A common trend has been emerging in the gaming industry lately, and it hasn’t been really beneficial to gamers all in all. More and more companies have started to drop modding support for their titles, choosing to instead focus on producing new content themselves, releasing it as paid DLC. While some gamers are fine with that system, and actually prefer the professional grade content that they get in this way, the vast majority are displeased with the way their creativity is being limited.
Which is why companies like CD Projekt RED are liked so much by the gaming community, as they seem to always prioritize the needs of gamers first and foremost in their development style. As a recent example of this, the studio’s own CEO announced that their upcoming title “The Witcher 3” will have mod support, and it will actually be quite the extensive system.
The news immediately started numerous discussions around the Internet, as many gamers were rightly excited to hear that they’ll have an opportunity to mod the vast world of “The Witcher 3”. The game is expected to be one of the hottest entries into the RPG genre, not just for the year of its release but for a very long period in general, and one of the features that it’s expected to bring to the table is a very large world. This should be great news to modders, who will have a lot of extra content to work with.
It’s great to see that not all companies are going the way of EA and similar studios and dropping modding support. Many of the most popular games of today actually started out as community-made mods – “Counter-Strike” and “Dota” being among the most prominent examples. Gaming studios themselves benefit a lot from supporting modding in their titles, but sadly not all of them seem to realize that, and many seem focused on the short-term profits that they can realize through the sales of DLC.
Meanwhile, “Counter-Strike” has been on the market for over a decade and is still going strong, and it would have likely never existed if “Half-Life” didn’t support mods back in the day. “The Witcher 3” could give gamers a great opportunity to come up with interesting new content, and some are apparently already preparing for that by coming up with their own plans for large-scale mods.
Hopefully, the main game itself will live up to all this hype, as without a solid base game to mod, not many people would be that enthusiastic to work on modifications of any kind. So far, we have no reason to believe that this will be a poor release at all though.