#and just tinkering around with assets and scripts and whatnot

[venacoeurva]

It's the Underfarm, AKA cute little farm with a waterfall in a cave, and kind of a pocket dimension Wren lived in while in Kurk's realm, since, y'know, enrichment. Also an excuse to do something with the little farmhouses

Little dim though with my ENB settings, so I gotta crank that up a tad

[tanadrin]

Map Editors I Have Known And Loved

Much as my favorite part of any RPG is the character creation screen, my favorite part of any RTS (and many other genres of video game) is the map editor, where it’s included. This is a brief review of different map editing experiences for different games based on the time I’ve spent with them.

Warcraft 2

One of the first, wayyy back in the dark days of the mid-90s. Good for little besides making melee maps, really, due to the absence of a trigger system (as I recall).I was too young to really be able to experiment with its mechanics, and mostly used it as a glorified version of a Paint program, because I liked Wc2′s distinctive art style.

Age of Empires 2

AoE2 is/was a freaking terrific game, but (and probably because the campaigns the game shipped with didn’t need more than it provided) the trigger system of its in-game editor is not super sophisticated. Third-party editors and utilities supplement the default modding tools, and modding AoE2 is easier than ever with the HD edition, but if you want to do something super elaborate you’re going to need to do a lot of quirky tricks and editing of database values. I still love the AoE2 map editor, because I love building huge elaborate isometric recreations of medieval European cities, and then wrecking them with a giant army of Elite Mangudai and trebuchets.

Deus Ex: GOTY Edition

An FPS, but it came with a variation on the Unreal engine level editor that was, despite requiring a fair bit of knowledge about the engine to make it really useful, was still great for a kind of conceptual Lego, building beautiful austere environments with careful lighting you could walk around in (and shoot up with a GEP gun). Again, I was a little too young and a little too impatient to master the subtler aspects of DX level design, like triggers and scripting and whatnot, and the tools provided, though powerful, didn’t hold your hand at all. Still, full marks for making the inner workings of the game robustly exposed to modders.

Starcraft

The original Starcraft and the BW expansion have a lot to recommend them: a great kind of redneck-punk scifi aesthetic, some seriously fun campaigns, and some seriously fun multiplayer (the panic instilled by “nuclear launch detected,” etc.); the map editor was great because it had pretty decent unit editing capabilities, and an extremely good trigger system--plus you could make your own voiced mission briefings, string missions together as campaigns, etc., etc. A lot of what you couldn’t do was supplemented by third-party editors, and playing around with SC’s trigger system trying to get all kinds of weird things to work laid a lot of the cognitive groundwork for learning how to think and clarify ideas when I started learning actual programming languages like Python. Rates very highly on both the “purity of form” and “purity of spirit” scales, but it’s nothing compared to

Warcraft 3

Hoooooooo boy

I have a sentimental attachment to wc3 map editing like nothing else. There were whole summers I spent playing custom games on battle.net, and probably thousands of ideas I played around with in the editor itself, but never quite finished, because let me tell you, this bad boy is as far as I’m concerned the gold standard for map editors. It was released in a somewhat limited form with RoC, but around the time TFT came out, they updated the editor to a much more full-featured version, and they eventually also released all the plugins necessary to make Wc3 models with third-party programs. Combined with the idiosyncratic-but-actually-kinda-useful form of custom game searching, the result was, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the wc3 modding scene probably knows, one of the greatest flowerings of modding creativity in video game history. Out of this crucible of innovation came among other things a deep vein of tower defense maps, elaborations on the Aeon of Strife custom games from SC, and out of those, eventually, the DotA maps--leading to DotA Allstars and thence DotA 2.

The Wc3 editor lets you fuck with literally every conceivable value in the game, comes with an exceedingly powerful trigger system, lets you make custom units and abilities and buildings, and where it can’t do what you want it to, also just lets you script shit directly. I love it so much. It is my happy place; the little “doot doo do do doot DOO” that sounds when you start it up gives me a jolt of delight every time, years later.

Homeworld 2/Homeworld Remastered

Honorable mention to the most fun I have ever had in a melee RTS with my pants on. The maps here are exceedingly simple: you edit them with a text editor. But true 3d space battles--true 3d gorgeous space battles with a 70s sci fi aesthetic--are impossible to underrate in my book, and it helps that the Homeworld series has genuinely delightful gameplay mechanics. It also has a pretty good modding scene, with the inevitable Star Trek and Star Wars and BSG mods, because while the game isn’t super easy to mod, and has nothing in the way of built-in modding tools, it isn’t actively hostile to modding the guts of it like some games I could mention (cough cough Paradox cough). Confession: I’ve never tried to mod HW2. I have played a shit ton of it, though, and I live in the vain hope that one day someone will be like, “You know what? Not only is it time to bring RTSes back, 3d space battles are actually the fuckin’ best,” and make another game like it.

Starcraft 2

I haven’t played around as much with the Sc2 editor, because while I played a lot of Sc2 melee during WoL and HotS days, the actual experience of finding custom games with SC2 blows. Rather than Wc3′s “here’s all the custom games currently going, knock yourself out bub” thing, with Sc2 they tried to start a curated game list thing and added rating games and all this other wacky stuff that means it’s actually kinda impossible to find things 1) that you like and 2) that people are actually playing. I haven’t touched Sc2 in years, though; maybe it’s gotten better? I doubt it. The editor itself is, based on my limited experience, just the natural iteration of the Wc3 editor: a little more robust, possibly a little more confusing at first as a result, but it’s got that same classic Blizzard polish that makes their modding tools such a joy to use. But between the fact that the scifi aesthetic doesn’t appeal to me as much when it comes to making custom games, and the sucky game finding interface, I think I’m mostly holding out for WC3: Reforged to scratch that RTS modding itch.

DotA 2

Valve did the community a huge solid and released its developer tools to let people mod its hat collecting/racial and homophobic slurs archiving engine, DotA 2, but the custom game search features suffer from the same problem that plagues SC2, only even worse. Just give me a fucking server browser!!!! FPSes had this solved in like 1994!!!

It doesn’t help that DotA is built in what is fundamentally, like, an FPS engine (ok, probably that’s not an accurate characterization, but it is the engine they devised for like Half-Life 2 and TF2), which means that the developer tools feel clunky and counterintuitive and wayyy too complicated if you’re thinking of them as RTS modding tools. Plus, since not everybody has the time and the professional pride Blizzard used to have to create powerful, polished, standalone modding tools, they’re not gonna hold your hand at all. And the fact that MOBAs/ARTSes have mostly colonized the space classic RTSes used to fill means that what you really have is, like, 5% of the assets you’d need to actually make an RTS mod for the DotA engine. It would probably be easier to make an FPS in the DotA engine than a true, Warcraft-style RTS. (Someone did once make an FPS in the Warcraft 3 engine. It was... actually kind of fun? But seriously goofy.)

If I were a smarter and more hardworking person, I could probably build an RTS-like thing in DotA’s modding tools, but I am not. Plus, there are elements of DotA level design that suffer from the same problems as

Later iterations of the Unreal engine

One thing I loved about the classic UT engine, which the original Deus Ex used, is that (though it was prone to frustrating geometry bugs) it let you tinker around with architecture directly in the space it provided. I played with the level editors of some later UT games (principally UT3, I think?), and with the push toward fancier graphics of later generations, there was also a push toward use of a lot more doodads and 3d assets in levels to provide what I would think of as basic architectural details. I’m sure there are solid graphical and programmatic reasons for this. I’m a dilettante at best at this sort of thing, and I can’t speak to those. But the downside of that was that unless you have some 3d modeling chops, and a measure of planning and patience, the sandboxy/creative appeal of dicking around in the level editor was much reduced. That’s not a criticism of the tools provided so much as it is a neutral observation and, perhaps, me mourning a little bit the fact that older, simpler games, by virtue of their simplicity, are often more amenable to modding. One thing we lose in an era of ever-more-elaborate triple-A titles is a fundamental transparency in how games are constructed; they become super complex, teetering programmatical edifices, and while that often allows for interesting new developments in gameplay (and shiny graphics!), for the person who wants to learn How Games Work by taking them apart and poking around, well, it’s harder. That’s one reason why I’ve never gotten into Skyrim modding, even though it looks awesome and super powerful.

(the U4 engine “map editor” equivalent is a suite of game dev tools, and sold as such, but I’m not really talking about standalone game dev tools that are meant to allow you to build a game from the ground up in this post, so that’s beyond the scope of what I’m interested in. Obviously the more general and powerful a modding tool is, the more it shades directly into that; and there’s something of an artificial distinction between a “total conversion mod” and “a new videogame,” like that between a musical and an opera, that mostly has to do with spirit and intent and marketing.)

EU4, CK2

I am including these because I love modding these games, even though the “modding tools” for them are Notepad++ and GIMP. It’s nothing but images and weirdly formatted text files (and little documentation), and it’s terrible and frustrating! But I love it! My big complaint is actually the lack of ability to alter fundamental game mechanics: everything you can change about the game easily is the accidence of it: its appearance, the map, what countries and characters you can control. The underlying mechanics--the spirit of the game--is frustratingly immutable, except via very clunky workarounds, and while I understand why you might not go out of your way to make these things easily manipulable (it’s a lot of extra work to uncertain benefit), and why Paradox games rely on an event-driven system that is both like and much unlike RTS trigger systems, it is a little disappointing. But EU4 and CK2 drive very different parts of my imagination (geography and politics and economics) than, say, Wc3 (strategy and fighting and tactical finesse), in the same way that Deus Ex drove yet another part (the architectural, the spatial, the atmospheric). One day, maybe, someone will invent a game that somehow captures everything I love about each, a kind of  transcendental game of everything, with modding tools to match, but I doubt it, and I’m OK with it even if that never happens.

Honorable mention: the Civ series

4x games are moooostly outside my scope of interest here, but I do remember Civ2 having a terrific editor with lots of opportunities for modding buildings and techs, and the great thing was that units and cities and terrain were all just very simple images that you could edit with an in-game tool. SMAC/AX was also pretty moddable, had a built in scenario editor/cheat menu, and Civ 3/4/5 have fun map editing and scenario building tools. Turn based games appeal to me a little less inherently, because they lack the thing I love about RTSes, the “oh shit PANIC” moments where you reflexes and quick thinking become super important, but the Civ series does have great strategic and econ management elements.

Other games

There are whole genres of games--Sim City, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, the building aspect of 4X games--that capture in small or large part what I love about map editors, with the same build-create-tweak-adjust cycle, though obviously on a distinct footing since they’re making them an actual game rather than a tool with which to create games. It scratches a similar itch, though: it’s all about combining aesthetic design with design of systems. I have a radical thesis which is that every game is improved with the inclusion of a map editor. The existence of a representational, navigable space is intrinsic to almost every genre of game (every game I can think of, though I don’t exclude the possibility that there are ones I haven’t thought of that don’t have that), and being able to use the same underlying rules--or to iterate on those rules--and apply them to a new space, especially a new space you can design for optimum fun rather than just relying on procedurally generated (inevitably samey) space, extends the life of games considerably.

My earliest and biggest interest is in RTSes with map editors, though, because I have a fervent, unquenchable love for the genre. Alas, as noted, it’s a genre that has never been super popular and is currently pretty marginal. THe challenges of making a good RTS engine--nevermind a fun-to-play RTS--are considerable, especially if you care about things like multiplayer (which is my favorite part of RTSes). A lot of entries in that genre now are in some sense hybrid. MOBAs, of course; but games like EU4 have RTSlike elements (and, being pausable, are in some ways the best of both worlds with regard to RTSes and turn-based games). I live in hope that the RTS genre will experience a minor renaissance one of these days, and we’ll get something worthy of being the successor to WC3 or AoE2. If you’re working on that--please, please, I’m begging you, release it with a map editor.