rogueknight333 wrote...
The reason why NWN was such a great modding platform was because it found such a great balance between ease of use on the one hand and power and versatility on the other, providing the perfect toolset for amateur modders who would sometimes be lacking in technical skills and probably always limited in the time they could devote to projects...
...for one example, I do not see how I could use a toolset that used NWN2-style painted areas rather than NWN's tilesets. The former requires time I simply do not have. But of course I am sure others would be quite upset to be denied the theoretically greater versatility of painted areas.
A possible alternative to ruthlessly cutting out anything likely to be a time-sink might be to come up with new tools to specifically address these ease-of-use issues.
I agree with a lot of what rogueknight is saying here. I touched on some of it in my
previous post on the thread, particularly in my observations about NWN's ease of use, ease of area building, and how these empowered solo modders. I do think it's worth emphasizing my final comment, though:
However, if you're an SP modder who's willing to organize and work in a team to create a high-quality product, then NWN2 or Dragon Age are good environments to work in... The main difficulty to overcome seems to me to be the need for modders to learn to cooperate and coordinate in teams to handle more ambitious projects with more powerful and sophisticated building tools, and Bioware has built that functionality right into the social site to encourage and facilitate it.
Precisely because of its comparative simplicity and ease of use, NWN was and will likely remain the modding environment of choice for beginner or serious solo modders working on significant projects. What I think the increasing complexity of the newer toolsets indicates is a paradigm shift in modding away from solo and towards team-based development. We started to see this shift with NWN2, and it's built into the very design of Dragon Age (for example with the toolset's facilities for checking resources in and out and the Social Site's features for finding available modding talent for teaming). This empowers the serious modder who's willing and able (and as rogueknight points out, has the time) to learn more complex tools and to coordinate with others in designing and developing a project. But it doesn't empower solo or hobbyist modders like rogueknight (and until recently, myself) in the way that NWN did.
I think it's understandable that companies like Bioware would take the route toward more complex and professional development tools emphasizing team collaboration. After all, that's how
they build
their games. But I think it means that to mod successfully for these newer games will require more serious commitment on the part of people with the time and willingness to develop new skills, including the ability to work and organize effectively in teams. And I know from many years of professional experience that the latter is indeed a skill and not something to be taken for granted. The result for games like DA (as it was the trend for NWN2) will be fewer, possibly shorter, but mostly higher quality mods, typically put out by collaborating groups rather than individuals.
Whether that will work successfully for them remains to be seen, and I think it will depend mostly on whether or not the modding community can adapt effectively to the idea of building in teams. I still think the jury is out on this. But I also think it's important not to judge the newer games by the older standard. It's likely a fool's expectation to think that DA modding, for example, will ever be as extensive as it was for NWN, with thousands of mods to download from the Vault. However the average quality of DA mods will likely be higher, even adjusting for obvious factors such as the better graphics and greater power of the toolset.
The biggest exposure that the newer games have is losing much of the ability to draw new talent into modding in the first place. As I wrote in my previous post,
I can say flatly that if I had had to collaborate with others on my first modding project for NWN, it would never have happened and I would never have become a NWN modder. I didn't know anyone and needed to be drawn into NWN modding as an individual before I could become a member of the community. I suspect this was true for many other builders as well.
Hopefully, NWN will live for a very long time, not only continuing to be a viable modding environment in its own right, but helping to draw new builders into RPG modding -- some of whom may eventually move on to the newer games as well.
Modifié par AndarianTD, 20 juillet 2010 - 12:09 .
