Official CA modding announcement

[edyzmedieval]

You've been hit by.

You've been struck by.

A promotion to the front page.

Thank you for the traffic to my profile page.

As for the news, while I say that it's good, I cannot help but agree with Voigtkampf who echoed my thoughts in a most gentlemanly way.

[antisocialmunky]

I'm glad they were finally able to deliver on those tools :)

[Furunculus]

thank you CA.

[Jacobin]

Way, way, way too late - the modders have almost all moved on to other games in disgust or are still tinkering with MTW.

Now if they were the STW2 data files that might make a real difference.

[Voigtkampf]

Read this, and it has reminded me of this thread. Basically, no modding tools for Battlefield 3 because "the power of the Frostbite 2 engine makes it tough to tweak".

"If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod."

Reminds me of the "our inhouse tools are not good enough for release as modding tools", just with the opposite twist; BF3 wannabe modders are too stupid to mod the l33tawesomesauce pie Frostbiting engine, whereas the CA would not dare put their fans through the horror of not perfectly polished editing tools they are using inhouse.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/05/ba...modding-tools/

Why are people making statements like this? Don't they understand how weak their cover stories are?

[Cu'Roi]

Alex, i agreed with your post 100%, and i didn't think u were a jerk. I agreed with volt even more. I was actually considering making a post like volts, until i saw he did it for me and did it better.

the truth is most people who know CA's talking points all too well are the same people that are too tired to bother calling CA on their BS. In their thread I was considering (for like the 1,000th time) of giving them some real suggestions, but they don't actually care about what is suggested to them. For example, making a way to detach units among other players and making a stop watch on replays and making the chat saved in the replay. All that is easy to do, very simple, but they won't do it. or they will do it one at a time so u have to buy the new game every year.

I like to think that the truth speaks for itself, but only to people who are paying attention and have seen the song and dance before.

unfortunately CA's market shifts somewhat with each game, and they focus on casual mass gamers who are majority children. Couple that with extremely lax consumer law enforcement inthis industry, especially over different nations, difficulty in developing video games over any other piece of software, Steam and other game download services, and DLC. you put all that together and you get games of decreasing quality, and it's a market wide trend, and not reversible.

this is a broad phenomenon which this modding tool fiasco is a good example of.

in 1998 Bungie released their developer tools for map making and for unit making with the game, then they integrated a "plugin" system so people could turn off 3rd party content on the fly in game. This is (literally) decades ahead of CA.

In the 90s the industry was in it's infancy, and since then over time game devs have learned they can keep decreasing quality without a correspondingly sever decrease in sales.

what all this means is, if you like video games, they are going to have less content/variation and even shorter lives tomorrow than they have today. this is good if you are in the business of selling games, but bad if you like to buy them.