ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76
The game has been out for years and even with superficial modding I count two complete gameplay mods that were one man shows..People like to talk about modding this and that but generally fuck off when they see the workload.You need BIG AAA strategy game communitys like CIV or TotalWar or forget about it..
Here I'd strongly disagree. Space Empires, Mount&Blade, Dominions, etc., none of these would be the same if not for the mod support. And there are no real gameplay mods for DW, since components and tech tree can't be modded.
ORIGINAL: Cauldyth
Yeah, to be honest, modding doesn't even register on the list for me. I never played mods, ever, not even the big ones like Fall From Heaven. As far as I'm concerned, dev time spend on improving moddability is lost time.
Obviously not everyone feels the same way, but I'm guessing even with Civ4's massive community, fanbase, and mods, the majority of players have never even installed one.
You're losing out, I'd say. The reason to mod is to improve upon the game, and very often mods do that. The Half-Life series likely wouldn't be even half as popular today if not for Counter-strike and the other great mods made for it when they released the mod tools. For a game like Distant Worlds, where some minutes/hours spent editing a few components can make huge changes to the balance and fun of the game, it's even more important I think. What's more, it lets players easily fix smaller stuff like balance issues that the developers might not consider patch-worthy.
Now, if making it moddable would end up taking like half the development time of the expansion, I might see your point. But since it's more likely to be just a week or two of effort to have the game get components and tech from files instead of code, I think it's more than worth it. Mods keep a game fresh, and that's something DW is in great need of.
