it recently. Most people will not want to buy half the game, but buying a game with 10 DLCs will never sound reasonable for someone getting into it as a new player.

 

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For me creating mods or maps would be great as a designer. The added content comes at a price, though, as You cannot judge the quality and compatibility with other mods beforehand. Quality of life mods may also alter the way, the game was meant to be by the developers.
For instance the poor indoor lighting is making lamp use and fuel crafting meaningful, a thing that may be neglected otherwise.

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2 hours ago, odizzido said:

Skylines costs about 230 canadian right now. The price is much too high for me, especially when it's a steam game. I do have interest in skylines but I will probably never play it because they won't sell it for a price I will pay.

 

2 hours ago, stratvox said:

... that says that I'm going to not get it now. 230 Canadian... good lord. I'll keep any eye peeled for any good sales, but that's a completely insane price. I don't care that it's steam, but good god that's a lot of money.

[Stinky laughs in EPIC]😁👍

Screenshot_20210404-171431_Opera.thumb.jpg.085ff2b481370796e243419e37141414.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

As far as I understand, the mods are carefully prepared, unlike other games. Although I don't like the add-on in the original game, the mods are valuable in that they offer options to customize the game. I think mods (as their use is optional) are useful. Of course, I prefer not to use direct facilitators like hyperlinks for Black Inlet. But realistic approaches like the ubiquity of Timberwolfs are exciting.

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