OshaHott
Smash Cadet
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2016
- Messages
- 38
My Thoughts on Mods in Smash 4
By Benjamin Tillman
Hello to all of my fellow smashers! I am here today to discuss a rather… delicate topic amongst the Super Smash Bros. fandom: mods! Mods are nothing new to the community, not by a longshot (or should I say, hookshot! *bud um tss*) They have been in, as far as I can tell, since Melee! We have got tons and tons of fan games from them. Super Smash Flash, Super Smash Flash 2, PM, Brawl Minus, Brawl plus, etc. and that’s just to name a few! So, what, you ask, am I here to discuss with you today? Well, that’d be mods for the newest entry in the series, Super Smash Bros. 4!
First of all, let me get this out of the way, mods in smash 4 are a disgrace to the series and really the community itself! Now, before you comment all angrily, let me explain! The first thing to pop to your head was probably something like, “Well, how could skins be bad at all?” I will answer that in due time. Sit back, relax, and simply read and hear what I have to say before you comment ANYTHING! Please?
So, let’s hop right in with my first point, simply applying mods. Now, applying mods, from what I can tell, isn’t a very hard process. Especially not when there are about 15 million tutorials for it anyways. But let me illustrate for you the process. First you must have an SD card. Now, they aren’t too expensive, but if you don’t have the extra cash laying around, then you can already forget about getting mods! But let’s say you do have one, then you can go on to create a dump of the game. This is a process that takes QUITE some time form what I have seen. At this point, you are, or at least I know I would be, questioning why I’m even doing this. For a bunch of pointless mods? Really? Anyways, then you have to go out and find mods that you may want to use. Not that bad, sure, but guess what, some people in this world aren’t… nice! Who KNOWS when people will decide to start adding viruses to the files you have to download for your “precious” mods! Now, let’s say you (for some reason) sat through all that, found a few mods you want, and now you’re ready to use them! You got 20 Falcon skins, 10 Shulk skins, replaced all English voices with their Japanese counterparts because you were too lazy and/or too broke to afford a Japanese Wii U and version of the game, and now you want to test them out! Jump into For Glory, why don’t ya?
I’ll tell you why sir! By jumping onto For Glory, you are being about as much of an ahole as a Diddy main (#NoHateToDiddyMains!) Now, this one is more from personal experience, but you can literally crash someone’s Wii U, yeah, not just their game, their entire Wii U, by simply having a modded Wii U! Let me tell you this story of mine. One day I went on For Glory to play some good ‘ol Smash. I was playing my new secondary, Olimar, and I had lost against a pretty good Dr. Mario. Nothing much, just a bit salt induced. But hey, who doesn’t get salty every now and then, right? Well, the match ended, but guess what? The guy was using mods and it literally crashed my Wii U! Isn’t that fun? Thank you, I wanted my Wi U to crash! But that’s not the only instance of hardware difficulty with this game, oh no!
By this point, we all know that the Wii U isn’t the sturdiest console in terms of internal hardware, and that only amplifies with mods! I have a friend who installed stage mods (which is a whole topic on its own! We’ll get there.) Well, we decided to do some casual smash, ya know, throw on some items and pick a non-omega/not tourney legal stage. So I decided to pick the amazing stage of Orbital Gate Assault! And by “great” I mean as great as the last 10 buffs Jigglypuff got! Ya know, the… uh… buffs…. That she… uh… got! Ya! Well, it was extremely laggy, which I didn’t mind all that much, for usually it fixes itself after a bit, but I noticed it wasn’t letting up. Hm... Do you see where this is going? Yup! It was his mods! Not only that, but we then decided to go back to competitive and go to either Smashville or Town and City (fairly sure it was T&C though) and he couldn’t even play there either! And all the mods were just simply reskins! Oh hey, that reminds me, skins!
Oh yes, how could I forget, skins. You have probably been wondering all this time about skins. After all, those don’t hurt online play, they don’t cause lag, and they’re just little visual pleasers, right? Well, sort of. Now, this is the main thing that REALLY irks me about mods. Look at this from a game designer’s standpoint. Now, I’m no game designer, but this is fairly understandable, or so I would think, anyways. Now, you are a small game designer. You did all of the work yourself and from scratch. Visuals, coding, AI, everything! Your game blows up in popularity. Kinda like Mewtwo when he got his buffs, Teehee. You start browsing forums and whatnot about your game, and you find some interesting things. You find that someone has made a fan game for you! It uses the same premise as your game, but with little messages to you and just little things like that. How sweet! You go back to the forums and find that people have added in skin swaps for your game’s main character and some other characters. Okay, cool. Then, after about a month, you notice something strange. In short, everyone is playing with modded skins! There are few people playing the game with the models and textures you spent HOURS of your spare time working on. Well that’s not cool! And then you realize that some of the main areas in the game, people have made them look completely different! What!? I can hear you now, “Sakurai isn’t a small game designer!”, “Sakurai didn’t design everything by hand himself!” and, “Why would he care about a few simple texture swaps?” Well, let me answer all of those! No, he isn’t a small game designer, but the point was that it was someone who is very passionate about their game. Can you think of anyone more passionate about game design then Sakurai? I sure as hell can’t! And he probably takes more pride in Smash 4 since that was the last game he got to design with Iwata. No, he didn’t design it all by hand himself. But it is still his game and he had it made the way he envisioned it. If he wanted Gaur Plains to be in the background of Smahsville, he would have made it like that! And last, but not least, why would he care about some texture swaps? Well, it’s as I said. He made it the way he envisioned it! And have you forgotten about his arm injury he was dealing with while making the game? Yeah, it was literally painful for him to design Smash 4. He put his blood, time, sweat, and tears into this game to make it play and look the way he has made it for us. He even traded family time for the development of the game! He has a wife, remember? Are you really going to throw that back in his face?
I just wanted to say all this to make you guys really think about the way mods have been growing in Smash 4. I know that a lot of people won’t see this. Heck, I don’t expect this to draw any attention at all! But to anyone who did read this, at least think about it, please? Yes, a lot of this was plain bias, I understand, but I really want to raise awareness of this. If you have mods, you do you, and I know that I am surely overthinking this, but what can I say? I’m passionate about Smash 4! It’s the first game in the series that I got into competitive with, after all. I just want to preserve the game and keep its life span long is all. Is anyone with me?
By Benjamin Tillman
Hello to all of my fellow smashers! I am here today to discuss a rather… delicate topic amongst the Super Smash Bros. fandom: mods! Mods are nothing new to the community, not by a longshot (or should I say, hookshot! *bud um tss*) They have been in, as far as I can tell, since Melee! We have got tons and tons of fan games from them. Super Smash Flash, Super Smash Flash 2, PM, Brawl Minus, Brawl plus, etc. and that’s just to name a few! So, what, you ask, am I here to discuss with you today? Well, that’d be mods for the newest entry in the series, Super Smash Bros. 4!
First of all, let me get this out of the way, mods in smash 4 are a disgrace to the series and really the community itself! Now, before you comment all angrily, let me explain! The first thing to pop to your head was probably something like, “Well, how could skins be bad at all?” I will answer that in due time. Sit back, relax, and simply read and hear what I have to say before you comment ANYTHING! Please?
So, let’s hop right in with my first point, simply applying mods. Now, applying mods, from what I can tell, isn’t a very hard process. Especially not when there are about 15 million tutorials for it anyways. But let me illustrate for you the process. First you must have an SD card. Now, they aren’t too expensive, but if you don’t have the extra cash laying around, then you can already forget about getting mods! But let’s say you do have one, then you can go on to create a dump of the game. This is a process that takes QUITE some time form what I have seen. At this point, you are, or at least I know I would be, questioning why I’m even doing this. For a bunch of pointless mods? Really? Anyways, then you have to go out and find mods that you may want to use. Not that bad, sure, but guess what, some people in this world aren’t… nice! Who KNOWS when people will decide to start adding viruses to the files you have to download for your “precious” mods! Now, let’s say you (for some reason) sat through all that, found a few mods you want, and now you’re ready to use them! You got 20 Falcon skins, 10 Shulk skins, replaced all English voices with their Japanese counterparts because you were too lazy and/or too broke to afford a Japanese Wii U and version of the game, and now you want to test them out! Jump into For Glory, why don’t ya?
I’ll tell you why sir! By jumping onto For Glory, you are being about as much of an ahole as a Diddy main (#NoHateToDiddyMains!) Now, this one is more from personal experience, but you can literally crash someone’s Wii U, yeah, not just their game, their entire Wii U, by simply having a modded Wii U! Let me tell you this story of mine. One day I went on For Glory to play some good ‘ol Smash. I was playing my new secondary, Olimar, and I had lost against a pretty good Dr. Mario. Nothing much, just a bit salt induced. But hey, who doesn’t get salty every now and then, right? Well, the match ended, but guess what? The guy was using mods and it literally crashed my Wii U! Isn’t that fun? Thank you, I wanted my Wi U to crash! But that’s not the only instance of hardware difficulty with this game, oh no!
By this point, we all know that the Wii U isn’t the sturdiest console in terms of internal hardware, and that only amplifies with mods! I have a friend who installed stage mods (which is a whole topic on its own! We’ll get there.) Well, we decided to do some casual smash, ya know, throw on some items and pick a non-omega/not tourney legal stage. So I decided to pick the amazing stage of Orbital Gate Assault! And by “great” I mean as great as the last 10 buffs Jigglypuff got! Ya know, the… uh… buffs…. That she… uh… got! Ya! Well, it was extremely laggy, which I didn’t mind all that much, for usually it fixes itself after a bit, but I noticed it wasn’t letting up. Hm... Do you see where this is going? Yup! It was his mods! Not only that, but we then decided to go back to competitive and go to either Smashville or Town and City (fairly sure it was T&C though) and he couldn’t even play there either! And all the mods were just simply reskins! Oh hey, that reminds me, skins!
Oh yes, how could I forget, skins. You have probably been wondering all this time about skins. After all, those don’t hurt online play, they don’t cause lag, and they’re just little visual pleasers, right? Well, sort of. Now, this is the main thing that REALLY irks me about mods. Look at this from a game designer’s standpoint. Now, I’m no game designer, but this is fairly understandable, or so I would think, anyways. Now, you are a small game designer. You did all of the work yourself and from scratch. Visuals, coding, AI, everything! Your game blows up in popularity. Kinda like Mewtwo when he got his buffs, Teehee. You start browsing forums and whatnot about your game, and you find some interesting things. You find that someone has made a fan game for you! It uses the same premise as your game, but with little messages to you and just little things like that. How sweet! You go back to the forums and find that people have added in skin swaps for your game’s main character and some other characters. Okay, cool. Then, after about a month, you notice something strange. In short, everyone is playing with modded skins! There are few people playing the game with the models and textures you spent HOURS of your spare time working on. Well that’s not cool! And then you realize that some of the main areas in the game, people have made them look completely different! What!? I can hear you now, “Sakurai isn’t a small game designer!”, “Sakurai didn’t design everything by hand himself!” and, “Why would he care about a few simple texture swaps?” Well, let me answer all of those! No, he isn’t a small game designer, but the point was that it was someone who is very passionate about their game. Can you think of anyone more passionate about game design then Sakurai? I sure as hell can’t! And he probably takes more pride in Smash 4 since that was the last game he got to design with Iwata. No, he didn’t design it all by hand himself. But it is still his game and he had it made the way he envisioned it. If he wanted Gaur Plains to be in the background of Smahsville, he would have made it like that! And last, but not least, why would he care about some texture swaps? Well, it’s as I said. He made it the way he envisioned it! And have you forgotten about his arm injury he was dealing with while making the game? Yeah, it was literally painful for him to design Smash 4. He put his blood, time, sweat, and tears into this game to make it play and look the way he has made it for us. He even traded family time for the development of the game! He has a wife, remember? Are you really going to throw that back in his face?
I just wanted to say all this to make you guys really think about the way mods have been growing in Smash 4. I know that a lot of people won’t see this. Heck, I don’t expect this to draw any attention at all! But to anyone who did read this, at least think about it, please? Yes, a lot of this was plain bias, I understand, but I really want to raise awareness of this. If you have mods, you do you, and I know that I am surely overthinking this, but what can I say? I’m passionate about Smash 4! It’s the first game in the series that I got into competitive with, after all. I just want to preserve the game and keep its life span long is all. Is anyone with me?