So I decided to install and play on a private server for Need for Speed World, a f2p game that I played for a time way back in the day and enjoyed my time with it back then. Apparently the server I had pick to visit my nostalgia was the wrong one, as the server runners had decided that they needed to make massive sweeping changes to the gameplay, especially for the cop chase parts of the game (admittedly they were pretty easy in vanilla).
So imagine my face when I go to do a pursuit/team escape with my racing car to break up the monotomy only to find out that the cops were made to be infinitely more bullshit, enough that it made me want to go on their discord and make a complaint that they ruined it. Then I found that someone else was making the same complaint, and the ‘devs’ of this server were just going “Lol that’s the point, you’re supposed to be a cheesedick, using the best car modded this exact way for the event 24/7, because we balanced it around you cheesedicking because the vanilla game was so easy. You’re just mad cause bad.” Okay, they weren’t saying that exactly, but you get the point.
Jesus christ man, I don’t get why when modders decide to go fix legit problems with a game they almost always end up thinking the lack of difficulty is an issue then proceed to overtune it to an absurd degree.
I always notice this with open world games. They always want to add cities and locations that are extremely large, closer to what they are in the lore. But they never justify that vastness with anything interesting. They don’t have hundreds of quests packed in, tons of NPCs making the area feel lived in, etc. Its just huge and empty and boring to traverse.
It just takes too much creativity, effort etc to add all that stuff for one person or even a small team, so the project ends up being left incomplete. Also mercurial fever dream project is going to fall short of something with vision and accountability of some kind.
this is “modding megalomania” to use the scientific term; one person (or member of team) has a specific skillset and goes buckwild heaping on a specific aspect or system of the game, leaving other parts of the user experience behind.
a single, interesting npc that’s well implemented is a more complete package from a gameplay perspective, but if your modder only knows how to do the environment design that’s usually what they stick with. there’s not a huge incentive for cultivating holistic knowledge of development in a hobby environment