It’s already getting bad. It’s kind of heartbreaking. Around 2015 was the sweet spot where a lot of mods would be updated quickly, authors turned around compatibility patches for other mods very often, and the game was still a big enough part of the zeitgeist that you had a lot of people who were interested in DIY game dev putting time into the modding scene, with the expectation that so many people play Skyrim that surely your mod would appeal to someone.
I even have a little mod idea from 2012. I haven’t done it yet. Maybe I still will.
I played a fair bit at the time and then told myself I’ll go again in the future. About a year ago I tried to start setting up a new mod list and it was complicated by the versions and the need to manually port versions and that kind of thing. Frankly, it was laziness on my part, not trying hard enough to learn the new meta, not bothering to understand the porting process. It looked like so much effort and I quite frankly had way less time and patience for it.
My setup wasn’t great (laptop with a 4700MQ (I think!) and GT750 SLI. Not GTX, GT. Yeah.) but it was plenty to play at decently high settings in vanilla and high with a little bit of ultra after doing all the modded optimizations. Seriously, that one texture compression mod made the game playable at all during the summer months.
Those were the days huh. I still think modding peaked with Skyrim and Minecraft and every successive generation of people playing games is fighting for fewer and fewer scraps.
It’s already getting bad. It’s kind of heartbreaking. Around 2015 was the sweet spot where a lot of mods would be updated quickly, authors turned around compatibility patches for other mods very often, and the game was still a big enough part of the zeitgeist that you had a lot of people who were interested in DIY game dev putting time into the modding scene, with the expectation that so many people play Skyrim that surely your mod would appeal to someone.
I even have a little mod idea from 2012. I haven’t done it yet. Maybe I still will.
I played a fair bit at the time and then told myself I’ll go again in the future. About a year ago I tried to start setting up a new mod list and it was complicated by the versions and the need to manually port versions and that kind of thing. Frankly, it was laziness on my part, not trying hard enough to learn the new meta, not bothering to understand the porting process. It looked like so much effort and I quite frankly had way less time and patience for it.
My setup wasn’t great (laptop with a 4700MQ (I think!) and GT750 SLI. Not GTX, GT. Yeah.) but it was plenty to play at decently high settings in vanilla and high with a little bit of ultra after doing all the modded optimizations. Seriously, that one texture compression mod made the game playable at all during the summer months.
Those were the days huh. I still think modding peaked with Skyrim and Minecraft and every successive generation of people playing games is fighting for fewer and fewer scraps.