mods posts

BioWare famously included a very powerful set of mod tools in Neverwinter Nights, making for an unprecedented degree of control over creating custom content for the game. It looks like that trend will continue with Dragon Age: Origins. Mod makers will have access to every aspect of the game, including voice overs and visual effects. The community will be able to put its creative skills to work when the game releases on November 3rd.

Download HD Dragon Age: Origins Toolset Trailer (80 MB)
Check out all Dragon Age: Origins downloads

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

For the game developer, nothing is more important than the longevity of a game. Will people be playing your opus a year after release? Ten years after release? The answer should be yes, but the ways to extend the life of a game are often overlooked. There are many different methods to add replayability, including multiple story paths, procedurally generated content, and non-linear gameplay. However, the best way, and the one that has ensured the survival of games like Unreal Tournament or Half-Life, is allowing players to fiddle with the content themselves. The more your players can tweak the game, the more they will play it, and that's a lesson all developers should take to heart.

Anyone could come up with a lot of reasons for why Valve is such a successful company. Ask any two people what makes Valve so successful and they'll probably point to different things. Some will say their cabal style game design and free content updates. While others will point to the Steam platform, mod support and integration of top mod designers. Some may even call out Gabe Newell himself. Oh and don't forget Doug Lombardi, either. We could go on and on about just what made (and continues to make) Valve so very special. Though I doubt it's any single one of those things as opposed to many of them at the right moments in the right way. Or in other words, a lot of chance, determination and some vision.

What I do think can be gleaned from the success of Valve, is where PC gaming will -- or at least should be -- going over the next few years. Hit the image above to take a look at what I think their model of game design and business decisions has to offer the wider PC gaming market.

Obsidian's Josh Sawyer (no relation to Tom Sawyer) recently spoke in a session at the Paris GDC. Discussing their follow-up to Bioware's incredibly popular Neverwinter Nights, the discussed one of the major things they did wrong: making the tools too complex. From Josh Sawyer's seminar:

BioWare's approach to the Neverwinter Nights toolset was to go for ease-of-use, so that people could get small things running quickly and then expand from there. Obsidian's approach was to cater for the hardcore, though - dramatically increase the level of control, meaning that more things could be altered. That would make the barrier to entry higher, but we thought that would similarly raise the quality of what was produced.

You can only get so far as an amateur designer if the tools given to you are so complex that they require far more investment of time than you can put in.

Eternal Silence may not be the newest Half-Life 2 mod around but it's certainly one of the more compelling projects. We're always up for some epic space battles, which his what Eternal Silence is all about. ModDB recently ran a preview of the newest beta build (the 3.0 build, if you're curious) and gave their overall impressions.

It seems as though the space environments have been markedly improved, especially the lighting and shading elements. However, being a beta build means there is still work to be done and in the case of Eternal Silence the interiors have yet to be finished. It should be mentioned that indoor visual improvements have been promised by the development team, Crank Shaft, for the next beta build. It's all part of the mod experience and means we have something to look forward to in the near future. There's plenty of screens and even videos towards the bottom of the preview, so check it out if you'd like to see the game in motion.

Every Friday to come, we'll present to you some of the biggest downloads at Big Download. Sometimes they'll be the most popular, sometimes the best rated. Sometimes they'll be our own personal favorites! There's a little of each in today's inaugural round-up. Thanks to the launch of Mass Effect, the huge Ubidays press event, and all the other exciting stuff this past week, there's a lot of great stuff to check out. Here are the Big Downloads!

	Beyond Good & Evil 2 Teaser Trailer Ubisoft dropped the bomb on everyoneat the Ubidays press event: the esteemed Beyond Good & Evil is getting a sequel! Here's the first trailer, our most popular download this week.
	Doom 3 Classic Mod Relive the 90s in the Doom 3 Classic Mod. It's a remake of classic Doom in the more modern Doom 3 engine.
	Prince of Persia Ubidays 2008 Teaser Trailer Also from Ubidays, the Prince of Persia trailer shows off the next installment's colorful, gorgeous visual style.
	Mass Effect Combat Video 3 We can't let this week slip without featuring arguably its biggest release, Mass Effect. Here's a combat video depicting zombies and worse.
	Get a Life Half-Life 2 Mod The Get a Life mod for Half-Life 2 has been popular in the Big Download offices these past few days. It's a full-length single-player affair that has you uncovering the mysteries of the protagonist's past.

Valve Software's Doug Lombardi revealed in the second half of a two part interview with Shacknews (in part one he declared PC gaming alive and well) that the studio hopes to ship its co-op, zombie-themed, survival horror FPS Left 4 Dead sometime in November of this year.

Left 4 Dead is Valve's big release this year, and the company hopes that it will do the same thing for co-op multi-player gaming that Counter Strike did for competitive play. The audience is clearly there; zombie-themed, user-created Half-Life 2 mods like Zombie Master and Zombie Panic are among the most popular on Steam.

Lombardi also suggested that gamers will get to play the full version of Left 4 Dead free for a whole weekend, and that a demo is probably coming as well. He wasn't able to confirm a time-frame for either of those, though.

First Strike, the Star Wars modification for Battlefield 2142, has released their newest version today. This new version, numbered 1.2, thankfully keeps with tradition and continues to ignore the awful prequel trilogy. No, First Strike is about the classics, and they are going to keep it that way!

Featuring 7 new maps, 7 new vehicles, some big bugfixes, and persistent stat tracking, this new patch expands the already excellent Star Wars conversion. If you are a Star Wars fan who plays Battlefield 2142, this is a must-have. If you aren't a Star Wars fan, but still play Battlefield 2142, it's worth a looksee anyways, as the gameplay is more fun and engaging than the already quite good Battlefront series. Pick up the new client over on their official site.

Almost everyone has played Dodgeball at some point or another. The rules are fairly simple. Tag the opponent with the ball, they go to jail. When all opponents are in jail, you win! Pretty easy. What happens when you apply that to the world of shooters? Jailbreak.

Jailbreak carries on this dodgeball spirit in the gory tradition of shooters. Kill an opponent, he goes to jail. Kill all opponents, and you get to punish the jailed folk by hacking them to pieces. The original was released quite a while ago on the original Half-life, and the second iteration came to Half-life 2. And now it has finally updated.

Featuring 4 new official maps, 17 new weapons, a new perks system, and plenty more updates, it's an excellent multiplayer mod for anybody wanting to for some classic childhood fun (with machineguns). Check out the official download page to get the installer. You won't regret it.

[Via modDB]

Anybody who is a big fan of videogames will no doubt hear the phrase "Get a life!" sometime in their life. A group of modders has apparently taken this to heart, and indeed, have gotten a life. To be precise, they have released Get a Life, a single-player total conversion for Half-life 2. You play Alexander Zemlinsky, a subway technician with leukemia who wakes up in a strange laboratory without knowing what is going on.

The game has a slew of features, including approximately 11 hours of gameplay, 25 levels, 11 weapons, 24 music tracks, a completely new gameplay system, and voice-acting with subtitles. It's a rather impressive feature list for a singular mod, so if you're into downloading and playing mods, give it a whirl! You can download it at modDB, and the trailer is embedded after the jump.