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[BC]

Modding is "a declining trend", says Battlefield producer

DICE believes the once-popular practice of "modding" games – whereby amateur hobbyists take a published game and use tools provided by the developer to modify it into a new experience for players – is on the way out.

"Modding is a declining trend actually," said Patrick Bach, the executive producer on Battlefield 3, in an interview with Gameplanet. "It’s sad to say. We’ve seen some cool mods but since games are getting more complicated to build, it’s also getting more complicated to mod them, so it’s a declining trend as we see it. Sad but true."

Bach would not be drawn on whether Battlefield 3 will include any tools for modding: "We don’t have any information on that right now, at all."

Various mods have been released for previous games in DICE's Battlefield series, such as the Desert Combat modern warfare mod for Battlefield 1942.

Modding grew to prominence in the age of id Software's Quake in the mid '90s. Quake was readily modifiable and spawned many popular mods including Team Fortress and Rocket Arena. The popularity of mods peaked with the Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life, which was later acquired by Valve.

Once lauded as an avenue of growth, creativity and innovation in the games industry, modding's star has waned as more of the business has drifted away from PCs and onto console platforms, which have no modding capability.

thanks to Gameplanet



This will kind of sober people up on the mindset of game studios. This caused a lot of commotion amongst the mod/mapping community.

One of the best comments came from ZeRoY:
Douche of the day for Patrick Bach, "mods on the way out" http://bit.ly/g7i6xc tell you what Patrick, keep not releasing modtools and yeah.
http://twitter.com/TheRealZeRoY

Zeroy even asked:
@RammJaeger @TripwireYoshiro hey guys, please comment on this BS: http://bit.ly/g7i6xc #PC #MODS

A good rebuttal came from Yoshiro of Tripwire Interactive:
So, word around the internets is that modding is on the decline? News to us. RO and Killing Floor modding communities are going strong!
http://twitter.com/TripwireYoshiro

It's good to see the community come together. Especially good when a developer like Tripwire points out that Bachman's post is misleading.

While I am hoping that BF3 will live up to our expectations. Realize that they're part of the problem by not releasing Mod tools for the community.