For you guys that dont like the levelling system in Oblivion, there are many mods that will fix. The best imo is Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. This is a pretty massive mod that does a whole lot more than just change the levelling system. The sheer number of mods for this game is staggering and greatly adds to the replay value of it.

Which is great if you have it on PC

There is that...

That brings up something that's bothered me about x-platform development on PC and X360: WHY ARE DEVS NOT MAKING 360 GAMES MODDABLE? Xbox Live is a dynamic platform which could infinitely extend the lifetime of any game by, say, freely distributing a level editor or SDK or whatever on PC. People could then make their own levels or mods or what have you and submit them to the developers, who could (with minimal effort) perform quality control on whatever people are submitting and put the best submissions up for free download on Xbox Live, thus infinitely extending the life of their product with no work on their part. WHY IS THIS A BAD IDEA? HOW ARE PEOPLE NOT DOING THIS ALREADY???

As much as I love HD gaming it [censored] kills me that when I buy a 360 game I'm pretty much getting what's in the box and nothing more (with the exception of a DLC pack or two down the road for more popular titles). PC gaming allows for so much extensibility by the user community and the foundation is there for this to happen on 360 as well, but NONE OF THE DEVELOPERS ARE [censored] USING IT. Bungie is taking a step in the right direction by including Forge in Halo 3 but there's only so much you can do with that, and using the same kind of PC tools (yes, even if they might scare some of the noobs with technical complexity) will result in much better work done by the community.

It would be hell trying to sift through all the crap that people would send in. I think developers would rather sell you a new game.

The PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3 is expected to have user mods available when it ships due to the PC version being out earlier. You should be able to download user mods to your PS3. The mods still have to be made on a PC and a button creates a PS3 version of the mod.

The Xbox 360 hasn't confirmed that mods will be available, but Epic says they want mods on the 360.

If they were to release a serious editor it would likely be complex enough to dissuade your average 14 yo ****** gamer from making 2 rooms and flaming the development company when their submission gets rejected.

Or even if they do get swamped, they hire voluntary moderators to weed out the submissions that don't suck. There's millions of ways to manage the influx, and that's not even the biggest concern, that's more of a "something to worry about once you actually decide to go this route" concern.

Like, I'm seriously irked that I shelled out $60 for Orange Box and I won't be able to have any more Portal maps, even though it's the type of the game where the user community will undoubtedly make about 50 awesome and fun maps to extend the life of the game by like 5x its original length. If Valve were to do this, then I really doubt that they'd have any trouble finding like 10 dudes that spend all day on the Steam forums and seem to be good posters who could compile a list (for free) of the best user-made maps to put on Xbox Live.

So so so so true. Map editing is part of what made SC so great.

It's a matter of scale. Say you have a popular game with about a million active users. If you get something like an aggregate average of 1% of those users submitting an average of one mod per week. That's 10,000 mods per week to sort through! The first few months or so when it's hugely popular and everybody's trying it out, it wouldn't be suprising to end up with hundreds of thousands of mods to sort through.

Then you have to go through all the media for the level (textures/sounds/even geometric formations within the level) ensuring none of it is obscene beyond 'standards', etc, etc.. That's tens of thousands of man hours of work, per week, per game. And even if you could round up hundreds/thousands of volunteers, there's then the process of training them in what is acceptable and what's not / etc.

It's the same problem with XNA games. Anybody can develop games on your 360 if you purchase the developer's license (or whatever its called) on Live, but you can only share your games/software with others who have also purchased a license!

Guess we'll see what happens with UT3. Epic was/is really pushing for user created content and MS has alluded to working to allow it. Whether or not that turns out to be the case though...

I actually agree with you in concept, but this part is very wrong. Sifting through a bunch of crappy user mods (and for every good one there will be lots and lots of trash) is a lot of work in itself. Then, thoroughly QAing each one is another huge chunk of time. This isn't just "play it once or twice and make sure it seems okay", it's more like "beat on the level in every possible way, test every possible exploit, soak test it for a week straight and make sure it doesn't run out of memory, etc...". Finally, after all that, there is the actual submission process to microsoft, where they will do there own testing on it before finally approving it for download (and you have to pay them to do that).

On PC, the operating system goes a long way towards protecting the rest of your computer against content potentially abusing game code flaws. On the xbox, the OS doesn't have nearly this level of protection, so the risk is much higher. Arguably, the game should protect itself from it's own content, but making that completely bullet-proof is another big chunk of work.

So while your idea is doable, "no work on their part" is way off base.

Why do you have to screen them? Just let people play any one they come across (like custom halo maps). The good ones will filter through.

Halo (any of them) is not even that good of a FPS and Time Splitters is better but never got the same user base sadly.

True, I guess this would work better for user-made maps than for mods. I don't think custom maps using standard game features would need a lot of testing though as long as the game engine itself is pretty robust (of course, I haven't done level editing since Doom, where it was pretty hard to mess up "here are some linedefs, LET'S MAKE A SECTOR!").

Or, perhaps selling user-made content for like $1 or $2 a pop would motivate devs to put in the energy to perform quality control on user submissions. That's a pretty reasonable fee to add new functionality to a $60 game and it's probably reasonable to expect that the best submissions will be worth a couple hundred thousand downloads (at least - in Halo, a good map would prob get a mil or two) for the company, so they could actually turn these into a pretty decent cash cow.

And as for the concern of being flooded with material, for cross-platform games it's quite possible the PC community can decide. The PC has the same issue as far as "if 1% of 1 million users are making maps" and the better maps will naturally become more popular and get more exposure among PC enthusiasts. Whichever maps those turn out to be are easy candidates for X360 submission.

that is a good idea

Because Live is a controlled environment. Microsoft decided to try to ensure a certain level of quality and age-standards amongst everything on it. Allow anything through and it'll be a matter of minutes before the first XXX explicit Halo 3 mod hits Live. Without any specific way to manage that content, it can cause problems especially since the 360 is working to make itself a very 'family friendly' console.

I think it is also a quality of brand issue as well. MS wants people to think they are producing high quality stuff. You can't have riff raff mixing in with the cream!

Isn't what Bungie's doing with Forge and file shares kinda a weaker version of what I'm talking about though? What's to stop someone to write a big "[censored] YOU" on the ground on Valhalla using boxes and send that to all their friends? Is it important (from Microsoft's POV) that Halo 3 stuff is Bungie-controlled rather than Live-controlled?

User created maps are often as much fun in games as are the maps that came with the game. They extend the longevity immensely and keep the gaming feeling like it's new and there will be more surprises in it for a long time. I always look forward to user-created maps. Mods, not so much, but lots of people do. It's definitely a strength of the PC platform that such things are fairly routine.

It depends on the game. Mods completely changed Quake 1/2 (CTF was ridic fun in both, and I was completely addicted to Weapons Factory in Q2, which was based on TeamFortress and imo was better) and Half-Life (would anyone remember that game if not for TFC, DoD, and CS?). Nowadays though games tend to come with more variety in gametypes which decreases the need for user mods.

The original Half Life was one of the highest rated games of all-time and received multiple Game of the Year awards.

Yeah, that was a crappy way to word it. Rather, people wouldn't still have been talking about it like 5 years after it was released. The deathmatch it came with wasn't that great, HL's lifetime beyond single player was due solely to mods.

I didn't even think the single player was GotY worthy unless that happened to be a down year for video games but I'm obv in the minority on that one.

Yeah, you are. Obviously looking at the story and gameplay today it doesn't seem worthy, but at the time it was a huge step forward in fps gameplay. I remember finishing the single player right after it came out and being totally blown away.

All depends on when you played it imo.

I got to the end of FFXII without leveling at all. Just before the final boss I looked on gamefaqs to see what he'd be like in terms of attacks and recommended level and such. I saw that I'd have to spend several hours leveling to stand a chance, turned it off and haven't looked back.

I feel like I wasted dozens of hours to get to the end of a game and not be able to polish her off, but being forced to level is so [censored] ghey.

I haven't played Episode 2 yet, but am glad to see someone else trash the storytelling in HL2. It's always been bareboned as fair I'm concerned and I cannot understand why every damn critic says it's so great. The games have never made me feel any affinity for Gordon Freeman whatsoever either.

I'll do a World of Warcraft, and really all MMORPGs one.

The appeal of WoW truly escapes me. I played for about a month then quit out of sheer boredom. It's just so damn repetitve. The gameplay is incredibly tedious. Quests are so repetitive and unimaginative - Kill 10 baby dragons and 5 lion cubs so you can get some gold and xp. Now level up and buy new equipment. What's the big difference? You now do 2 more damage when you whack someone with your sword, and take 2 less when you get hit. Now go kill 10 teenage dragons and 5 lions. Repeat until you get to level 60 or fall asleep. What's the point? What am I achieving here? Nothing more than being able to say that my character has ever bigger numbers to his name. There's just a total lack of motivation. Sigh, it's sad to see that traditional RPGs in the Baldur's Gate 2 mold seem to have become a niche genre.