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Death
at the Hands of a Dream
by Kevlar
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Introduction
 Every so often,
I need a good place to focus my rage, and this week it's the Make
Something Unreal contest. While you may look at the $1,000,000
in prizes and think to yourself - hey Kevlar, stop smoking crack,
modders getting paid for works of love is good - I intend to throw
my own perspective into the controversy and challenge this concept.
First,
you should know my bias(es). I've done
some work
in the mod community in the past, testing and some designing, and
I am also currently working for a team that may enter into the MSU
contest. It wouldn't be fair if you didn't know this before my rant,
and it also bears notice that my words here do NOT reflect the views
of the T][S LAN Crew, any and all sponsors or the project I work
for. Nonetheless, I feel a possible personal stake in the contest
only strengthens my stance on the current state of affairs in the
mod community.
One
last note: I
am not condemning any of the involved parties for their actions
in recent times. However, I AM strongly critiquing them in the hopes
that these important considerations will be remembered when, like
all games before it, this new crop of FPS's is tested by time. Hopefully
then the strength of the community will be enough to offset these
critiques.
That
being said, here we go...
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Franchise Me, Baby!
With
the news that Epic has bought out the domain names UT2003.com
through UT2010.com, and the announcement of UT2004, we need to
take a serious look at where competitive FPS's are headed.
id is out of the online game, having put themselves squarely behind
Doom III (offering 4-player DM only) and leaving Epic as its own
competition. While I applaud id for not backing down on Doom's
true vision, it does mean Epic is the only "sport" FPS
for the foreseeable future to be a guaranteed
OGL/CPL
game (minus that small behemoth called HL2). For us competitive
gamers, it means we're forced to learn UT2003 whether we like
it or not. (Personally, I somewhat do - I will always love Quake
and I feel disappointed with 2K3 compared to the original UT.)
Simple? Yes - there's not much time spent having to practice different
games for different tournaments. Better for mod designers? Arguably
- they have an established fanbase and engine to work with.
So
where do we go wrong? What's my point, and when will I get to
it?
A
yearly franchise in the form of an FPS
ensures that
mod teams, while working with the ever-more-difficult process
of mod-making for new games, will constantly be under the gun
to produce content for a game that will likely be replaced by
a newer codebase (possibly rendering the mod useless) and changing
SDK variables soon after its release. Hell, even with a full complement
of near-professional talent, a large TC undertaking can still
easily take in the realm of 6 months to a year to complete; right
around the time when the game is replaced and nullified under
Epic's new franchise system.
Who
wants to work on a mod every year for a company that keeps adding/changing
incremental content? For that matter, who wants to keep buying
essentially the same title every year? Yes, it may work for Madden
football, but this is a different and untested genre for that
kind of behavior, and I believe a separate argument could be written
on this topic alone.
Also,
that which is fact: Forums were abuzz with controversy over the
true size of UT2003's daily playerbase on GameSpy. Bots were rumored
to take up as much as 75% of the reported players online at any
given time, and some players complained that bots were all
they could find online. I can't speak to the validity of these
claims...
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Mods
and the MSU
However,
what I can speak to is that until this past week, very few
large UT2003 mods had actually been released. Take into account
this general "more of the same" disappointment in UT2003
from reviewers and fans and the discrepancy between "players"
and mod support (especially considering UT's fanbase), you'd expect
such a statement. Nonetheless, let me give you a rundown of the
mods released in the past week for UT2003:
The
Missbehaviors
Chaos
UT2
Global
Warzone
Domain
Conquest
Marines
Deathball
UnrealSpeed
Seismic
CTF
(soon)
Troopers:
Dawn of Destiny
Faceoff
And
this is a condensed list. You might ask yourself: why has the
UT2003 mod community been stagnant for this long, but is now suddenly
releasing all kinds of Alpha builds of mods in one week? Because
the MSU Phase 1 deadline for the mod contest ends this week.
Yes, many hands working together all to strip each other of the
$50,000 Unreal mod contest winner title.
What
has happened to us in the short span of a few years? UT2003 was
a 'dead' game by some standards, with nary a mod team working
to enrich the daily play of its fans. Now NVidia and Epic throw
a little green out and the chance for a mod team to win an engine
license and they're jumping all over the chance?
What
is wrong with this picture? I'll tell you what: comparing the
mod community's support for UT2003 before this week, it feels
like Epic needs to throw out a $50,000 prize just to get
its most hardcore backers (modders) working for its game.
And this is for a development team that apparently has their sights
set on this game for the next 7 years. Now that UT2003 is the
newest (and seemingly singular) plain-vanilla FPS in existence,
you'd expect to see less of that community fragmentation that
came from the flood of titles that split our innocent mod community.
So,
simply, what I'm asking is is this what we're reduced to?
That nowadays even a "guaranteed" FPS franchise can
be screwed up and we need to pump out a million dollars to artificially
generate a community around it after people realize it's a disappointment?
At a time when even the monolithic presence of the Quake series
is at our backs, and there's only 1 choice left for old-school
DM styled action? We can't unify the once-proud, for-fun community
in the face of 1 future series of titles to pick from?
Again,
I have my own stake in it and I don't mean to slam Epic - while
I was disappointed in UT2003, I've grown to like it. However,
I'm honestly disgusted to see so many mods come out that are obviously
geared toward a contest and a commercial potential. That not only
rapes the proud memories of a once-strong gaming community whose
purpose was coming up with inventive ideas for fun, it
further implies to our modders - our future developers - that
pushing a turd to meet a deadline is more important than making
something other than a turd.
If
this trend continues, I not only see the slow death of the mod
community in terms of presence, reputation and meaning, but I
see the hardcore gameplay background as nothing but a Minor Leagues
of sort for professional gaming and game development. And where's
the fun in that?
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Finalities
You
know, I don't know if I've ranted or presented a useful viewpoint
up until now, but I had been planning on writing this article for
a while, and it should be said that recent events did not "spur"
it - only help it along. My feelings changed towards the whole process
of mod-making in the first MSU contest I participated in back in
2000, and while I was considering my feelings about the recent developments
in the UT2003 mod community, along came the
nail in the coffin.
Follow
the link to see a disgusting story currently developing in the forums
of one of the UT2003 mods gunning for the MSU title. Troopers was
one of my most anticipated mods for the game, and I almost ended
up working on it at one point. To see a development team swipe content
out from under the man who brought them together and gave them the
design to start with is despicable. Whether or not he was a bad
leader, to not be man enough to fix the problem internally by talking
about it and swallowing your pride is pathetic.
When
I work for a team, I throw as much of my own IP at them as I can.
I've "invented" dozens of fun gametypes. None of them
have seen the light of day, and I've signed enough NDAs to know
they probably don't belong to me anymore. You know what? It's my
own fault - I pick up, move on, and that's that. At least those
guys in the above link didn't sign NDAs that gave away their property,
and to the dumbass who lost thousands in wages due to the mod: it
was your own choice, and a bad decision at that for buying into
the lie that it would take you somewhere. Regardless, what we see
now are teams fighting for money, and even teams fighting themselves
to get any advantage they can in the race to a commercial title...
At
first we played the games. Then we suited them to our liking, and
the game we played was the dream of making our projects a reality.
Valve fed that lie; Counterstrike was born and the community grew
fat with people trying to "make it big". As of today,
even the game itself has been stripped away - now we play for the
table scraps, all believing we will end up making the next Doom.
Most of us won't. In the meantime, we choke ourselves on rehashes
and mod cash-ins while we chastise the developers who do the same,
and pretend we're still above it all.
We
used to be the elite, but those days have gone. The next time you
look at yourself, fellow modder, look at the 5 nearest mods around
you for your engine, and see just how much of that original dream
is left in us all. How many original ideas do you see? Personally,
I don't see many.
Shame
on most of us for blatantly feeding into the minimal development
cycle we used to try and revolutionize, for proving it really is
all
about the money, and for not only letting our competitiveness
destroy the comaraderie that used to tie the community together...
But also for being so greedy as to pursue the lie and bludgeon it
until we could no longer pretend there was an innocence left.
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