Games - Mod

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Mod or modification is a term generally applied to computer games, especially first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public, and can be entirely new games in themselves. They can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, modes, textures, levels, and story lines. They also usually take place in unique locations. They can be single-player or multiplayer. Mods that add new content to the underlying game are often called partial conversions, while mods that create an entirely new game are called total conversions.

Games running on a PC are often designed with change in mind, and this consequently allows modern computer games to be modified by gamers without much difficulty. These mods can add an extra dimension of replayability and interest. The Internet provides an inexpensive medium to promote and distribute mods, and they have become an increasingly important factor in the commercial success of some games. Developers such as id Software, Valve Software, Bethesda Softworks (the TES-Construction Set), and Epic Games provide extensive tools and documentation to assist mod makers, leveraging the potential success brought in by a popular mod like Counter-Strike
.

Mods can significantly outshine or continue the success of the original game. Playing a mod might even become more common than playing the unmodded original. When talking about playing a game, players might have to clarify that they are referring to "vanilla Battlefield 1942", for example.

Recently, computer games have also been used as a digital-art medium. See artistic computer game modification.

Total conversion

A total conversion is a mod of an existing game that replaces 100% of the artistic assets in the original game, as well as a good deal of the gameplay. Many games provide players with the ability to edit the game's many elements, for example levels, sounds, enemies or weapons. Most modifications are limited in scope, resulting in a partial conversion. Total conversions are much less common, mainly due to the large amount of development and man-time needed to bring a whole project together. Often the goal of a group that sets out to create a total conversion is to sell their end product, which necessitates the need to replace the original content to avoid copyright infringement.

In contrast, partial conversions may add new maps, or models, skins, and weapons. Some changes may be even smaller, such as changing the variables for physics, movement, or weapon qualities. In the Unreal engine, these smaller changes are sometimes implemented as mutators which can be selected in the administrator menu. Other mutators not considered mods include those that provide anti-cheater, mapvoting, and zero ping (client-side hit computation) functions.

An example of a well-known total conversion is Counter-Strike
, which is based on the Half-Life engine. Half-Life is a linear, single-player first-person shooter with some puzzle solving, where you take the place of a character named Gordon Freeman. The earth is under attack by aliens, and the weapons used to destroy them tend to be futuristic. In contrast, Counter-Strike is a round-based, multiplayer-only game, based on realistic settings between Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists. Gameplay is centralised around goals of disarming bombs or rescuing hostages, and all weaponry is modelled on existing arms — including design, use, and sound effects. Practically the only thing that Counter-Strike has in common with Half-Life is that Counter-Strike originally required Half-Life to be installed for it to run.

Development

A great many mods do not progress very far and are abandoned without ever having a public release. One of the most famous vaporware mods was Star Wars Quake
, which was never released despite six years of development. Some are very limited and just include some gameplay changes or even a different loading screen, while others are total conversions and can modify content and gameplay extensively. A few mods become very popular and convert themselves into distinct games, with the rights getting bought and turning into an official modification.

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Games - Mod

Total conversion

Development

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