Company of Heroes 2 Message Board  

Just wanted to give a heads up on the matter. Most may not need or care about -Dev mode in COH2 but this post is for those who played the early beta with Jannev's commands mod which, needed dev mode to run. The game's developers in their infinite wisdom or infinite stupidity.... whichever way you want to look at it, have removed the dev feature from the last beta update and the full game with no plans to put it back in . Maybe they want to control content to make more DLC money and stop free mods, who knows? Like I said, just a heads up for those who have yet to dl the full game from steam or are thinking of buying it as you will be without mod content it seems.

btw. I love each and every one of you for all the epic work and support that is put into this site and each and every one of the games.

Well this is sadly something I had predicted long before CoH2 was even a distant thought...

Relic themselves have been progressively more and more hostile toward the modding community for many years to the point that on multiple occasions they made COH1 entirely unusable with mods until overwhelming community outcry made them reluctantly relent.

However, to perpetually make it evermore annoying and hard for modders to keep their mods compatible, they continued update after update which were nothing more than statistical adjustments, and yet they purposely re-configured how start-up files were loaded and thus mods as well were directly effected and hindered.


But wait, it gets even better!

SEGA, the anti-christ of modding everywhere, has been violently and obviously counter to the modding community since they bought up the Creative Assembly studio, who are responsible for the Total War series. Since Empire: Total War especially they have quite purposely released patches and gone to great lengths for no other reason to hamper modding.

Ironically, it was modders who actually -=FIXED=- their broken code in Medieval 2 and Empire especially, which SEGA then flagrantly stole and used as their own since they apparently can't pay programmers good enough to compete with the modders working for FREE.


Now that SEGA owns Relic, it's practically a snake eating its own tail with how much the two entities openly despise the modding community, and I have absolutely no hope of support from official avenues for modding Company of Heroes 2...

It will likely still be possible, given that it is a PC game, and its files are so readily accessible to the user, but the level of difficulty to mod will remain to be seen, and the clear disdain for the modding community producing content that SEGA/Relic can't cash in on themselves is practically a declaration of war from them even before the first "post release" mod gets off the ground.



While I say this with plenty of venom dripping from my tongue for the actions of Relic/SEGA, I still love Company of Heroes and Company of Heroes 2 for what they are, truly good games that I enjoy playing.

As for my qualification to say what I am saying, and make the claims I have made, I am the author of Ewiger Krieg (among others) for the original COH and its expansions. I've felt the growth, and pains, of contending with the developer actively fighting the efforts of the community to SUPPORT their game, not diminish it...

But sadly all too many developers only see modders as competition for their DLC sales.

[Edited by knightpress, 6/28/2013 8:21:11 PM]

Agreed 100% and I did play the Eternal War mod, great work btw!
I always thought it was THQ who hated modders so much lol. Now I see that it is as much relic as they have continued the crusade against us! as for sega... ugh. I think sega should be tried for crimes against corrupting human sanity. I can almost (and can't believe I'm saying this) understand their point of view as I saw in dawn of war II. Relic/THQ made a wargear pack for veteran unlocks but the modding community on the relic forums made a much better wargear pack and everyone (or most) got that pack instead, thus they lost out on big money. As you say, they have only themselves to blame if unpaid and better skilled people top the crap they pump out half the time. Companies never used to make any money off dlc because it never existed and they survived just fine from you buying the base game. With most of those old games having big modding communities if they released tools or made the files easy to mod. They were not in it to get rich and they did not get rich but they made great games both they and we will always love.

Why stop modders if it makes your community grow 80% bigger and get more buyers for future games you release? you will make less money if there are less players to buy your dlc in the first place.
I can't make heads or tails of it and have given up on doing so.

[Edited by Hyperion501, 6/29/2013 5:48:11 AM]

Coh2 will go on steam workshop,so it will be kinda the same as skyrim workshop

community.companyofheroes.com/forums/company-of-heroes-2-discussion/topics/Workshop-and-Trading-Card-Support-please

and this thread

community.companyofheroes.com/forums/company-of-heroes-2-discussion/topics/Build-9614-dev-mode-no-longer-works

I don't know about you but I want to use my own tools to make and release mods, not the workshop. Having a "mod community" on steam is like having a bacon sandvich with NO BACON! its a mess to keep track of things.


As for this quote from community.companyofheroes.com/forums/company-of-heroes-2-discussion/topics/Build-9614-dev-mode-no-longer-works

"Never fear mod community! There will be something to cover this again in the near future! We do like mods, and we do want you to be able to do them, so there will certainly be something that allows you to mod the game again. Hopefully within a week or two".... lies!

If not, then I will belive it when I see it.

As knightpress said they have in the past made it as hard as possible for us to mod the game. Now I fear that they will limit the mods we make to maps or unit skins rather than new factions or scar function modding.

If a Modder with the skill set could make naval combat and maps for COH2 (as unlikley as that is), they will do everything in their power to stop that. period

where as companies such as bethesda from the elder scrolls series would embrace a skilled person and may even ask to work with them as has been done in the past.

Well bethesda knows the value of a great community, they have never turned it down as far as i know.

Relic was ****ed at it's community and customers for modding the Homeworld series and made it increasingly hard to mod them with each pacth that got thrown out, in the end they stopped managing it, and left it alone to die. It never will.

It gets more and more clear that modding is going to be a rare thing in the future, since more developers go against it to gain greater profit.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that modding will become more rare...

There will however, be a great schism between development mindsets, along the lines of "open-community" and "anti-community", and both will have their support and benefits and detractors.


There are many many "open-community" developers right at this very moment that wholeheartedly support modding and their communities, because they genuinely enjoy the creative process, and once the game goes out the door and is installed on your computer, they know it's no longer theirs to completely control how you choose to play with it.

As such I coin the term "open community", referring to their process of opening some aspect of content development to anyone who wants to take a crack at it, beyond what the developer themselves had put in as the base-game.

I liken it to LEGO's, if the LEGO company makes a set that builds a house, they know most people will take it home and build that house with that set, but in most lego manuals they acknowledge that many people don't always color within the lines, and so they commonly suggest alternative things you can build with the blocks provided.

And as anyone knows, any kind that's ever had more than one lego set in their lives has nearly universally used parts from countless sets to make something entirely new and different from either of the original sets.

So the "lego" developers are out there and they aren't opposed to their communities, and in many cases even endorse their creativity. Bethesda is an excellent example, but there are even lesser known examples, even developers like Rockstar, while profoundly infuriating for their needless interfaces and bloatware, they don't mind the community fiddling around with the textures, models, and pretty much everything else under the hood.




Then there is the "closed-community" developer... And please don't think of that as a derogatory term, it really isn't, it's really more of a description of their preference to keep development of their intellectual property contained within their house, or even semi-closed community that filters or controls what content can be added by the community.

For instance, Nintendo, a developer that on the whole I really really like, and while I haven't followed them too closely with the WiiU, I know they can deliver simply fantastic games. However in that same breath, they aren't overly eager about third-parties fiddling with their games. Heck they even sued Galoob (unsuccessfully) in the 80's for making the GameGenie...

Arguably the great great great grandfather of much of what our beloved cheats and trainers here do. Had Nintendo not lost that battle, it is VERY arguable that this site couldn't exist... But I digress...

A developer being "closed" to allowing external content development is within their rights, and I don't begrudge them not making public tools (software development kit or "SDK" ) that the community can use to fiddle with their games. What I do however take exception to is a developer reaching out, from their headquarters, across the internet, and intentionally changing (via updates) a game to expressly diminish or cripple the ability of a player to play their game the way they want to play it.


There is no fear whatsoever of online manipulation, because any incorrect (i.e. modified) files would not match up and thus not be allowed on public servers. So the only alternative is onerous control over every end-user and how they are going to be allowed to play the game they paid for.




I don't mind so much if a game is pretty much marketed as a "pre-set experience", I know going into a Zelda game that there isn't likely going to be any sort of SDK to make my own levels with, and I don't expect it. I play it for what it is.

However on the flip-side of the coin, in games like COH and Total War, even if the developer won't release any SDK, the community is still capable of many things, especially so on PC platforms. As such, I feel very strongly that while the developers need not support the community directly, they shouldn't actively seek to set them back and impede their progress either.

[Edited by knightpress, 6/30/2013 8:37:33 PM]

GOD DAMN IT MAN! why in the seven hells did you have to bring up LEGO! now i'll have to go to the toy shop and buy enough lego to build a life size death star....

I think that it is up to the company to support mods and to make mod tools for it, but making the game unmoddable because you don't like people playing around with your s**t is a **** thing to do. On the other hand if you have to make the files harcoded or unmoddable to make the game stable then that is another matter.

[Edited by Hyperion501, 7/1/2013 12:06:32 PM]