Are Mods Good Or Bad For Games? (Total War)

[zachman1201]

As always, please move if not appropriate to post here Just thought this would create some nice discussion.


Did your favorite Mod make the discussion? Let me know in the comments! I really enjoyed making this video and a big thank you to my Discord for helping me compile the list!!

[alhoon]

I respectfully disagree with the cons of modding mentioned here. Not because these things don't exist but because... you always have the choice to NOT use mods.
For me the question mods Good or Bad mostly refer to the practice of modding in general. I.e. if the question is "do you use mods" you would get a different answer from me.

So, in short: Mods are good because if you don't like them, nobody forces you to use them. I see no drawback in having the option to use mods thus the ability to mod is only beneficial IMO.

One thing some people may refer to is that some companies may think "Rush it to production and the modders will fix it for us for free" but I don't think any company thinks that way.

[CommodusV]

By virtue of existing as an option, there are only two ways mods can be bad for games. Because they inherently raise the bar on a company ("we can just mod this, y u so lazy" attitude in some shape or form possibly taken to a 'eh, modding will fix it' attitude) and when they make undesirable caterings requiring response from developers or changes in the community. Ie, modding done as a bad thing via cheats requiring an excess of anticheat, since mods are not inherently forces of good. But there you get into use cases and how people actually respond, which isn't necessarily something you can blame on the act of modding.

In relation to the last point, what modding entails for one game is very different and inapplicable to virtually any other franchise let alone the entirety of moddable titles, both from a 'social' modder perspective and what it takes to create mods from game to game. How things work for Total War should be considered incomplete in the bigger picture as they aren't even the same between generations of Total War titles.