I feel kinda sad in a way when I think about Doom 2016. Old Doom has a fantastic modding scene out there, with mods like Brutal Doom to wacky stuff like a No Man's Sky mod. Doom 2016 has...SnapMap. A good idea, mind you, it's just it's really the only thing available to get longevity out of Doom. I understand that modern Doom is a much more complex game and assets and such aren't as easily available as a game from the early 90s, but it still makes me sad because I think in a lot of ways, new Doom really could benefit from a great modding scene.

It's a game that takes a gameplay and level design approach over narrative and world building. Not many modern games that aren't rogue-like or rogue-lite do that. It's especially true of so called 'AAA' games. As such, I think this game will just fade into 'yeah that was a neat single player game back in the day' when the game could've had a legacy like the original had. But I guess that's kinda the curse, it's easier to draw a picture than to sculpt a sculpture and it's just easier to design levels in original Doom than modern Doom. Perhaps that's a symptom of the modern age. It still makes me sad a bit, but at least we have the original Doom.

A lot of people, especially the Doom modding communities, saw this coming the second Snapmap was announced.

Also, I think even if the new Doom had custom tools to allow modding, it still wouldn't take off that much. It's simply too much work to make a map, model, or mod for current gen games than it was/is from stuff back in the 90s. More work will go into making a character model look great and animate properly nowadays than it would take to make a nice big complete level for something like original Doom.

I miss the days when almost every PC game had mods.

I don't know. I thought the game was too long as it was. Not sure I need any more in any form.

As someone who used to contribute to the CS modding community I felt this way as soon as I booted up SnapMap. Snap Map had a fantastic way to teach people how to make things with it but it was so limited in what it could do. It's like the developers were scared to let anyone make their game function in a way that broke the mechanics or deviated from what was outlined in their design document.

You could do some things, but any modding editor that doesn't allow for custom content just isn't going to produce much long lasting material.

Have been trying to beat it for like two months now. The kite enemies through a battle arena while shooting them gameplay gets really old after awhile. The level design is really nice and I like the world and flavor text they've written, but (and I can't believe I'm saying this) I want more of that and less of shooting demons in the face.

This is the crap that every game dev that doesn't feel like putting out a level editor always says. Where do you think half the modern game industry got its start? Tinkering around with something out of their league.

Except it's true. Games are incredibly complicated now and made by hundreds of people over years. The original Doom was made by a team of less than 20 in less than one.

Also, the game developer putting out a level editor (which, by the way, Snap Map literally is for Doom) doesn't equate to mod support.

What modern FPS games do have a good mod scene I wonder. Modern as in since, I dunno, 2012.

Some of these were released slightly before 2012, but mods are one of the only things keeping their communities alive:

• Left 4 Dead 2
• Arma 3
• Killing Floor 2
• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Portal 2
• Team Fortress 2
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Fallout: New Vegas
• STALKER: Call of Pripyat and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

The upcoming free to play Unreal Tournament will make most of its income from authors selling their mods and visual creations.

Have you actually tried to make content for a current gen AAA release that allowed modding?

@jec03: While its true that quite a lot of games were modable back in the day, lets not pretend and say that nowadays its any different. Even "games you should not mod" have mods nowadays. GTA V is just one example. About every singleplayer game that is famous in one way or the other has mods. A lot of famous classic games are modable because the engines were released via GPL. Only because a game is not famous doesn't mean it can or cannot be modded, Most newer games I know about are modable. The thing is if its worthwhile for the fans to make mods for these games or not or if the games need further development (like Skyrim, modding really got going once the game was fully patched, so the modders didn't need to hold back so they could programm the tools you need to mod properly according to the systems that are in place).

If anything, modding has become more accessable than ever and we can see that in new mods that are being released for games that are already 25 years old. Personally I think thats great.

And I'm certain that you can mod DOOM, but only in a more hack kind of sense. Mods for DOOM indeed do exist.

You also have to remember that the original DOOM was built with a different mindset. They were a handful of teenagers who build it more for the challenge of it than expecting to make millions. As such, they pretty much released the code, the tools and all the assets for the public to tinker with... they kept nothing to themselves.

By contrast, most modern games modders can only tinker as far as the tools available allow them, and what even the big games with an active modding community allows is rather basic (mostly scripting and combining existing assets). Most other mods are developed using (not entirely legitimate) tools for opening copyrighted material in proprietary formats. Fallout 4 even disable achievements if you use any mod, for some reason... this should tell you something about the change in philosophy.

My point is, even when the developers would wish to just make all their work and tools publicly available, Bethesda is not going to allow it. SnapMap is likely the best compromise they could get with the budget and priority the publisher wanted to allocate to customization.

Except its not, most mods are not nearly the scope of a full game so they don't need hundreds of people. Plenty of games are released today with much smaller teams. Just because Ubisoft does this outlandish strategy of having many studios work on one game doesn't mean its the reality of all games today. Though in general development teams are larger than in the past. Also game development isn't some major league sport, game development skills aren't some unattainable talent, devs aren't super people they're regular people who learned what they did through experience. Like I said many of them started cutting their teeth on mods back then.

Yeah, I shouldn't have said "level editor" vs mod tools, they're kinda the same in my head but they aren't really. Also I was thinking of snapmap as it was on release, which was pretty much just for multiplayer and seriously limited.

Seriously though, the reason developers don't put out mod support isn't because people aren't capable. It's because putting out a portion of your game (even if mod tools are only technically part of the game) unpolished looks bad. Developers don't want to spend the money on cleaning up their in house software. Or often times they use a ton of middle ware / third party software they'd have to license or rebuild for public use. But ask yourself this, you're in PR for a studio and everyone asks you about mod support but you know the studio will never do it. Are you going to tell people no its not worth the money or come up with a convenient excuse? Look at the above list of games that still have mod scenes, notice most of them are built upon an engine using the same tool set they've used for a decade (low cost to update) and mod support is a major PR selling point for those studios.

It's a mix of both, really. The developer cleaning up the creation tools and having documentation is a lot of work especially in the current times, and in some cases wouldn't even be worth it; look at Rage, id Software put out the tools for that and there simply isn't a modding community at all (for several reasons). It's interesting they went the Snapmap approach instead of just not having any tools period.

Content creation for big AAA games is also much much more complicated and time consuming now than it was before, fact. One person can create a total conversion mod for the original Doom, and they still do to this day; in fact, there are many MANY people doing that to this day. It's entirely possible for them to create a full Doom episode or custom weapons and monsters within a month or two. The reason is that it is extremely accessible and easy to do.

Creating even just a single level for something like Half-Life 2 or CSGO or new Unreal Tournament requires you to be able to plan out the level, block it out, playtest it, texture it, light it, detail it, polish it more and more and more and already you are looking at around a month of work for a single level; that isn't including if you are going to have custom models or textures which also have to be a high fidelity to match the base game.

A lot of the current(ish) games that have modding communities are also on older engines (Source Engine games, Bethesda's games) or newer engines that are based on older engines (all Unreal engine games) so it's easier for established modders/game developers to create stuff. With the new Doom, it's a new engine created by completely different people than all previous id games (the biggest one being Carmack's departure) so even if id had made the tools available for new Doom, I don't think we would even see nearly as many custom levels and mods as we have been with Snapmap; and this is coming from a guy that absolutely loves mods in my games.

It's just an unfortunate fact of life.