/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10200732
I gotta defend myself and I'm pretty drunk but I'll try.

The fact of the matter is that there is a 1:1:1 ratio between the player count of a game, its modding tools, and its mod quality... at least in these retro FPS games.

You can see that now because obviously the order of current day players, the quality of the mods (As in, production quality especially), and the quality of the mod tools are directly correlated. Doom has modern-day sites even, like Doomworld. Or even active Subreddits and Discords. Quake has a few of those, but less total. It also has less mods, and decent but still slightly intuitive to use tools for modding. Duke has even less of all these things. Then trickle down to Shadow Warrior, Blood, or even go up to Quake 2 and 3 and Live.

Doom had that initial spike of players. It came out first, but it also had a decently dedicated modding scene. So already, good tools, good mods, and a good healthy playerbase to play these mods. Quake had them too, but to a lesser extent. Everything else had less and fell in the dirt.

As such, Doom got the most talent to make the best tools first, then they made better mods, which brought in more players who were subsequently inspired to make more mods. Repeat onwards. As the tools got better, they proceeded to eat up features of other games, taking away even more modding talent. First came Duke, with ZDoom and GZDoom emulating their special features but with a Doom twist. Then came Quake with a combination of semi-easy reprogramming of the game (QuakeC and Decorate/ZScript). Shadow Warrior, Blood, and Redneck Rampage were all fucked from the start. Quake 2 tailed Quake 1 in this matter.

That's why Duke is completely busted. EDuke devs had to do the bare minimum. Just slight improvements to rendering and porting to other OSes. Duke is effectively stuck in the 1994 to 1998 or so of Doom modding because there's nobody to work on it.