Mod
A mod, mods, or the process of modding refers to player-made game modifications. These are unofficial changes that generally make the game incompatible with the official version. Modding ranges from from minor changes like changing the stats on weapons or monsters, up to huge "full conversions" where the entire game is changed around
The Diablo series has never done much to support modding, since Blizzard makes the games with proprietary tools that are not user friendly, or in the public domain. Despite these obstacles, players have created some amazing mods, greatly extending the play experience of Diablo and Diablo 2.
Sadly, the would-be modders will be running uphill again with Diablo 3, since the D3 Team has no plans to make the game mod friendly or to release any tools that assist the modding community.
Official Comments on Modding
Blizzcon 2008, Jay Wilson on modding: [1]
- "We don't have a lot of plans to do that. It would make our lives so much harder" he said, adding that despite the fact that he and many other designers got their start in modding, the team takes a strong stance on the hacking of their games.
- About mods in Diablo 3, they've been really crucial to long-term playability. What are you planning to do about them?
- Jay Wilson: We considered the idea of doing mods, but decided a map editor was too ambitious. The randomness does not lend itself to create user mod tools. We value mods, but "for us it was really a choice of randomness or in-user mods."
Blizzcon 2009 Joystiq Interview:
- Diablo has never officially supported modding although they haven't really banned it. Is there any thought towards modding going into this or even map editing? Have you guys thought about including a map editor?
- Leonard Boyarsky: We talked about it early on and we considered it but the way we put together our maps and the fact that it's random ... it's very artistic-centric. And, on top of that, the fact that it's so random it's like, would people just change the random number generator? You know what I mean? [laughs] We don't hand-build our dungeons anyways, but the way we build our maps kind of makes that prohibitive. But we're always looking at what the end users might want so we did look at including a map editor and we just said that it's never been a big part of Diablo. So we didn't feel it was necessary.
- Kevin Martens: We're certainly not opposed to modding it.
- Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, we're not going to put in things that, "Oh my God, you can never mod this!" If somebody comes along and makes this great editor and makes this great mod...
- Kevin Martens:At this point, we're knee-deep in just making the game. That's sort of at the periphery of our discussions at this point.
Diablo 2 Mods
Brother Laz's Median XL mod has grown justly famous and popular. This mod makes massive changes to the game, reworking every skill and introducing a great deal of new artwork and special effects.
