i gave cyberpunk2077 another shot after hating it at launch because multiple people pestered me about it for two years. i was repeatedly told of my lengthy list of criticisms, “they fixed all that, it’s like a totally different game now”.
10 hours later it’s clear that they’re either:
a) delusional b) liars c) literally cannot hear criticism of the game being spoken aloud
because that shit was 99% identical to at launch, bugs included. the difference between the game that people keep describing to me and the game in front of me is so stark that i’m fucking baffled. it’s like it’s a cult or something.
That is entirely correct, I am also simultaneously toying around with a bunch of ideas for my own game, but they’re… a bit different.
Its certainly not impossible to make such a comprehensive total overhaul mod, many games have mods like this… but, yeah, they end up taking a decade, and there is a decent chance that that same group of people probably could have more or less made very close to the same thing, in half the time, although with different branding, if they all just learned unity or godot or something.
But two caveats to that:
It has only been fairly recent that things like unity and godot exist, not too long ago making you own halfway decent engine was a very serious roadblock, so, just mod.
Also… you absolutely can learn a lot of aspects of just general game dev if you mod fairly substantially, there is a good degrer of overlap and just general shared knowledge and skills, if you go at modding pretty seriously for a while.
Back in the day, industry used to directly hire very skilled modders.
Now… not so much.
I guess it depends on your goals, your timeframe, your commitment level, etc.
Like, in this specific thing I’ve proposed… remaking all of CP77, all of Night City, to the same fidelity… yeah good fucking luck as a small indie dev/modder or small team of them.
But, if you basically just want to make your own, maybe less dense, less detailed… some kind of hybrid of ttrpg and fps mechanics, well then sure, that could work!
But also: WolvenKit exists for CP77, those are pretty comprehensive mod tools, they seem to roughly be on par with GECK from the FO games.
Anyway, I am just spitballing the ‘ShadowPunk’ idea, personally, yeah, I’d rather grind at my own indie game that I could potentially make at least some money from lol. Well that, and there are a number of things I’d like to be able to do in my game that I am 99.9% certain would be impossible to mod in to any current ‘moddable’ game, would require being built into the core of the engine from the ground up.