For me, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 modding was the golden age of FPS gaming. The life of a single game purchase was extended well beyond any expectations because of the creativity of the modders.
Unfortunately, mods like Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and many others are getting developed and released as “Full games” now, to the detriment of the gamer and the industry.
Now we’re in the age of relatively easy to use game engines, where anyone can develop and release a game, but there are so many games flooding the market that you look at and think “Why would you release this?”. In the past, I truly believe these types of games would have been relegated to the modding scene and filtered properly through the communities to gain popularity naturally and organically rather than getting huge marketing budgets pushing us to buy the next big thing or FOMO.
Companies and customers alike need verisimilitude to be as easy as slapping down some textured boxes. Procedural generation should’ve taken off circa 2006, but it got to trees and just… stopped. Even as the cost of hiring artists to arrange trash in corners kept creeping up. It’s really not that difficult to have a program generate endless unique concrete walls, at any resolution you can imagine. You can either ship the big dumb bitmaps or ship the tiny program that makes them. But for some reason the industry’s not even done that, so we’re decades behind.
It’s obviously possible to have whole building interiors emerge as soon as you draw their dimensions, and use paintbrushes that rot away the walls with decades of water damage, for at least a plausibly boring first pass. I’m not even talking about “AI” nonsense. This is just rule-based stuff that demoscene maniacs can somehow fit in a tweet.
For me, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 modding was the golden age of FPS gaming. The life of a single game purchase was extended well beyond any expectations because of the creativity of the modders.
Unfortunately, mods like Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and many others are getting developed and released as “Full games” now, to the detriment of the gamer and the industry.
Now we’re in the age of relatively easy to use game engines, where anyone can develop and release a game, but there are so many games flooding the market that you look at and think “Why would you release this?”. In the past, I truly believe these types of games would have been relegated to the modding scene and filtered properly through the communities to gain popularity naturally and organically rather than getting huge marketing budgets pushing us to buy the next big thing or FOMO.
I totally agree with you mate!
Companies and customers alike need verisimilitude to be as easy as slapping down some textured boxes. Procedural generation should’ve taken off circa 2006, but it got to trees and just… stopped. Even as the cost of hiring artists to arrange trash in corners kept creeping up. It’s really not that difficult to have a program generate endless unique concrete walls, at any resolution you can imagine. You can either ship the big dumb bitmaps or ship the tiny program that makes them. But for some reason the industry’s not even done that, so we’re decades behind.
It’s obviously possible to have whole building interiors emerge as soon as you draw their dimensions, and use paintbrushes that rot away the walls with decades of water damage, for at least a plausibly boring first pass. I’m not even talking about “AI” nonsense. This is just rule-based stuff that demoscene maniacs can somehow fit in a tweet.
I shill this everywhere, but have you tried Terraria?
There is a mod called Calamity, which extends the game so much, in every direction, I always recommend it.