Another old-ass article? Fuck it, sure. This one is so old it was originally posted on Tumblr.
This one ponders why modern games aren't as moddable as their precursors. Turns out it's a bit more complicated than just "God hates us and wants us all to be unhappy"! Thankfully, the situation has improved over the years, but only a little, and not as much or as fast as I'd prefer.
It’s not uncommon in the circles I tend to frequent for people to curse the lack of modding tools for modern games, and to frequently blame the lack of such tools on the grim spectre of DLC. Why, after all, would somebody buy a Horse Butt Helmet add-on when they could download a Realistic Lore-Friendly Immersive Ultra-Ultra-HD Anatomically Correct-Horse Butt Helmet mod for free? Personally, I don’t buy that as a reason, and it goes back to the examples listed at the top of this article – Elder Scrolls, Fallout and XCOM 2.
These three games have plentiful DLC on top of their mod support, and in many cases mods develop around individual DLCs, augmenting their feature-set and content, creating something of a self-feeding ecosystem where DLC doubles as a pile of new functionality and professionally-made assets for the code-oriented to play with. And they aren’t the only ones that share this weird relationship with their player base. They’re just the most prominent examples.
So, if the obvious strawman answer is wrong, what’s the real reason? Well, there isn’t really one true overriding thing we can all point our fingers and scream angrily at like Donald Pleasance, it’s generally a combination of several smaller factors...
Dehumanize yourself and face to embed link.