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Modern MA's Not Talented?


KoolHndLuke

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31 minutes ago, SkyLover said:

In the case of Skyrim, I think it might just be a case of many of the modding community's heavy hitters having moved on to other pastures.

Kind of agree with you. Also I think a lot may have gotten burned out and "retired" for an indeterminate time.

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'Talent' is a rather nebulous word, as it implies some innate or inborn ability.  If I substitute the word 'skill', I would agree that is lacking, and I speak for myself as the last mod I made before my hiatus was for Fallout: New Vegas.

I would also like to posit the proposition that the learning curve for creating mods is rather steep.  Given that the level of skill is tied almost directly to the level of experience, it should be no surprise that the new crop of mod creators are less skilled, as they are less experienced.

I would add that if one looks closely, there are some very skilled mod authors working on projects like Beyond Skyrim, Fallout: London, etc.  These skilled people are producing mods which are in fact whole games. 

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9 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

do you think the overall talent level of modders now isn't what it used to be?

When I started making and using mods for Bethesda's games, two decades ago, modding was in a pretty primitive state.  We had some very talented modders in those days but we also had more than our share of folks who made, in my opinion, loads of very worthless stuff.  Hastily-made retexture mods were everywhere.  The term "Balmora house mod" became a kind of shorthand to describe the tons of crappy mods uploaded on a daily basis to the first modding sites like Morrowindfiles, Gamers Roam and Planet Elder Scrolls. 

What I see modders doing these days would make modders from 20 years ago stand back in awe.  In general I think modders these days display a more consistently professional attitude than most of us managed to do back in the beginning.  Each new "generation" of modders has built on the foundations laid by previous generations and what we have now, in my opinion, is better than anything we have ever had in the past.

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I don't think there's been a decline in the "skill" or "talent" of modders necessarily, but I do think that the requirements for making "good" mods have increased exponentially from game to game.

Recently, I have been learning how to create high-poly models in Blender and bake normal maps from them, and also how to draw directly on the model surface with a tablet and pen to create diffuse textures. That sort of thing is necessary if you want to match the sort of content Bethesda themselves put out these days. It's not enough to create a high-poly model and apply a stock repeating texture, no matter how artful you are about it.

That's just one example related to models and textures, but the same applies to quests (back in the time of Morrowing nobody cared that there were no voices files) and pretty much everything else too.

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Good mods may be getting harder to find, but I suspect that they still exist, and the authors are all boycotting the Nexus, which is the only place Google seems to look. You may find this site, too, but many others have just slipped into the shadows and you really need to hunt. 

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I think another aspect to this is what Sigurd already hinted at - people expect too much from hobbyist modders. We aren't all capable of AAA quality professional work no matter how much we might like to be. So when the mod consuming public demands this, we just stop advertising to that market.

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All good points have been made, one more aspect is loss of very good resources in the form of old forums and the wealth of information the modding community had to bring new MAs up to speed with knowledge gained over the years.

Any game by Bethesda you could pretty much go onto their old forum, and research old Morrowind / Oblivion topics and be nearly good to go for Skyrim / Fallout (3/NV/4), as all of their games are very similar in structure and resources. Though each game brings with it advances in scripting/meshes/textures/sounds etcetera, which needs community development in tools to help manipulate them or someone with money to throw away on their hobby for proprietary tools.

Their used to be some old TES sites too, with in depth topics such as archiveinvalidation, for example there is a topic here Oblivion Mod:BSAs and Archive Invalidation - The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP), but try the links to dev_akm's original sites for explained and destroyed and you will get a 404 error.

I don't know how good Bethesda's new forums have become or their wiki or how search friendly they are (I have been out of modding for about 5 years now so don't frequent the sites anymore), but I think a lot of introductory (and sometimes very technically detailed) topics to the subject of modding have unfortunately been lost.

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Bethesda no longer runs a forum so that font of knowledge has been destroyed. The CK Wiki is still available though, and UESP is currently mirroring a copy so that we can actually edit it as needed.

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