The Endless Mission News

We're excited to introduce the voice actors for The Endless Mission, a sandbox style creation game where a rich narrative leads players through a world unlike any other. Having previously made their mark on iconic franchises like Mass Effect, Halo, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, and Fallout, the talents of Laura Bailey, Jennifer Hale, Alix Wilton Regan, Sara Amini, and Courtenay Taylor will all now be setting off on The Endless Mission later this year.

See them in action and get a glimpse of the story here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVNZ4s38Awg&feature=youtu.be

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Well, here we are. The final article of this series. It’s been quite a journey - we laughed, we cried, we had a heartfelt montage set to a song by Phil Collins. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the history of User Generated Content and all the myriad ways that it presents itself in video games, from level editors to full-blown game creation kits. UGC has come a long way since 1983’s Pinball Construction Set, with each game and piece of software building on everything that came before it. For our final article in this series, however, we will be looking forward instead of back. It’s time to see what kind of changes and innovations are in store for UGC in the future.

… And by “the future” we, of course, mean “The Endless Mission”.

Pictured: Our Marketing Team, excited that we’re finally talking about OUR game for a change


A lot of games with UGC features in the past came with limitations: In Super Mario Maker, you’re making levels specifically in the Super Mario template. Whatever you create in Halo 3’s Forge will always be used in the context of a multiplayer FPS. This is great for folks who are just starting out, as all the framework has been laid out for them, so they can focus solely on one or two aspects. You don’t have to know how to code up a fighting game just to make stages in Super Smash Bros. However, this also means that you can never expand beyond these limitations - no amount of creativity or ingenuity will let you make a racing game in Rollercoaster Tycoon (no, the go-kart track doesn’t count). Meanwhile, other UGC-heavy software goes in the complete opposite direction, tossing you into the deep end with no way to scale back. Sure, RPG Maker will let you build an RPG from the ground-up, but you always start with a blank canvas. Want to just add an extra dungeon onto a preexisting RPG, with all the pre-established mechanics in place? Sorry, no can do. Better start learning code. And math.

The only appropriate reaction to realizing you’ll have to use math

One of the goals of The Endless Mission is to break down these barriers and have every level of UGC complexity available in one game. You can start out loading up prebuilt games and making minor changes - adjusting some variables here, placing an extra power-up there, and so forth. Or maybe you start by doing a simple find-and-replace mod where you take out all of Enemy A and replace them with Enemy B. One you’ve mastered that, you can move onto crafting entire levels from scratch. All the behind-the-scenes code necessary for the game to behave the way it should is already there without you having to write it up, but everything about the level itself, from geometry to enemies to mechanics used, is up to you. The ultimate goal, of course, is to not have to rely on any prebuilt code at all. If you want to build a game entirely from the ground up, writing your own code and using your own assets, The Endless Mission will let you do that.

This sense of progression -- this pipeline from minor edits to crafting entirely original games -- is the crux of The Endless Mission. Our hope is that someone with absolutely zero experience in coding or game editing can pick up The Endless Mission and, after spending enough time with the game, can create something that is completely, uniquely theirs. The Endless Mission will turn players into creators in ways that no other game has done before.

Today, you’re putting a fully-controllable race car in an otherwise-standard RTS just for a laugh. Tomorrow, you’ll be making a car-based RTS from scratch because that joke ended up being actually fun. That’s the power of The Endless Mission (and cars).



… Yeah, we might’ve forced that title a bit, sorry.

One of the biggest roadblocks with games that have UGC features has always been the fact that not all the skills one learns while using those features are transferable to other platforms. Sure, conceptual lessons like “treat the player fairly”, “playtest and iterate”, and “please stop using the editor to make naughty images” can and should apply across multiple games (especially that last one), but knowledge regarding specific toolsets and their strengths and weaknesses do not. It doesn’t matter how much you know about using Dreams or the insanely awesome content you’re able to craft in it (and you can indeed craft some insanely awesome things) - the moment you move onto another game, you’re back to square one. Not even game making tools are immune to this - move from Adventure Game Studio over to M.U.G.E.N, and you have to learn an entirely new interface and non-standard coding language just to get up to speed.

The pineapple symbolizes a new UGC Tool. Captain Blackclaw symbolizes the huge leap that’s required whenever you want to learn a new tool. Our High School Lit teachers would be proud.

Again, making the skills you learn be transferable to other applications was a major goal for us when creating The Endless Mission. We wanted it to be so that anyone who mastered The Endless Mission’s full editor (after working their way up to it - see the previous section) would be able to move onto other, professional game-making tools without missing a beat. How do we plan to accomplish this? Well, The Endless Mission is created in Unity, one of the biggest and most-used game engines in the world. Why not simply base our in-game editor on what we used to create it?

If The Endless Mission’s editor looks familiar to you, congratulations! That was totally the point.

When creating the editor for The Endless Mission, we based many of its features on what Unity already uses. Concepts such as dividing the game up into scenes, having a game-wide hierarchy, tools like the library or inspector, and even the decision to use C# as the editor’s default programming language are all based on what Unity uses. In short, The Endless Mission’s editor is essentially a “shell” around Unity - a Unity editor inside a Unity game.

The end result of all this? We believe The Endless Mission is the perfect on-ramp to learning Unity, as well as other similar professional game engines. Everything in our editor has a direct counterpart in Unity, simply streamlined to function within our game. Whatever lessons and concepts you learn while using our tools will be directly applicable should you choose to move onto Unity. This is called having a transferable skill set, and it’s what sets The Endless Mission apart from the UGC-focused games that came before it: If you can master The Endless Mission at its most complex, you will already have everything you need to master Unity, and the learning skill to pick up other engines.


User Generated Content has come a long, long way since the days of Pinball Construction Set, Lode Runner, and Castle Smurfenstein. What once was just unofficial mods and basic level editors has paved the way to creating full games and other experiences, and it is our hope that The Endless Mission will continue this proud tradition. For us, it’s not just about giving players the power to create whatever they want, but the resources to learn content creation at their own pace and the ability to use that knowledge, both conceptual and technical, outside of the game. We want The Endless Mission to not just be the next generation of UGC-focused games, but the first one to provide a means - not just the desire - for players to turn their creativity into a career, with a community that will help and support them every step of the way.

What will you make in our game? The possibilities are simply... endless (... yes, we’ve been sitting on that pun until just the right moment)

Thank you for joining us on this journey through the history of UGC. We will be starting a closed beta very soon for those of you who signed up for it, and we will officially launch into Early Access not long after. Here’s to the future of User Generated Content, and we hope to see you all soon in The Endless Mission!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Hey there, folks! We’re in the home stretch now! Yes, sadly it’s true: While we’ve all been having fun these past few weeks getting our learn on, next week’s article will be the last in this series. We know, we’re inconsolable, too.

We haven’t been this upset since paying full price for a game right before the Steam Summer Sale

We’ve covered a lot of ground these past weeks looking at the history of UGC. We’ve seen games about making games (and more!). Software that lets you make fully-featured games from the code on up. Fans taking matters into their own hands and modding games that otherwise had no UGC to speak of. What could possibly be left to go over in this penultimate article?


… Oh. Uh… Yeah, there’s that.

To be a bit more specific about it: We’ve been spending most of our time discussing games and software where UGC - specifically, the kind of UGC that involves game making - is the “main” objective. However, there are many, many games out there that have other kinds of UGC as well. Character creators, level editors, simulation games with a “sandbox mode”... Any game with any sort of editor or creation system in place totally counts as UGC! This is especially true in the modern era, where platforms like Steam Workshop allow users to share their creations with players the world over.

Now, it probably goes without saying that we can’t cover every single game with UGC elements like this, and even trimming it down to a “Greatest Hits” selection would still be quite large. Thus, we’ll be going through examples much more quickly here than in previous articles, highlighting what high quality or unique UGC each game brought to the table before moving on. Now hold on tight - the UGC Train has no brakes!

Though maybe it should


Simulation and construction games fill a weird niche in UGC-focused titles: sure, you have a lot of freedom to build stuff, but only if you have the resources to do so and follow the rules. Does this make them “real” UGC games, since you can’t just build whatever you want? If we assume they at least get an honorable mention, then the first game in this genre would be Utopia, released on the Intellivision back in 1982 (yes, even before the first “true” UGC title, Pinball Construction Set). This multiplayer game had two players build up cities on adjacent islands to see who can be more successful.

What do you do when you literally run out of room on the cartridge before implementing any sort of opponent AI? Just claim the game is multiplayer-only! Yes, really.


Released the same year as Pinball Construction Set (and Castle Smurfenstein), this puzzle-platformer game contained 150 levels in addition to a full-blown level editor. While not devoted solely to creation like PCS was, this marked one of the first times a game contained a separate level editor mode.


In this NES classic, players could design their own tracks to race on, making this not only one of the first Nintendo games with UGC (a tradition they’d proudly continue, as we have already seen in previous articles and will continue to see in this one), but also one of the first editors available on a console platform, proving that UGC would not only be a “PC thing.”


Another Nintendo classic, this puzzle game starring Mario also contained a level editor, beating out Super Mario Maker by a whopping 30 years.

Plumber, Doctor, Demolitionist… That deadbeat Mario can’t hold down a job for more than five minutes, can he?


If Utopia was the first construction/simulation game, SimCity is the game that made the genre popular, spawning a metric ton of spin-offs. Like Utopia, there was no “sandbox” mode where you could build whatever you want with no restrictions, but it was still fun seeing what you could create even while following the rules and restrictions the game had in place.


This cult-classic puzzle game tasks you with fixing broken contraptions clearly inspired by the works of cartoonist Rube Goldburg. In addition to the puzzles, there was a “freeform” mode where players could build whatever you wanted, whether they were complete machines or even more puzzles for others to solve.


Given that Lego is all about building things, it’s only natural that numerous Lego video games would have some level of UGC in them. The most famous of these would probably be Lego Racers - in this game, not only was your avatar fully customizable, but you could build your car brick by brick, with unique physics based on how many pieces you used and where they were placed. Just be prepared to have that menu music stuck in your head forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzwV5085Vvo
You’re welcome.


Well, we couldn’t use that gif above and not tip our hat to the game that provided it, now can we? RollerCoaster Tycoon was all about making and managing your own amusement park, with emphasis on the fact that you could lay out the track for certain attractions (like roller coasters, naturally) however you wanted, rather than just plopping down a static building. And yes, this absolutely included just letting your coasters fly off the rails and slam into populated areas. You monster.


Out of all the spin-offs SimCity created, The Sims was far-and-away the most successful. This game essentially “scaled down” the scope of SimCity by having you manage a household of people (called Sims) rather than an entire city. You had lots of control over your Sims’ appearances and how they developed, but if you ever got tired of having them pass out in their own filth taking care of them, you could simply load up an empty lot and build your dream home with unlimited funds instead. You could also take pictures and save them in a family scrapbook, which many players used to tell epic stories about them passing out in their own filth.


Not entirely unlike The Sims mentioned above, this charming little life simulator is all about living in a small town and making friends with all your animal neighbors. The ability to customize both your avatar and your home have existed since the original game, but due to the massive popularity of these elements, they’ve been expanded on in every entry. It’s gotten to the point they’ve even made a spin-off title, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, that’s all about making your own homes!

We were going to write a hilarious, in-character rant for Mr. Resetti that would be longer than the rest of this article, but then we remembered we aren’t paid by the word for this


Loved building roller coasters in RollerCoaster Tycoon, but hated all that pesky management stuff? Ultimate Ride is the game for you! This Disney(!) game let you build and ride any coaster that you wanted in full 3D (hey, this was impressive back in 2001), with no monetary restrictions. There was a mission mode, but rather than managing funds or keeping parkgoers happy, you were tasked with making coasters that not only met certain requirements, but also remained safe enough that people could actually ride them, using the game’s surprisingly detailed physics simulation system to track G-Forces and the like. This game was a great example of UGC being used for educational purposes - in this case, physics and structural engineering.


Character customization has been a thing in Massively Multiplayer Online games since the very beginning - after all, how else are you going to make your avatar unique compared to everyone else’s? City of Heroes, however, decided to take it one step further and introduced the Mission Architect. This feature allowed you to create custom quests in the game that other players could then play through and even earn EXP and items from. It was pretty ambitious for an MMO… and hey, it beats doing the same “kill 20 sewer rats” mission over and over to level grind.


Here’s a weird, not-quite-a-game-exactly entry for ya: when the Nintendo Wii launched, it came with the ability to create system-wide avatars called Miis. What made Miis unique compared to other avatar features in the past is how they interacted with games - many multiplayer games gave you the option to play as your Mii in addition to the usual cast of characters, giving your Mii a lot more prominence and importance than usual for this kind of avatar. Even if playing as your Mii wasn’t an option, there was a good chance that any and all Miis you created on the system would pop up in cameo roles in any given game (usually in crowd shots). This clever integration of UGC into all sorts of games is still used by Nintendo today, and there are even a few games (Tomodachi Life, Miitopia, etc.) that are based entirely on these little guys.


The third entry of this gobsmackingly successful franchise introduced The Forge, a game mode where players could edit multiplayer maps and create custom games. While this mode would be included in many future Halo games as well, this technically isn’t the first time the franchise dipped its toe in the UGC pool - users were already using previous games in the franchise to create machinima, such as the ever-popular Red vs. Blue series that started in 2003 using the original Halo: Combat Evolved.

The office is still taking bets on which will end first: the Halo franchise or Red vs. Blue


Also jokingly referred to as “SimEverything”, Spore was a simulation game about tending to the evolutionary rise of lifeforms on a planet, from primordial ooze to space-traveling races. In addition to having your species evolve naturally through gameplay choices, you could also use the Spore Creature Creator to just jump right in and handcraft the perfect specimen. Additionally, the creatures you created didn’t just change your game - as you traveled to other planets, the creatures you encountered there were ones that other players had brought up, meaning every player’s creation had an impact on the game as a whole.


In addition to finally making the dream fight of Mario vs. Sonic a reality (look, this was a big deal for 90s kids, okay?), Super Smash Bros. Brawl brought a Stage Builder mode to the franchise. The one in Brawl was very basic, but subsequent games would improve on it more and more. Also, those Miis we talked about earlier? Starting in the next game, they’d become playable fighters, too, and both them and stages could be shared with others online. Time to go make a Mii of [YouTube Influencer you disagree with] and beat the stuffing out of them!


Most games that have a built-in editor will let you do things like build levels or customize characters. When Overwatch debuted its Workshop mode, however, it went the extra mile, letting players straight-up write scripts and edit the code directly to create drastically new and different game modes. It can be pretty surreal booting up a team-based FPS and then playing a 2.5D beat-em-up instead, but you do you.

And then someone found a way to recreate Portal in it, because of course they did


Okay, one more roller coaster game for the road: Planet Coaster brings all the best aspects of previous theme park simulators together, having both a robust career mode where you have to manage funds and research as well as a sandbox mode where you can go nuts. It also features full freeform building for all structures, allowing players to create some truly unique designs and setpieces. You can even import your own 3D models into the game if the items that are already there aren’t enough!


Phew! That was a lot of games. They may not have fully embraced UGC as their “main” component (or had it thrust upon them by modders) like some of the games we discussed in previous weeks did, but their impact and influence should not be denied. Any one of these games could be the first step on someone’s journey from player to designer, and indeed, more often than not, it is. After all, someone enjoying a game and then deciding to check out its side-mode devoted to UGC is far more likely than them, say, downloading Garry’s Mod out of the blue and building a new game from scratch.

Be sure to check back next week for the epic series finale of The Endless Mission and the History of UGC! Don’t worry, there won’t be any arbitrary, character-wrecking plot twists that exist solely to “subvert expectations” - instead, we’ll be looking at where we go from here, and what the future of UGC will contain (spoiler alert: the answer may involve The Endless Mission). See you then!

CONTINUE TO PART SEVEN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources: videoblocks.com, imgur.com, Mattel, Wikipedia, Nintendo, Redbull.com, youtube.com/norlag,

Hi! We're back at it again and this time...it's for real.

We're happy to announce The Endless Mission will soon be entering into a closed beta and we'd like you to be a part of it.

SIGN UP HERE

We want to connect with you and begin testing the various features, tools, stories, and elements throughout the game. Some times we'll ask what you think about certain sections, while other times we'll be looking at the entire game from top to bottom. We'll explain more about that as the process goes on.

For right now, we need to learn a bit more about you so our testing can be as complete as possible. If you've been selected for the first round, you'll be getting more updates from us soon! If you're not, don't worry! We're going to be steadily increasing the size of the closed beta as we get closer and closer to our Early Access Launch (the number of beta participants will be determined by the number of eligible respondents).

Thanks again and we can't wait to share what we've been working on with you!

~ The Endless Mission Team

p.s. We encourage you to share this survey with friends that might be interested as well. You can do so with this link.

• Follow this link to Sign Up
• Fill out the Sign Up Form completely and accurately by Thursday, June 27th @ 11:59p PST
  
• If accepted, you'll hear from us with further instructions at the email address you provided during the sign up process
  

Hey there, creators! Who’s hungry for some Mods?

Our investors didn’t appreciate it when we told them our plan to “get more dough” was to start a pizza business

Wait… That’s not the kind of Mod we’re talking about today? Uh… hold on a sec…

Mod Pizza

MOD Pizza is a fast casual pizza restaurant chain based in the United States. Founded in Seattle, Washington, in 2008, MOD has more than 400 locations in the United States and United Kingdom. MOD is a company that is claimed by its owners to be "more about the people than the pizza" and to focus on paying living wages and providing employees with opportunities to give back to the community.


We’ve been looking at a lot of games (and software) that are entirely focused on letting users create new content, but not every game is like that, of course. Many games are all about playing through a perfectly crafted experience, and thus don’t have room to allow users to create whatever absurd things they can think of. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but it can lead to players wanting… more.

And thus mods are born.

As the old saying goes: Lack of Thomas the Tank Engine in Skyrim is the Mother of Invention

Game mods are any sort of alteration created by users that change how a game plays. As such, game mods can easily be seen as a variation on the more traditional styles of UGC we’ve been discussing in previous weeks. There are many, many different kinds of mods out there, and to try and cover them all would be an exercise in futility. Some merely exist to patch bugs or make gameplay fixes that the original developers did not do. Others add new content to preexisting games, from new weapons and items to entire campaigns. Others still simply replace assets in the game with different ones, either to upgrade the graphics of the game piece by piece or to allow for completely absurd scenarios, like the infamous “Really Useful Dragons” mod pictured above. There are even mods that dig into the game’s code to find and restore content that was removed by the original developers… sometimes for good reason.

Pic Unrelated

Some companies don’t like it when users mod their games - adding a new overpowered weapon that only you have to an online multiplayer game, for instance, is generally frowned upon - but many others, such as Valve and Bethesda, embrace the modding community with open arms. Needless to say, this has resulted in mods becoming an indisputable and massively influential part of the gaming community.

For the purposes of this article, we are only going to look at a handful of examples. There is a large number of massively popular games with equally large modding communities - Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, etc. - and we simply cannot cover them all. Instead, we’ll be focusing most of our energy on games that had mods that themselves have made a large impact on the industry. But enough talk, let’s get to it!

“This is how a normal person walks, right?” - Castle Wolfenstein’s Cover Artist, presumably

Trivia Time: What is generally accepted as the first video game mod ever created? The original game (as you might have guessed given… ya know… the title of this section) was Castle Wolfenstein, released in 1981, but the first mod created for it wouldn’t come out until two years later in 1983. That’s right, the same year as Pinball Construction Set! Man, 1983 was a big year for UGC of all stripes, wasn’t it?

In any case, back in the early 80s, teenagers Andrew Johnson and Preston Nevins were huge fans of the original Castle Wolfenstein. However, they felt as though the Nazi antagonists weren’t particularly threatening (again: it was the 80s), so they decided to go into the game and replace them with something much more threatening.

Naturally, they choose Smurfs.

Rumors that Gargamel was their third programming buddy are unconfirmed

Using only a paint program, sector editor, and Muse Software’s “Voice”, Andrew and Preston created Castle Smurfenstein, a full-game conversion of Castle Wolfenstein. All the Nazi guards were replaced with Smurfs, complete with new Smurf audio in place of German. They also created new title and closing screens, and even composed a new opening theme. In doing so, they created what is considered the first game mod, opening the door for all others.

The duo would go on to create another mod in the form of Dino Smurf, a parody of the game Dino Eggs, before college would put an end to their anti-Smurf propaganda days. However, their impact on gaming cannot be overstated, as it is because of them that mods thrive to this very day.

And so do Smurfs. Unfortunately.

It’s been 26 years, and they still haven’t explained what’s up with that second Space Marine in the background

Doom is a game that needs no introduction - it’s theclassic first-person shooter that put the genre on the map. It proved the effectiveness of shareware as a marketing tactic. It crashed university servers across the country due to so many college kids wanting to do multiplayer deathmatches. It generated a firestorm of controversy over its violence and satanic imagery (despite the fact that said violence was directed at said satanic imagery… go figure). But we’re not here to talk about all that; we’re here to talk about the mods.

Doom was created by id Software, and its founders, Tom Hall and John Carmack, recalled how their previous title, Wolfenstein 3D, received a good number of mods from fans (no word on how much Smurf killing was involved this time). Thus, they decided to go out of their way and make sure that Doom would be simple for anyone to go in and mod. All of Doom’s assets, such as maps, sprites, textures, and so forth, were stored in a file completely separate from the game’s engine. This made it a simple affair for novice coders to go in and create their own levels without having to mess with the game’s code directly. By 1994, they would release more user-friendly tools to make modding their game even easier.

Besides custom levels, swapping out art assets was another popular mod choice, facilitating some… pretty surreal crossovers

Doom would mark the first time that the developer of a game would offer so much support for its own modding community, rather than simply leaving them to their own devices. This resulted in the game reaching even further heights in popularity, and the concept of game mods breaking fully into the public conscious of the gaming community. Many a game developer’s career would begin by making Doom mods, including id Software’s very own Tim Willits. If Castle Wolfenstein was the first game to feature mods, Doom was the game that made sure they were here to stay.

The Doom modding community is still alive and well, by the way - not just for later games in the franchise, but for the 1993 classic as well. As recently as last year, one of the original designers on the game, John Romero, released a large level pack for the original game in celebration of its 25th anniversary. This game, it seems, is as unstoppable as Doomguy himself.

We won’t make the easy joke here because 1) It’s not funny, 2) It’s not original, and 3) …

It may have been id Software that was the first to establish a relationship between a developer and the fans who mod their games, but Valve was the one who proved just how successful such a relationship could be. When Half-Life came out in 1998, Valve made the software development kit for the game’s engine, GoldSrc, available for users to mess around in. A year later in 1999, college student Minh Le, with help from his friend Jess Cliffe, released a mod for the game called Counter-Strike. While Half-Life was a single-player experience, Counter-Strike was a team-based multiplayer game where you played as either a terrorist or counter-terrorist while trying to complete various objectives.

Ah, 1999... The Glory Days of the “Real is Brown” mentality in video game graphics

By 2000, the mod had gotten so popular that Valve came to Minh and Jess with an offer - they wanted to not only buy the rights to Counter-Strike, but hire the duo to continue working on updates for the game. They agreed, and Counter-Strike went from fan mod to commercial release to, eventually, a multi-million dollar franchise that has hundreds of thousands of players to this very day.

Counter-Strike was one of the first games to bridge the fan mod to official release gap, and in doing so proved once and for all that mods weren’t just a hobby or even a “stepping stone” to bigger things, but a genuine means of entering the game industry proper. Valve, for their part, would continue this practice of scouting out modders to hire to turn their creations into commercial products, as we will see in the very next entry…

Wanna make a gamer feel old? Act like you’re surprised that Warcraft was anything other than an MMO.

Now, wait a second here: How is Valve associated with Warcraft? That’s a Blizzard game! It says so right there on the box! Well, hunker down, ‘cuz it’s gonna get a little crazy.

Back when Blizzard Entertainment released Warcraft II, they included a free “world editor” in the game that let players create custom scenarios and maps for the game, which could then be shared online (or, if it was a multiplayer set-up, play it with others) via their Battle.net service. Once Warcraft III came out in 2002, it was only natural that they’d bring this feature back and expand on it. Within the year, a guy by the name of Eul (real name: Kyle Sommer), inspired by the custom StarCraft map known as “Aeon of Strife”, would release a brand new scenario called Defense of the Ancients, or DotA.

Yup, that’s right: the entire Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre started as a game mod.

MOBAs: Putting a new twist on the phrase “Stay in your Lane”

While Eul wouldn’t continue to update DotA after the original release, several other modders would take over, including Steve “Guinsoo” Feak and IceFrog (real name unknown… yes, really). Now, this is when things start getting wild, so try to keep up: Guinsoo would eventually stop working on DotA and join Riot Games, using his knowledge from working on DotA to help create the MOBA mega-hit, League of Legends. Valve, meanwhile, knowing a good idea when they saw one, swooped in and hired IceFrog to make DotA 2 from the ground up for them as, despite originally being a mod for a Blizzard game, Blizzard did not ever try to claim a copyright on the name or concept. Not to be outdone, Blizzard would respond to this by creating their own MOBA in the form of Heroes of the Storm. So in summary - The original DotA was a mod of a Blizzard game, one dev on that team would go on to help make LoL with Riot Games, Valve would get the rights to make DotA 2 with the help of another dev from the same team, and Blizzard would make HotS all on their own. Got all that?

We’ll take your stunned silence as a “Yes”

DotA perhaps represents the peak of what game mods can do. It was a fan-made mod, made possible by the support of devs for their modding communities, that not only went on to become a commercial success, but in the process create an entire new game genre that would sky-rocket in popularity soon after. If there was ever a question as to whether or not UGC could make a wide-scale impact on the gaming industry, DotA is proof that it absolutely can.

… And if you’re ever getting ticked off over that little brat Teemo ganking you yet again, at least now you know exactly who to blame.

The face of pure, unadulterated evil

Look who’s back, back again…

… Hey, we told you we’d come back around to Minecraft eventually, didn’t we? Just took us like two whole articles to get there.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, mods are a very popular feature for many modern games, bolstered no doubt by success stories like those in the previous entries in this article. There’s no way we could possibly cover all of them here, so we figured that singling out one to highlight would suffice. Thus, it’s time to bring back Minecraft!

Modding in Minecraft is almost as old as Minecraft itself, and is indeed one of the major factors in the game’s astronomical success. Mods took off so fast because the original version of Minecraft was programmed using Java, a coding language that’s very easy to pick apart and edit. In fact, even though a new version of Minecraft that is coded in C++ rather than Java was later released by Mojang, they are still keeping the Java version up-to-date alongside the C++ version, specifically because they didn’t want to abandon all the modders who had done their projects in Java. And yes, there have been a number of Minecraft modders who have since been hired by Mojang to work on the game proper as well. Talk about a strong relationship between the developers and the modders, huh?

Bibliocraft is just one of the many, many mods that adds new items for you to build… And is also one of the many, many mods whose name is just [Something]craft. Hey, no one said modders had to be good with titles.

Of course, it’s easy to see why Mojang would want to keep the modders happy, as some of the things they’ve created are insanely impressive. Many mods have added features that would go on to be included in official updates due to their popularity - the Mo’ Creatures mod, for instance, had horses long before they were put in the game proper. Others focus on optimization, UI improvements, or plain making the game prettier. Additionally, since you can host servers in Minecraft that others can join, you and your online buddies can even experience the changes these mods offer together! It was this kind of multiplayer-focused modding that lead to the creation of MinecraftEdu, which some of us here at E-Line had a hand in developing with Mojang’s full support.

A Creeper blew up my--- Wait, we used that joke last time, never mind

However, as much as we’d like to toot our own horn when it comes to multiplayer Minecraft mods, our work isn’t the biggest success story in that regard. That honor would have to go to the Survival Games mod first released in 2012, just three years after Minecraft’s initial release. Inspired by the Hunger Games novels and film adaptations, this mod turns a Minecraft server into a brutal free-for-all where dozens of players must search for resources and battle each other to be the last blocky person standing. The map starts out huge but, as time goes on, it gets smaller and smaller to force confrontations between players. Sound familiar?

… Well, okay, yes, but if you’re citing THIS, you’re an even bigger nerd than we thought

Yup. Much like DotA before it, the Survival Games mod in Minecraft would go on to inspire an entire game genre, in this case Battle Royale. Before Fortnite, before PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, there was this humble Minecraft mod.

Minecraft is perhaps the ultimate summation of all mod-heavy games that came before it. It is a game that thrived as much as it did because of its mod support. The company behind it recognized this, and fostered a healthy relationship with their modding community. And ultimately, the work of these modders would wind up making a huge impact on the gaming industry as a whole. All of this, and even at ten years old, there are no signs of Minecraft slowing down. Who knows what these modders will do next? Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Until then, there’s always the pig poop mod


Mods may not be a fully-intended feature of all games, but they nonetheless provide an opportunity for some truly unique cases of UGC. They have opened the door for people looking to get into the game industry in a multitude of ways, and in the greatest cases have made an impact on the industry itself. Those of us working on The Endless Mission are well aware of just how powerful and transformative mods can be, and you can rest assured that the game will cater to that in many, many ways. As for next week, we’ll be going through “the rest of the best” when it comes to games with UGC - games that provided plenty of opportunities for users to create even when it wasn’t the focus. See you then!

CONTINUE TO PART SIX

https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/

Image Sources:
Mod Pizza, Eurogamer, bhatpsych.com, wikipedia.org, uic.edu, hollywoodreporter.com, id software, polygon.com, techspot.com, youtube.com/ggwp, spauldinggrp.com, mobafire.com, microsoft.com, bibliocraftmod.com, jasonwilmot.com, pcgamesn.com