Mod Creation Motivation

[Spartan198]

I'm not exactly sure where this thread should be,so I'm putting it here in the entrance hall.

What exactly is the motivation for creating Classical Period mods for games set in the Medieval Period,and Medieval Mods for games set in the Classical Period?

I've been wondering this for quite a while now,but I just never thought about asking. I know it may seem like a dumb question,but,please,bear with me here,people.

[Martok]

Well I can only guess at the reasons, but I strongly suspect it boils down to people wanting a mod based on the game engine of their choice.

In other words, people who primarily play RTW probably prefer the game's 3D campaign map over MTW's Risk-style campaign map. However, many of them also want to play that kind of game in a medieval setting, so mods like Citadel TW were created.

Likewise, there's some MTW fans out there that would like to see a Rome mod for it, because they prefer the game's campaign map over RTW's.

[caravel]

To add to the above, I think a lot of mods are a product of their time, so that when mods like HTW and NTW were made, RTW still didn't exist so the RTW engine was not an option back then. Also with most of the medieval era mods made for RTW, their development was started well before M2TW was announced.

[Makanyane]

Caravel is right but also some modders also get stuck with a particular game engine due to hardware / software problems.

You can run RTW happily on a much lower end computer, so some people stay with that if they can't run M2TW properly. On the other hand if you're trying to make models for the game the software used for most bits in M2TW is ££££'s cheaper than 3ds Max that's needed for RTW!

[Spartan198]

Oh,I see. That makes sense.

[macsen rufus]

Well, I can only speak for myself, but a brief tour of my TW career will probably illuminate a bit...

I first "discovered" the TW series through the "Time Commander" TV shows, and was instantly hooked by the promise of fighting those classical era battles they featured. I eventually discovered the series was based on RTW which hadn't yet been released - so I got the nearest that was available, MTW. When RTW was released I found my PC was too puny for it, but then I discovered Hellenic:TW, and subsequently played my first ever MTW mod, which totally blew my socks off. I got started in modding by first doing some additional graphics for HTW, then I worked on a "fix" for the HTW Bronze Age scenario which wasn't quite working in the release.

After playing this for a while I got more interested in the history of the era, and as I read more, the thoughts running through my mind were along the lines of "The Punic Wars are fascinating.... wonder how it would play in MTW... gosh, I never realised the Hittites did that .... wonder how it would play in MTW ... etc etc etc"

In the end I just had to make a whole new mod, and Ancient: TW was born. Largely for personal satisfaction, but it seems to have acquired a few other followers as well. In the middle of all this I did eventually upgrade the PC, tried RTW and found it severely wanting, especially the tactical/battle AI. Hence I decided to stick with the MTW versions of the era, filling holes myself as and when I found them.