was not originally intended to be released on PC, the devs told people they had little to no experience working with the platform. Then a certain petition gathered 100k+ votes and the stance was changed to "you want it that badly? We'll do our best". And when the port turned out to be... not flawless, the fans had a choice: either they help with mods that would enhance the PC version and make it good or the devs might think that turning to PC wasn't the best idea and then DS2 would probably be a console exclusive. I see this as an example of community helping the game be the way the devs originally meant it to be.

The topicstarter's afraid the devs will get lazy with all the fan support and will no longer bother making high quality games, hmm? The tombstones on the graves of .dat (Disciples 3 dev) and Jowood (Gothic 4 publisher) make me think that it's not really an issue. And Troika did cease to exist after VTM:B
Now for the artistic value issue. How are devs different from modders? Are they all not human beings with imagination, creativity and skills to express themselves via software? Why should we choose to think that the artistic value of a vanilla game is higher than that of a modded one? Of course, there are different games and different mods, but seriously, to hate people who just want to express themselves and to claim their efforts are disrupting the essence of the game? Isn't it a bit too harsh?
Some mods don't break the immersion but actually keep it up. The little details that might bug you (a bolt on the wrong side of rifles, ugly facial textures of NPCs, unnatural weather effects etc.) are corrected by those who already experienced the game and know how to make it even more immersive,

All that being said, to mod or not to mod is not a question really. Do whatever works best for you, whatever makes you enjoy the games you play.

very well said +1

I don't hate modding/modders. I hate people who think it's a good excuse to release buggy unplayable messes of games. >.>

If your game isn't playable out of the box, then you have a bad game. Not that it's innately bad, but the first question any good customer should ask is this: Can I use my purchase in the way it was intended? If no, then your product is bad. Could you imagine in any other industry that people could get away with it? Say Martin releases his next book with a shit ton of bad editing and misspelled words, because "HEY, A FAN WILL TOTALLY FIX IT!" We'd be pretty mad.

I love that people CAN use their ability to better the experiences, but I strongly dislike when devs use that as a crutch. Yes, Bethesda, I'm looking squarely at you. (Obsidian as well, to some degree, they've always been pretty bad about buggy releases, but I give them a pass because they're usually being saddled by some shitty publisher rushing their products out.)

Modders brought us Desert Combat (and others, but this was the biggie) for Battlefield 1942. For that alone I can't hate them. On top of that one can add all of the community efforts to fix games that the developer gave up on.

Well, the non-personal nature of internet discussions do at worst bring out the least free-spirited, the least argued, the least generous kind of responses... and I do think that the aggressiveness at non-normative opinions is at times astoundingly cruel.

I have once been at the receiving end of this behavior, on actually a moral stand point that I cannot see at fault at all, and I shall again be so if need be, but I admit it is rather tough.

On these bases, would you say your OP was well presented and amiably argued, to the point of making your haters shame themselves?

Ever since Oblivion, I have not encountered a single game-breaking bug in any of the Bethesda's games. Presumably, most console players didn't happen to do that either. The 'Bethesda's games need to be modded to be playable' is one of the biggest lies I've seen floating around the internet, usually spread by people who just don't enjoy games as Bethesda makes them and need the modding for their enjoyment. That doesn't change the fact that Bethesda releases quality products and don't rely on people to fix their bugs (if they did, they would not patch their products extensively.) Yes, their titles are buggy - but with games that massive, it would be a miracle if they weren't.

Funny thing about Obsidian - every single publisher they have ever worked for was an 'Evil publisher who didn't give them enough time'. Makes one think that the fault might not lie on the publishers after all...

edit: Yay, I'm repeating myself from a couple of posts upwards! Slow topic is slow

im one of those people who thinks you should not play game modded at first unless the mod is strictly a bug fixer or makes the game playable on modern system (like widescreen mods for fallout, PST)
then after 2-3 hours you can get the idea of the core game and install mods.

The OP is just silly. Is offended by people telling he is crazy for not wanting mods which is just crazy thing to do. Don't want to install mods then dont. why should one care that a random person on interwebs is telling you that you are wrong?
also makes incorrect assumption that because modders can fix stuff then it means devs won't fix bugs. I am not aware of single case of it ever happening. it didn't happen with total war series (quiet opposite. they locked off modding and the games are even more buggier) or with Elder Scrolls or Witcher games...

it is silly post. don't want use mods then DONT. it is just that simple.
I absolutely adore obsidian but you are right. KOTOR2 is the exception. they DID not give them enough time and they really cannot be blamed in what state the game was.
south park got all the money and time it needed. we will see how it turns out.


saying that: kotor2 is one of my fav. games and alpha protocol was my best game of 2010

I never understood the hate for AP. The only thing I may have to say against it is that I expected way more difference from my second playthrough.

I like my games vanilla but if people want to use mods, why not? I'm more worried about the whole relying on fanbase to patch, Vampire Bloodlines had this happen but the devs had the plug pulled from them mid patching. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those patch/mod guys were the original devs who took their craft quite serious. I've noticed outside of GOG (one or two games I have from GOG had this problem though) a lot of rereleased games had a lot of old problems that should be ironed out before releasing it.

no. it had not. You are talking from perspective of time. after a decade of fanbase work. Developers did not rely on fanbase at all. mods or not the game would be in the same state at the release and afterwards as it was. no they are not. at first there were a lot of random people who committed themselves to fixing the game. not connected to devs (but i did hear they helped a bit) but modders especially Wesp did incredible job in fixing the game


Bloodlines is one of the best examples why mods are needed... no, why they are our right to have. if the game was not moddable it would be not playable at all on modern system. and it would be a broken piece of shit on system it supposed to work.

Well I"m not blaming devs but if a distributor like say Steam decides to re release the game on digital distribution and leaves a major bug in that makes the game nigh unplayable (I believe that bloodlines did not work if you had more than 2gigs of memory on a 64bit Windows platform) than it kind of forces the user to rely on a third party patch. I was lucky and found Wesp's awesome work on Patch Scroll site. I'm just saying these games shouldn't be sold to the user by a distributor and not at least cleared of major bugs like that without at least warning the user that they may have to fetch fixes.

but it is not an issue with mods you presented. steam and gog release broken games all the time. most of them don't have mod support.

I don't know about the rest of the games but my friend, who doesn't know much from PCs, encountered some nasty bugs in Skyrim with Esbern preventing him from progressing the main quest. After some haphazard solutions to those bugs, he reached the Season Unending Quest, only to find out that the speech between the parties couldn't proceed because Esbern was mute. After I installed the sound files for him, he was quite surprised to hear Esbern talk, because up to this point my friend knew him as Esbern the Mute Bugmaster.

What I'm asking is; were you lucky enough with Esbern that you didn't need to use the console or something similar?

I don't even know who Esbern is, but looking at uesp.net, this bug only triggers when certain conditions are met - and that's exactly my point, TES games are so massive that testing everything, all the possible combinations, is beyond the capabilities of just about any studio and the only real way to get rid of all the bugs would be to make the game smaller, with much less content.

That said, most people (note that I'm not saying all of them) will only encounter minor bugs, not game breakers - at least that's the experience voiced by people playing TES either on console or without mods that I know of