Kevin “arQon” Bleckinsopp, best known in recent years for heading up the Challenge Promode Arena mod team, has been interviewed on eGames.de about the mod scene.
The blinding truth spit from his mouth caused me to wear sunglasses when writing this. Here’s a lengthy excerpt that explains the dire situation mods find themselves in today:
From CPMA’s ‘Deathmatch Perfected’ gameplay detail-driven mindset, to Freeze Tag, Clan Arena gametype variations, to CS’s, more accurately, ‘Action Quake’s’, total conversion, these are the mods that matter, but they end up starved for assets because the artists are all off doing prettymods, so the newbies look at screenshots of them and go ‘durrr, looks the same, why play it?’ If those two groups could actually work together, the end results would be so much better for both of them, but it seems almost impossible to get that to happen. Every once in a while one does – and is invariably a success, duh – but it’s the exception rather than the norm, so overall there’s just a colossal waste of talent on both sides most of the time. The featureset mods like OSP, Q4MAX, PK++, HL2DMPro, and so on, are simply doing a job that should have been done by the company that sold you the game.
