How are you all? I am writing my thesis about the influence of mods on the gameplay experience of the player in video games. The cases (games) I use to do research on this question are Minecraft and Skyrim. I am still looking for more opinions to really get a comprehensive understanding of the pros and cons of mods for the gameplay experience in video games. Therefore I am very curious to hear your perspective about the following questions:
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?
How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
Do you read any mod reviews and if yes, how do you see the effect of this on your opinion of the mod?
How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?
If you don’t feel like answering every single question, this is fine of course. Each answer will be very valuable for my research!
Thank you so much!
Hope everyone stays healthy & safe in these strange times.
Mods are often good things in video games. It adds content that people don't have but want. Personally I don't use mods that add content, but that is because I am satisfied with the vanilla game. People who mod are just people who want other things in their game, and if they can get it they will stay, so mods are good for both the game and the players.
"How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?"
If people add specific mods for their game then it is there to enhance their gameplay (in a way which the vanilla game can't).
"Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?"
If people use the mods they want then I don't see it being something negative, but it can lead to lag.
"How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?"
For Minecraft I hope that modders will update their mods more frequently in the future, and also that more mods that enhance vanilla is developed. I also wish for Mojang to work more with modders for Java Edition. I don't keep up with modding anymore so I don't know how it will develop.
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
I really enjoy my sandbox games, and Minecraft delivers on that in spades. The vanilla game is already great at giving you that open-world, do-anything experience. In my experience, when I play vanilla singleplayer, the arc of gameplay tends to be intense interest and excitement until you've got your base set up, all the farms are pumping out endless resources, and you don't need anything else. After that point, I try to keep things interesting and find new things to build and enjoy, but the excitement wanes and eventually the world is deleted.
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?
I think that reputable mods that people have lavished love and care on over many versions of Minecraft really add to the whole experience, providing new content and click-saving, sanity-keeping enhancements. Things like faster leaf despawning and being able to hold down the left mouse button and sweep everything into a chest in one click are things that I really, really miss when I'm playing vanilla.
That said, because this is a "general" opinion, mods also carry the caveats of needing to stay updated, conflicts, lag, and making sure you've installed a good one that won't corrupt your game.
How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
They pick up where vanilla leaves off in that arc I described above: they provide new and interesting content to keep the excitement going, while also enhancing that first base experience. What I'm trying to say is, they extend the life of your Minecraft experience in any given world. I love to play modded, and the current world I'm playing has been active for about a year and a half at this point. I've spent over 500 hours in it, and I'm still finding new and exciting things to do beyond just getting myself established. I even just recently started a Youtube channel where I'm serializing playing that very world, so yeah, I'd say mods have had a pretty good effect on my Minecraft experience.
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
Mods are infamous for causing lag in your game.
Sometimes, different mods will conflict in various ways, causing glitches or creating insurmountable gameplay obstacles (like recipe conflicts... luckily now surmountable, thanks to mods that let you click through the available recipes, but I digress).
Each mod gets new updates at different times, and so you have to stay on top of keeping your modpack updated, if you're using a personal one and not something published. Some mods carry a risk of corrupting your save file or game.
Almost all mods have a config file, which you need to keep track of and update to the settings you want every time the mod is updated.
Every time you update your modpack, unless you keep meticulous notes, you have to boot the game up multiple times to be informed of new dependencies that your mods need in order to function. Between downloading the new versions and getting all the dependencies sorted out, this can be an hours-long process.
Both Minecraft itself and your world save take much longer to load up when there's several mods involved.
Way back when, before the mods folder existed, you had to jump through hoops to install mods into the right .jar files, and even now, some more complex mods require special installation processes that can be difficult to accomplish.
New updates of vanilla Minecraft often require complete rewrites of existing mods. That means that some update right away to the new version, some take months or years to update, and some are simply retired and never update at all. That, in turn, means that those of us who play modded find themselves multiple versions behind the most recent vanilla version so they can keep playing with their favorite mods. (I, for example, am still playing 1.12.2, even though the current version is all the way to 1.15.2,)
Downloading a mod from a disreputable website often comes with unwanted additional software, viruses, and/or spyware.
Do you read any mod reviews and if yes, how do you see the effect of this on your opinion of the mod?
Not really. I generally discover new mods either by browsing through CurseForge or by watching modded Minecraft series on Youtube.
How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?
My number one wish for Minecraft mods is that they become easier to update to current versions of the game, so that they can keep up with the vanilla versions and the mod writers don't have to rewrite everything every time an update happens. I'm not sure what would be required to make this happen--almost certainly something on Mojang's part--but that's the effect I hope for, someday.
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
My experience with the game is quite a bit different from most players since I have not updated to newer versions, in part because of mods, in particular, the ability to make my own mods, as opposed to using mods others made, with a few exceptions early on, as well as the way I like to play, where I spend most of the time caving for the enjoyment, rather than gathering needed resources. I'd say that the main attraction of the game in general is the open-world sandbox aspect which accommodates practically any playstyle, without having to follow any set storyline (besides the Ender Dragon but I see this as a minor part of the game). The ease of which it can be modded is another bonus; while not officially supported it is relatively easy to decompile and deobfuscate Java, for which there are various tools that do this automatically, and Mojang doesn't forbid modding unless it is for nefarious purposes (bypassing paying for the game or hacking in multiplayer).
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods? / How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
I've been playing with and making my own mods for nearly 7 years now and would consider them to be essential, especially in newer versions of the game; I started a few months after the release of 1.6 (July 2013) and have been using mods ever since, either of the "tweak" variety (just small changes) to complete changes to things like world generation (my own modding specialty, i started out using a 3rd party mod which let you configure the density of caves, later changing them with my own mods before going on to other parts of world generation, like adding new biomes and improving terrain). Both caves and biomes were also changed in newer versions, mainly in 1.7, in ways that I highly dislike and I'd use mods to change them if I played on those versions; 1.7 greatly reduced the variation in the size and density of cave systems and made underground structures much rarer, and also changed biome placement so you have the same few biomes within large areas instead of any biome next to any other biome (the latter is a rendering of a world created with my own mod, including biomes based on ones in 1.7+ as well as many of my own. The first map is the same area of the same seed in 1.7 and later).
Note that I have never actually updated past 1.6.4, the last version before a major change to world generation, in large part because of mods, which I see as more of a separate branch of game development rather than something that exists alongside the base game, this is especially true for mods that add a lot of their own content or change vanilla content, including my own, in particular, what I call "TheMasterCaver's World"; for example, I added my own version of Mending, an enchantment added to vanilla in 1.9, which works as I think it should (the vanilla version repairs your items with XP you pick up while my version prevents the cost from increasing when you repair them in the anvil, which also requires resources to repair them with an XP cost dependent on the quality of the item. This is the same as how items could be repaired in older versions, where renaming an item would keep the cost from increasing).
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
I don't have issues with mods themselves; many of the negatives mentioned by others are the result of inexperienced modders who don't do much bugfixes/optimizations, which I spend a lot of time on, even improving performance over vanilla (I've even made a complete replacement for Optifine, a popular optimization mod, which goes far beyond anything it does, and will eventually be part of TMCW; for example, this is a screenshot I took while testing while playing - nearly 1000 FPS and only 260 MB max memory usage in the most resource-demanding biome in TMCW (the trees get up to 64 blocks tall with thousands of leaves each). The game also loads within a second or two, indistinguishable from vanilla, same for creating a new world, which is 2-3 times faster than vanilla, both of which are also far faster than newer vanilla versions (more content is often cited as a reason for being slower but it is mostly due to poorly optimized code). Many mods also suffer from relying on an API/modloader to indirectly access the core code, rather than directly integrating with the base game, as my own mods do; however, this greatly reduces compatibility with other mods since they can't change the same code.
My main negative experience is from people who think that using any mods, no matter how minor, completely changes the game such that I may as well be playing an entirely different game, or what I do is completely invalidated by using mods (for example, I've had people tell me that I can only mine so many ores because I use mods to make them more common and/or easier to collect, or the game I play is otherwise totally different from vanilla - even though that couldn't be further from the truth, for example, while TMCW does add in "better than diamond" gear (a very popular addition in many mods) it is only better when compared to diamond in the mod, which is weaker than diamond in vanilla, and there also isn't much difference between a nearly vanilla world and more modded worlds in terms of how quickly I collect resources).
Thank you so much for sharing your opinion!!! Your thorough answers will definitely be very valuable for my thesis!! If you know more people that want to share their opinion, let me know. Have a nice day!!
Thank you so much for sharing your opinion!!! Your thorough answers will definitely be very valuable for my thesis!! If you know more people that want to share their opinion, let me know. Have a nice day!!
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
I see Minecraft as a game that can be played in many different ways; if you're tired of playing it one way, try another. For instance, you can play in survival or creative, and have different goals in each mode. You can also play on custom maps or multiplayer servers, and more importantly for your questions, mods, many of which fill a certain niche of playstyle.
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?
I think they add a lot of replay value to the game, as well as inspiration for new features in the base game.
How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
By now, I mostly play with mods, because they provide experiences that the vanilla game probably won't ever provide, and they've kept me interested in the game for a long time.
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
impact on performance (especially memory usage)
bugs caused by mods
mods taking a long time to update to a newer Minecraft version
similarly, modding APIs taking a long time to update to a newer Minecraft version (e.g. Forge taking a long time to update to 1.13)
mods being abandoned
learning curves of some mods such as the more hardcore tech mods
Do you read any mod reviews and if yes, how do you see the effect of this on your opinion of the mod?
Rarely, though 'watch' might be a better term.
How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?
Mojang has made changes to the game's code to make modding easier (e.g. 1.3 made singleplayer use an integrated server, 1.5 'unstitched' textures, 1.13 had the Flattening), especially by making certain content data-driven (models in 1.8, loot tables in 1.9, recipes and advancements in 1.12). I wouldn't be surprised to see more internal changes in that direction.
I'm quite excited about Fabric gaining traction. At the very least, it's made snapshot modding feasible, when it was a pipe dream several years ago.
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
They are quite relaxing because in Minecraft, you can do almost anything you want. From building huge creation in creative to surviving the world together with friends.
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?
They greatly enhance the gameplay experience and adds new experience to the same game. Does server plugin counts since they're not exactly built in to the vanilla game.
How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
Mods adds new experience to the game, but i guess it depends on the mod itself.
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
The negative experience i have with mod would be when they conflict with the gameplay experience with the vanilla game.
Do you read any mod reviews and if yes, how do you see the effect of this on your opinion of the mod?
Yes, i take the review with a grain of salt and try the mod for myself.
How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?
I hope mods are more compatible into the game to minimize conflict whether in terms of gameplay mechanic or simply not crashing the game.
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Hi community,
How are you all? I am writing my thesis about the influence of mods on the gameplay experience of the player in video games. The cases (games) I use to do research on this question are Minecraft and Skyrim. I am still looking for more opinions to really get a comprehensive understanding of the pros and cons of mods for the gameplay experience in video games. Therefore I am very curious to hear your perspective about the following questions:
If you don’t feel like answering every single question, this is fine of course. Each answer will be very valuable for my research!
Thank you so much!
Hope everyone stays healthy & safe in these strange times.
Jeroen
"What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?"
Mods are often good things in video games. It adds content that people don't have but want. Personally I don't use mods that add content, but that is because I am satisfied with the vanilla game. People who mod are just people who want other things in their game, and if they can get it they will stay, so mods are good for both the game and the players.
"How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?"
If people add specific mods for their game then it is there to enhance their gameplay (in a way which the vanilla game can't).
"Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?"
If people use the mods they want then I don't see it being something negative, but it can lead to lag.
"How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?"
For Minecraft I hope that modders will update their mods more frequently in the future, and also that more mods that enhance vanilla is developed. I also wish for Mojang to work more with modders for Java Edition. I don't keep up with modding anymore so I don't know how it will develop.
Thank you so much for sharing your opinion!! If you know more people who want to share their opinion, let me know. Have a nice day.
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
I really enjoy my sandbox games, and Minecraft delivers on that in spades. The vanilla game is already great at giving you that open-world, do-anything experience. In my experience, when I play vanilla singleplayer, the arc of gameplay tends to be intense interest and excitement until you've got your base set up, all the farms are pumping out endless resources, and you don't need anything else. After that point, I try to keep things interesting and find new things to build and enjoy, but the excitement wanes and eventually the world is deleted.
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?
I think that reputable mods that people have lavished love and care on over many versions of Minecraft really add to the whole experience, providing new content and click-saving, sanity-keeping enhancements. Things like faster leaf despawning and being able to hold down the left mouse button and sweep everything into a chest in one click are things that I really, really miss when I'm playing vanilla.
That said, because this is a "general" opinion, mods also carry the caveats of needing to stay updated, conflicts, lag, and making sure you've installed a good one that won't corrupt your game.
How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
They pick up where vanilla leaves off in that arc I described above: they provide new and interesting content to keep the excitement going, while also enhancing that first base experience. What I'm trying to say is, they extend the life of your Minecraft experience in any given world. I love to play modded, and the current world I'm playing has been active for about a year and a half at this point. I've spent over 500 hours in it, and I'm still finding new and exciting things to do beyond just getting myself established. I even just recently started a Youtube channel where I'm serializing playing that very world, so yeah, I'd say mods have had a pretty good effect on my Minecraft experience.
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
Do you read any mod reviews and if yes, how do you see the effect of this on your opinion of the mod?
Not really. I generally discover new mods either by browsing through CurseForge or by watching modded Minecraft series on Youtube.
How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?
My number one wish for Minecraft mods is that they become easier to update to current versions of the game, so that they can keep up with the vanilla versions and the mod writers don't have to rewrite everything every time an update happens. I'm not sure what would be required to make this happen--almost certainly something on Mojang's part--but that's the effect I hope for, someday.
My Youtube channel! You have a downright fantastic day!
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
My experience with the game is quite a bit different from most players since I have not updated to newer versions, in part because of mods, in particular, the ability to make my own mods, as opposed to using mods others made, with a few exceptions early on, as well as the way I like to play, where I spend most of the time caving for the enjoyment, rather than gathering needed resources. I'd say that the main attraction of the game in general is the open-world sandbox aspect which accommodates practically any playstyle, without having to follow any set storyline (besides the Ender Dragon but I see this as a minor part of the game). The ease of which it can be modded is another bonus; while not officially supported it is relatively easy to decompile and deobfuscate Java, for which there are various tools that do this automatically, and Mojang doesn't forbid modding unless it is for nefarious purposes (bypassing paying for the game or hacking in multiplayer).
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods? / How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
I've been playing with and making my own mods for nearly 7 years now and would consider them to be essential, especially in newer versions of the game; I started a few months after the release of 1.6 (July 2013) and have been using mods ever since, either of the "tweak" variety (just small changes) to complete changes to things like world generation (my own modding specialty, i started out using a 3rd party mod which let you configure the density of caves, later changing them with my own mods before going on to other parts of world generation, like adding new biomes and improving terrain). Both caves and biomes were also changed in newer versions, mainly in 1.7, in ways that I highly dislike and I'd use mods to change them if I played on those versions; 1.7 greatly reduced the variation in the size and density of cave systems and made underground structures much rarer, and also changed biome placement so you have the same few biomes within large areas instead of any biome next to any other biome (the latter is a rendering of a world created with my own mod, including biomes based on ones in 1.7+ as well as many of my own. The first map is the same area of the same seed in 1.7 and later).
Note that I have never actually updated past 1.6.4, the last version before a major change to world generation, in large part because of mods, which I see as more of a separate branch of game development rather than something that exists alongside the base game, this is especially true for mods that add a lot of their own content or change vanilla content, including my own, in particular, what I call "TheMasterCaver's World"; for example, I added my own version of Mending, an enchantment added to vanilla in 1.9, which works as I think it should (the vanilla version repairs your items with XP you pick up while my version prevents the cost from increasing when you repair them in the anvil, which also requires resources to repair them with an XP cost dependent on the quality of the item. This is the same as how items could be repaired in older versions, where renaming an item would keep the cost from increasing).
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
I don't have issues with mods themselves; many of the negatives mentioned by others are the result of inexperienced modders who don't do much bugfixes/optimizations, which I spend a lot of time on, even improving performance over vanilla (I've even made a complete replacement for Optifine, a popular optimization mod, which goes far beyond anything it does, and will eventually be part of TMCW; for example, this is a screenshot I took while testing while playing - nearly 1000 FPS and only 260 MB max memory usage in the most resource-demanding biome in TMCW (the trees get up to 64 blocks tall with thousands of leaves each). The game also loads within a second or two, indistinguishable from vanilla, same for creating a new world, which is 2-3 times faster than vanilla, both of which are also far faster than newer vanilla versions (more content is often cited as a reason for being slower but it is mostly due to poorly optimized code). Many mods also suffer from relying on an API/modloader to indirectly access the core code, rather than directly integrating with the base game, as my own mods do; however, this greatly reduces compatibility with other mods since they can't change the same code.
My main negative experience is from people who think that using any mods, no matter how minor, completely changes the game such that I may as well be playing an entirely different game, or what I do is completely invalidated by using mods (for example, I've had people tell me that I can only mine so many ores because I use mods to make them more common and/or easier to collect, or the game I play is otherwise totally different from vanilla - even though that couldn't be further from the truth, for example, while TMCW does add in "better than diamond" gear (a very popular addition in many mods) it is only better when compared to diamond in the mod, which is weaker than diamond in vanilla, and there also isn't much difference between a nearly vanilla world and more modded worlds in terms of how quickly I collect resources).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Thank you so much for sharing your opinion!!! Your thorough answers will definitely be very valuable for my thesis!! If you know more people that want to share their opinion, let me know. Have a nice day!!
Thank you so much for sharing your opinion!!! Your thorough answers will definitely be very valuable for my thesis!! If you know more people that want to share their opinion, let me know. Have a nice day!!
How would you describe the gameplay experience in Minecraft?
I see Minecraft as a game that can be played in many different ways; if you're tired of playing it one way, try another. For instance, you can play in survival or creative, and have different goals in each mode. You can also play on custom maps or multiplayer servers, and more importantly for your questions, mods, many of which fill a certain niche of playstyle.
What do you generally think of Minecraft mods?
I think they add a lot of replay value to the game, as well as inspiration for new features in the base game.
How do you see the effect of mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
By now, I mostly play with mods, because they provide experiences that the vanilla game probably won't ever provide, and they've kept me interested in the game for a long time.
Can you also describe any possible negative experiences with mods on your Minecraft gameplay experience?
Do you read any mod reviews and if yes, how do you see the effect of this on your opinion of the mod?
Rarely, though 'watch' might be a better term.
How do you hope / modding will develop in the near future for Minecraft or other games and why?
They are quite relaxing because in Minecraft, you can do almost anything you want. From building huge creation in creative to surviving the world together with friends.
They greatly enhance the gameplay experience and adds new experience to the same game. Does server plugin counts since they're not exactly built in to the vanilla game.
Mods adds new experience to the game, but i guess it depends on the mod itself.
The negative experience i have with mod would be when they conflict with the gameplay experience with the vanilla game.
Yes, i take the review with a grain of salt and try the mod for myself.
I hope mods are more compatible into the game to minimize conflict whether in terms of gameplay mechanic or simply not crashing the game.
Thank you so much mates!!!! Sorry for my late response; I was busy with coding!