The life and times of user created content

Today I got to take a look at iD’s Tech 5 engine demo, in which they showed how they’ve optimized the developmental process with new tools for the engine to be used in Rage. I am almost certain that it will breathe new life into the custom content community once they are released to the public; opening doors to those who have found themselves weeded out of the group of content providers considered by others as “quality contributors”.

Anybody can tell you how far graphics in games have come since their birth with the release of Pong (actually it’s kind of embarrassing to have actually written that out). While this is obviously a huge benefit for most of the games on which the work ends the moment it goes gold, this has not been entirely true for those games which allow for user created content. From the first games that promoted custom content like Doom and Sim City 2K, there had been a slow but gradual growth in the number of people generating content which most people would consider comparable to that included with the game itself.

This trend persisted up until the UT99 vs Q3 war which, in my belief, was the period in which user created content was at its finest. I remember spending well over a year and a half obsessing over Unreal Tournament, and I didn’t even have an internet connection that could handle the multiplayer game search, much less an actual match. The reason why Unreal Tournament survived so long in my ‘list of games I’m currently playing’ is because of all the fun mods and maps I could download – and because the visuals weren’t all that polished to begin with, it really didn’t matter if certain details in the custom created elements weren’t present.

The further onward graphics moved from this balance between being simply nonexistant and being too detailed to replicate, the more the difference between those with experience, talent and those with neither became painfully apparent; custom, visual content just didn’t look good any more next to those made by the developers any more. This deterred aspiring creators from trying at all and nowadays there’s little content that players can look at and say, “damn, this would have made a great extra mission/level/character in the game.” This essentially defeats the whole point of allowing the creation of custom content in the first place since nobody really gains anything out of it in the end.

With their new tool however, iD stand to turn things back to the way they used to be by bringing everything in the content creation process back down to earth, while at the same time retaining the sophistication and depth that games have garnered over time. In doing so, the distinction between the newbies and the pros will likely become slightly more blurred once again, allowing for easier access for newcomers to the custom content community. I am most certainly looking forward to these new tools being built upon and fine tuned to a point that it will set a standard for other developers to aspire for. Perhaps then I might get to see more games that have enough custom content available to them to last me another year and a half.