Fallout Modding? Oy...

Over this past weekend, I became a little depressed at the scores upon scores of mods that have been released by first-time modders.  While most of them aren't overly atrocious, many of them are.  Usually, these mods are along the lines of "Hey, I want to be a God among Men, so I'm going to create my own armor that will basically protect me from everything under the sun.  The destruction of Megaton?  Piece of cake."

Or, they fall into the second category of "Look!  I can retexture this armor to a variety of colors that are only possible through paint that no longer exists."

While I don't necessarily begrudge them their hideous armor mods and retextures (I do, in point of fact, but saying I don't makes me sound like less of an arrogant jackass), I do take issue with the manner in which they do so.

Rather than creating some kind of balance ("Hey, if I'm immortal in this armor, at least I can make it so that everyone in Rivet City can see me standing at Raven Rock."), they want their armor to do everything.  Or, rather than taking any kind of effort at being creative with their textures, they just fiddle with the color settings on the default texture and call it good.

Granted, my own modding experience has been rather limited, and I am partially guilty of the above.  However, my purposes with the mod I have created were to serve more as a test for myself on how to do any of it at all.  Remapping textures is easier when you start small, such as adjusting the default texture color.  And adding a suit of armor that has better stats than most allows me to figure out how the Object Effects system works.  However, the texture I created also has decals on it and the color looks like it was found in a rust pile.  The status effects I added to the armor also include some rather nasty drawbacks, should I get them to work properly (glowing while sneaking, leaking deadly amounts of radiation should the armor become too damaged).

Why would I do something like that?  Simple.  God mods piss me off.  I hate the feeling of cheating at a game.  I'm good enough at video games that I will eventually be able to take down all manners of enemies in a game; I don't need some damn cheat code or mod to help me do so.

Hell, as a personal anecdote, I beat Dead Space on the hardest difficulty using nothing but the starting weapon.  By the end of the game, I was still scared shitless, but I had a ton of ammo, and unless the monsters really got a drop on me, I never had to really worry about any fight.  Why?  Because I'm a gamer and figuring out how to *play* the game *well* is half of the enjoyment.

So, when I eventually get better at modding, I'll eventually try scripts and maybe tiptoe into 3D modeling to try and make the armor mod I created this weekend into a true mod, rather than a simple restat and reskin.