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Post by Julius CMXCIX on Mar 3, 2015 2:43:38 GMT
And designing in particular. What is it?
Apart from nostalgia, for me I think the essential thing has always been the aesthetics. When I was little I loved drawing made-up maps, and with toys like Lego I always made buildings rather than anything else. You can do more or less the same thing with AoK, because the graphics are detailed and yet can be put together in endless combinations. And the game engine, with its fog of war, is ideal for exploring.
But I don't think this can hold true for everyone. Fundamentally, I really don't understand the appeal of modding the graphics into something quite different, but that's now incredibly popular. I can appreciate the effort and skill that has gone into ToME, for example, but I'm curious about why you would make it.
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Post by HockeySam18 on Mar 4, 2015 14:12:47 GMT
Nostalgia value is a major part for sure. I think you hit on the endless possibility, though, which is the best part. You can do essentially anything with triggers, combinations of objects, modding, or a combination of the three. Every game will be different, and the game is complex enough but simple enough to have hit a perfect middle ground. I think this perfect balance of complexity and simplicity is the game's greatest asset. There is also an obvious appeal for students of history like myself, or for anybody who is interested by fantasy novels and the like.
I could never mod by myself (I don't know how to model graphics, and who knows when I'll ever have the time to learn), but I have an incredible amount of respect for anybody who can and does so in a successful fashion. I'm decent enough with data editing, though, and there are several tutorials that one can access. I think the appeal of modding is a) you can tailor the game to serve your purpose (if you want to have falling rocks and fireball-chucking swordsmen, you can do that and it is quite cool! If you want to play in Middle Earth or the late Middle Ages, you can do that too), a personal touch that is often overlooked, and b) endless possibility. Long after all of the design tricks have been found and used, modding can still be used to push the boundaries of the game. Who would have thought 5 years ago that you can add new civs to the game? In UserPatch, you can.
That being said, I still love designing in the vanilla editor because of that simplicity. You can't deny, though that modding properly can bring a ton to the vanilla editor.
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Post by Julius CMXCIX on Mar 4, 2015 20:03:00 GMT
It's not all sorts of modding that I find difficult to like. That much-copied Italian buildset mostly looks great; Mattty's steps in The Quiet Dawn was amazing; stuff like Matty's and Basse's title screens is fine; the better copy/paste buildings can look great; that Inca wonder looks pretty good. Data-editing is neutral: mostly it doesn't affect the visual feel of AoK but when it does it can be done very well, as it was in Matty's TOMATS. What I do find difficult to like is TOME. I can appreciate that the graphics are both skilled and look very good. But they look good in their own way, and it is a different way. For it not to look weird, virtually every graphic needs to be changed to the new style. The end result is good in its own right, but rather than adding new options to the original game you've exchanged all the old options for new ones, at enormous effort. For that to be worth it I can only assume that Matty's (and others) view about the original is different to mine, and I'm curious. What I find impossible to like is introducing new graphics that just look horrible, in my opinion. See posts 1054 and 1057 in this thread. And some of the units in this thread. Yet apparently some people do like that. I'm not very curious about them, because I can only assume that they are mad or see images in a fundamentally different way to me. Edit: Just in case someone who made the graphics I called horrible somehow wanders in, I'm going to add some (barely) constructive criticism to that last paragraph, for the screenshot where some real effort has been put in anyway. You can get away with some careful copy/pasting of shields. You can't draw on the existing graphics without it looking awful - it's impossible. Why is that cataphract fluorescent yellow? Is that a frog in a dressing grown?
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Watson
Stormwind Member
Second Rate Exorcist
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Posts: 1,200,000,005
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Post by Watson on Apr 17, 2015 22:19:41 GMT
Now now, respect the frog and the fashion statement. (I think I was bigoted about mod packs ever since they took over the SD forum for good. )
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Post by HockeySam18 on Aug 1, 2015 5:45:53 GMT
Now that the SD forum has been freed, Watson, you should come back to it. I was especially hopeful after seeing your PTC13 entry a couple years back that we all might see some more designs of yours
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Matt
Stormwind Member
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Post by Matt on Aug 1, 2015 17:03:38 GMT
Seeing as this thread has been revived, I actually kind of agree with julius. ToME for me is a different game than AoK. Essentially I wanted a tolkien based RTS and there wasn't one worth playing (BFME is terrible). I wanted something in the AoE style but slightly more complicated, which is what it is basically. I imagine Kor wanted an accurate medieval representation. Age of Chivalry is its own game too.
If I was modding for a scenario though, I don't go that far.
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Post by Basse on Aug 1, 2015 20:32:52 GMT
Most major mods, at least the ones that actually get finished, probably come into fruition that way. I had the same feeling before I started working on The Relics of Athalën, although obviously on a smaller scale: I had a story I wanted to tell, and I didn't want the restrictions of the game getting too much in the way of telling it. Thus I turned to modding to get around those problems, and allow me to create what I wanted, instead of a weaker AoK-adaption of what I wanted to make.
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