Mod Hype and Disappointment

First of all, by making this post I don't mean to denigrate anybody's hard work. I know modding is a complex and unrewarding pass-time and I'm very grateful to everyone who puts their time into making us new content for no reason but loving the game.

That said, I'm getting a little frustrated with mods that are great in conception, have a huge amount of content, but seem to have a requirement for at least one nonsensical 'feature' that must have seemed like a good idea at the time and then were never thought about again.

For example, last night I was super excited about AWOIAF 1.0. Naval combat in the Narrow Sea? Sign me up! And then in my first battle, I ordered my troops to charge, and my character plays a 10-second paralyzing animation that adds literally nothing to the game except breaking immersion. Alt-f4. I know I may be a little oversensitive at this point, but it's so odd to me.

Another good example is ACOK. It's very well-discussed territory so I won't go all over it, but there's been a huge amount of work done on this mod, and it still has these 'features' that make it simply frustrating to play. This is literally one of the most popular and recommended mods and it's mechanically not very good. Not to mention the issues with the author and his anti-editing, performance-killing vanity defender scripts.

The two of these put together are what inspired this post. Here we have two indisputably talented people putting an insane amount of time and work into their mods, and both

Parabellum is a good third and final example. I had so much hype for this one. But of course it gets into legal troubles, gets removed, and never finished. That's not so much a mechanical issue, but the absurd vehicles really are. They essentially make infantry totally useless... in a WW1 game. Simultaneously they look ridiculous and don't work very well. Game-breaking.

Now, there's a new mod in development that I'm totally hyped for: Age of Arthur. If you read the link, the planned features are really damn cool. But I find myself more and more prepping for disappointment rather than immersion.

I've read the Cozur flamewars and I get the argument: It's free content, I made it, shut the fuck up, i'm doing it how I want. To a point I can respect that, on a per-mod basis. Of course you make the thing the way you want it. My question is more about the general trend, not to attack anyone in particular. Why do so many mods insist on implementing things that are explicitly anti-fun or impossible to represent well? Does anyone know how to remove that damn charge animation from AWIOAF? How about Parabellum's vehicles? Does anyone know a mod that is actually 100% perfect?

Disclaimer: This is a bitch/rant post, and I get it if the immediate response is to tell me to shut the hell up. But I feel like I'm taking crazy pills and I want to know if anyone feels the same way/can fix these silly problems. Paging /u/cozur and /u/produno for transparency, but I want to be clear that I adore produno and respect his work.

Submitted April 29, 2017 at 01:16PM by itscalledacting http://ift.tt/2oJnjDy