Photo-realism: How come modders do a better job than devs?

When it comes to photo-realistic graphics, how come modders do a better job than the developers who developed the games in the first place and have access to more professional designers, tools, and budget?

I know that PC specs needs to be in check in order to target the lowest common denominator, but weren't that what graphics settings in PC games are for?

For example, I felt Ubisoft downgrading watch dogs graphically for the PC was unnecessary, and was wondering why can't they just offer higher fidelity settings for those who have nVidia Titan Black or Radeon R9 x290.

I could understand lowering the graphics fidelity for consoles, but for PCs that just doesn't seem to be a rational decision.

Because its not worth the time

Developers are on a strict time/monetary budget. Modders usually mod in their spare time, and with no monetary incentive.

Isn't downgrading the fidelity costs more time than leaving it as is?

They want to appeal to the masses. The average PC gamer doesn't own an insane high end PC.

@Mystery_Writer: that's part of optimizing the game/engine

I'm not saying don't target average PCs, that's what graphics settings are for.

Also, won't the masses (including gaming press) be more impressed, for instance, to see the trailer of photo-realistic modded GTA game than vanilla GTA?

So, for instance, how that fits the case of downgrading watch_dogs for PCs?

Because one is making a game, one is making a mood to an existing game.

Because modders have all the time in the world and are working over a base that was already designed by others.

Those are the best answers you're going to get.

Because doing so would limit the amount of people that can play their game.

Mods provide an option for those with the systems can run it.

Not everyone can run a game with ENB mods.

Devs shouldnt sacrifice game quality to spend time and resources catering to the few.......especially when they know the community will do it.

What they SHOULD do is make their games easily support mods as Bethesda does with their games.

Modders can spend years on single aspects working like an ant colony. Valve had said so themselves, it's virtually impossible for a developer to match them.

That just seems a waste of time and resources. Plus they already got the modders to do their work for them for free. And It's not like they can't do it.

more like companies don't want to pay developers more and developers don't want to work longer.

and modders usually dont care how hard it is to run their stuff. Slap a high end ENB mod over skyrim and watch your VRAM fill up in seconds. Devs have to cater to various kinds of PCs strong and weak, as well as consoles

yeah, nice visuals are nice, but it doesn't mean crap if your computer or console can't handle it.

Slapping a new coat of paint over an already built house is substantially easier than building one from scratch.

That would be true if we were not talking about 3d art. It is easier for a modded to build whatever they want because we are not restricted to packages. We also are not under any art direction. If I decided to build a character however I still must build it from scratch. Most of what I've seen when it comes to modding you cannot use already built assists. I use Arma for example because that Is what i modded the most. You still have to build a mesh within the confines of the engine using whatever mod tools they give you (which normally suck). It is not easier at all.

In the case of Skyrim it's a shoddy ramshackle tent ready to blow over with sparklers and glitter placed around it.

Developers have the design around the lowest common denominator in hardware, have budget and time constraints as well.

We havent officially seen what WD looks like on PC yet... as far as we know that E3 2012 footage may be pre-rendered video

Time, budget, having to cater to a massive number of systems. The best thing about mods is, I can chose what I install based on how powerful my system is.

/thread

There really isn't much discussion past this.

Because there's people with so much skill they spend their free time doing what somebody else does for pay.

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Devs also have to contend with making the lighting work with all content and look good. Sure some engines baked lighting, but more are shifting towards dynamic lighting and tod settings have to look natural with whatever you're throwing in their. Some Crysis and GTAIV mods look godly, but may lack uniformity in exposure so some parts look ass.

@Mystery_Writer: So many reasons. They have to get the game running to begin with, then get it done by a certain deadline, plus make it interesting to play, plus do every other damn thing it takes to release a multi-million dollar, often multiplatform title. So many people underestimate how time consuming and challenging it is to program a big budget video game. It's a shame. Developers work their asses off for years, a lot of times working 60-80 hours a week, and anything other than ground-breaking perfection results in anonymous internet whiners bitching non-stop about how "lazy" they are. It's a shame people think their precious 60$ is worth more than 2-4 years of 200 peoples' lives.

All bored nerds do is re-texture things months to years after the game's been released and graphical standards have improved significantly, making it a lot easier to mod games to a greater visual output.

^^ This got a little more hostile than the original post called for, but developer bashing is something that's always got under my skin, as I work in the creative field, and people generally have no idea how hard we work.

This. Also time constraints.

There is a lot that goes into this process.

Textures can to some degree be down scaled in engine or photoshop(to have multiple res copies), but if you overdo this you end up with texture bleeding and the texture does not match up with the UV's of the 3d model any more, so you have to go back and re-touch it. This takes time. When you have to make a 4096, 2048, 1024, 512, 256 and 128 pixel texture map for everything. You'll also have to back out new normal maps, cavity maps, ambient occlusion and what ever other map the engine might use. This isn't something that is done with just a press of a button. And there are a LOT of 3d models in a game, so if you have to spend 5x amount of time doing textures, then you start lagging behind.

3d models needs to be re done at different polygon limits. Your tech lead might say that the game has a poly limit of 200k at the lowest setting and 2m at its highest. And the game might have a total of 5 settings on the resolution of the game models, so every model has to be made at least 5 times, though this can be sped up somewhat with the new re-topology tools that are available now. And ad on top of that that you might have level of detail, adding to even more versions of the same model.

Moders on the other hand usually focuses on one thing. Like making new textures where all are in 8192 pixels. That's not hard or very time consuming.
Or they might focus on up rezing a set of models with no regard to polygon budget, not hard either. Point is that they don't have to take into consideration lower settings. They can just aim at taking it to the breaking point of a SLI/X-fire setup.
I'll add that rewriting lighting engines is hard and is VERY impressive that hobbyists are able to do.

TLDR;

It takes time and is a lot of work!

Preety much this, its kind of like the Linux system where people just contribute to the offer all. No amount of dev team can out do a dedicated colony of ants

This. It's far more difficult to build something from scratch than it is to give it a paint job.

no matter how well developers do modders are still gonna come along and mod anyways

This.

And development teams tend to be over-managed and have too many people on them, with different, conflicting ideas.

# 1) Those mods are usually just for high end PC, which 90% of PC gamers do not own an equal to.

2) Because in reality no one really gives a shit about them except PC fanboys who use screenshots of them to post on forums to compensate for having a tiny dick.

3) Because it takes a very large amount of time and no developer is going to tack on an extra year of development because of see 2)

ummm.....Because mods don't do any actual work most of the time, Most modders just go into game code and unlock any sort of limiters that developers put in to keep the game running smooth and they then dump huge high res textures into the game.

They don't make the engines they just tweak them usually so they don't actually do a better job than the developers.

you cant compare the two devs make the game from scratch making the animations,environments,sound etc etc modders are just changing some of the lighting and textures. Devs also have to ensure the game works for a wide audience not just those with high powered pcs

Devs make the cake and put the icing on it modder just put a few sprinkles on it its not the same!

Man, a lot of people here have a such a negative attitude towards modders. Just look at Counterstrike or even the old zombie horde mod for half-life that eventually became the Left4Dead co-op survival genre. Those were done by just a couple guys. Valve even hired them. Bungie always loved their creative community as well and heavily featured custom "mods" on bungie.net.

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Also, lol at the idea that most devs are slaving away on their own proprietary engines and using custom sourced textures. How many Quake, Unreal, and other middleware engines games have been released over the years and still looked shit using recycled textures from previous iterations.. GT5 and the PS2 car models for instance. Modders do better work than that for free.

Don't hate, appreciate.

No, dude. It DEFINITELY is MUCH easier than building the game.

There's a reason why games have teams of hundreds of people working on one game, and that's because it definitely is much harder than it looks.