Interview - (2001-08-08) Varaya & Khan
Description: Phrozen Heart of the Phrozen Keep interviews Varaya and Khan of VKMods.de on their Middle Earth and mod making in general.
Categories: Interviews
PHROZEN |
How did you originally get into mod making and what was the the first game you worked on? |
KHAN |
Well apart from changing sounds for Doom (I still occassionally play my soundedited Doom version),
Diablo was the first and nearly only game we modded. It all began with Jarulf telling us that there were hidden (or better buggy=not spawnable) bosses in Diablo 1 (For example Fleshdancer, a Soulburner boss of level 16). He didn't actually think about that this should be added but rather told the community about it out of curiosity. We made these bosses available for our own private playing. Soon more things, including the monster structure were discovered and so slowly things got changed to the game, which eventually ended in a mod. |
VARAYA |
That depends on how you define 'mod making' :-)
|
PHROZEN |
So why did you choose the Diablo series to create you well known Middle Earth mods rather than a more traditional roleplaying style game? |
KHAN |
We don't really mod anything apart from Diablo and this also more or less by accident (see above).
Also modding a standard Adventure/RPG would mean to create or change the story. With Diablo you can just change some parameters (like monster or item properties) and the whole game changes, whereas with for example Baldur's Gate you would have to create each item, monster, spawnpoint seperately. The modder would know everything about his mod and he himself would have less fun. Diablo is unique in it's randomization and therefore unrivaled replayability. IMO it's idiotic to create a game without randomized elements. Even games like Need for Speed or Unreal Tournament would be a LOT better if they had randomized properties (random obstacles on tracks, random tracks, random levels, random weapon enhancements). But a company sells a game and is most of the time not interested in longevity of their game. Blizzard with Bnet is :) |
VARAYA |
Simple: we like the game, and the opportunity presented itself. As Khan said, one day there was this
post about the 'hidden' bosses (bosses which were set to appear on levels were the standard monster never can appear), and we both spontaneously decided to a.) make them work and b.) fiddle around a bit with the data to see what else can be done. It was pretty easy once you figured out the basics, and so we decided to do some large scale modifications to the game. Standard RPGs have the disadvantage that they are pretty story-oriented, so you cannot switch the whole background story around. In Diablo 1, there is no real background story with lots of NPC talk, cut scenes and whatnot, so it is very easy to say 'well, look - this is Sauron, and these are the Nazgul'. The randomness of D1 - which is extremely important for replayability - was another big point. Even though maybe some won't believe it, we created the mod first and foremost for our own enjoyment. Creating a mod for, say, Baldur's Gate 1 with a Middle Earth story would have been a nice thing to do, but you could only play it through once or twice without falling asleep, since the second time around, every single item and every single monster would have been at the exact same point like the first time you played the mod. I still play our ME mod for D1 every once in a while. |
PHROZEN |
How did the two of you hook up with each other and why did the two of you choose the Middle Earth setting rather than
an unthemed one as a lot of mod makers do? |
KHAN |
We were friends from school and are both into RPGs and Computer games. Some other friends of us share
these interests also but only we two are obsessed by Diablo. We are also much into Tolkien's Middle Earth and have read the Lord of the Rings uncounted times (actually I'm at page 426 currently again). IMO Middle Earth is the only true fantasy world, or at least the very best and most 'realistic' one. Middle Earth has some dignity wheras most other fantasy settings are infested by 'coolz wizards', warriors with more useless spikes on their armor than is good for them or dwarfs with machineguns - bah! |
VARAYA |
We know each other from school (we were not in the same grade, but I had a friend who had a friend whose
friend was Khan). Back then, p&p RPGs were still played regularly, and so we got to know each other. Since we're the only two who are into computer games, we meet relatively often. Middle Earth ? I think Khan already said everything which is to say :-) I read quite a lot of fantasy literature (Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, no Wheel of Time though), but Tolkien is the best. It's hard to describe, but his kind of fantasy somehow seems more 'serious' than everything else I have read. Far more believable. Like Khan, I read the books at least twice a year - and that since around 1980 :)
|
PHROZEN |
You mentioned that, like myself, you started out modding in ID's game Doom. The majority of the Doom
modders seemed to have migrated to the Quake series and more recently Half Life and Unreal Tournement, did you ever consider something along those lines? |
KHAN |
We didn't actually mod Doom. I just changed the sounds of it and inserted samples from various movies
(Star Wars, Predator, Excalibur, Star Trek (yes the infamous 'KHAAAAN!' from the second Star Trek movie should be there too :) |
VARAYA |
I personally like to play those games once in a while in coop mode, but after having had a look at the
various level designers for the Quake series, I have to say there's too much work involved for my taste. The quality of the existing add-on levels is so high that it would be very hard to create something of comparable quality - when we want to do something, we want to make it good. And since I like RPGs and the Diablo series more, I don't see any point in investing months of time into learning how to do correct lighting and 3d models. |
PHROZEN |
In your opinion, has the D2 mod making community suffered as a result of Blizzard's introduction of BIN
files to the patches? |
KHAN |
At first I did but that was only because I was afraid that modding was altogether dead for non-programmers.
As it is now it does require a further step but you for testing purposes you can just use the -direct command. So I say it doesn't have any bad effect on the modding comunity and those who do think so must indeed be more lazy than myself - which is hardly possible :) |
VARAYA |
Not at all. Once it was figured out which command line parameters to use, everything was back to normal.
Except of course for those modders who neither read web pages nor ask Blizzard programmers :-) |
PHROZEN |
Do you think the frequency that Blizzard releases patches is a good thing or not? |
KHAN |
Well it's a nuisance for modders but it's a blessing for players. With the new txt-modding of D2 vs D1's exe
modding, this is not much of an issue. The only patch that was difficult to convert mods to was the 1.08, but then this added so many new and moddable features that I'd say it was more than worth it. At the moment I would like Blizzard to release the 1.09 patch as I think it changes quite a lot of hardcoded stuff, that modmakers will have to compensate for and take into account while modding. |
VARAYA |
It depends on what the patch does. For D1, a patch was a massacre, since you had to port everything over,
which was a pain (especially the code changes). For D2, that is a pretty easy thing to do. But there are two kinds of patches which I think are annoying: First, the 'was it really necessary ?' - patch, which really does nothing except change the chat colours for Win95 users in Usbekistan. You, as the mod maker, see absolutely no reason for the patch, but you have to do the work. Next, the 'when will it finally arrive?' patch, like 1.09 for D2. You wait and wait and wait, the patch is announced for Mid-July, you decide 'let's wait for that patch before we mod any further', then you wait some more, but the patch is not there yet. But basically yes, patches are a good thing. It shows that Blizzard is at least interested in making D2 as bug-free as possible (even though they do not manage to actually do it :) ) |
PHROZEN |
Other than your own, what mods either past or present have sparked your interest? |
KHAN |
Well I don't play GP3 or RS2/3 (F1-Racing Championship) in an umodded state if you count season updates as
mods. Other than that it's only levels for shooters and the like but no real mods. I tried some mods for Rogue Spear but they only add weapons. In fact I think there VERY few real mods for any games out there. IMO a mod is a total conversion, not just some new level, weapon or enemies. I really wish there were more mods like there are for Diablo 1 and 2. |
VARAYA |
Of course most of the other mods for D1 and D2. Some of them are really well done, like 'The Dark'. It is
interesting to see what other modders pay attention to. Some of them like 'flashy' changes, i.e. things you immediately notice when you start playing, but sometimes these changes are just there for the sake of it and have no real relevance, which is sad. Others concentrate on replacing every single unique item, but leave the monsters like they were in the original game. Still others put in code changes which raise D1 nearly to the level of D2 :) Following the mod scene is interesting, but I think it is a bit sad that so many D2 modders concentrate on putting in new sets and uniques but do nothing to the rest of the game. |
PHROZEN |
Are you planning on continuing with your Middle Earth mod or are there any new projects on the horizon? |
KHAN |
Well the Middle Earth Mod for LoD is nearly finished and will be expanded with rune recipes, crafting recipes
and balancing/bugfixing in the future. If Blizzard decided to create Diablo 3 we would probably make an MEmod for that game also. We are not planning to create another mod and there are no other games that are moddable to the extent D1/2 is. |
VARAYA |
For now, ME for D2 only. It's enough work, and it is still fun. |
PHROZEN |
In you opinion, are the modders who still only have classic Diablo 2 getting left behind in the wake
of all of the xpack modding? |
KHAN |
Yes - D2X has so much more moddable features that making a mod for CD2 doesn't make sense. There are several
issues where you could argue CD2 was better than D2X but as a modder 99% of these are changeable by you. |
VARAYA |
The problem is that of those players who are likely to play mods, nearly everybody will have bought the
expansion pack (since it is kind of an 'official' mod). So, doing a mod for classic Diablo2 is most likely pretty useless, since you cannot use the mod with the expansion pack, too (and this is the reason why we stopped doing anything for classic D2). |
PHROZEN |
Finally, do you think the D2 modding community as a whole has much of a future and if so, what direction
do you think it's most likely to take? |
KHAN |
I guess the modding community is only beginning to evolve. In the future mods for D2 will raise in importance
as more and more players are looking for new challenges and features to the game they love. I think the max in mod popularity will be reached in about half a year. Depending on if there are other great games (Neverwinter Nights, WC3, Freelancer, etc) or not, the modding scene will survive or slowly vanish.
|
VARAYA |
Wow, this is a kind of 'what's the meaning of life' question :)
|
PHROZEN |
Well that about wraps it up. Thanks a lot guys for taking the time to share your thoughts and views with our
D2 modding community and I'm sure everyone will be keeping an eye out for future releases of the excellent Middle Earth mod. |
Anyone wishing to check out the Middle Earth mods can do so by visiting Varaya and Khan's website at http://vkmods.d2mods.com.
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[url=https://www.d2mods.info/forum/kb/viewarticle?a=75&sid=114bf4ebae7831d3bb11dff205fe4123]Knowledge Base - Interview - (2001-08-08) Varaya & Khan[/url]