Modding communities for other games

[sabugo]

In a recent conversation with a friend of mine I mentioned that MVP 05 is probably the most modded sports game ever. Since he doesn't like baseball, he asked if there is anything similar going on with other games. So, I searched a little bit and found some interesting stuff:

Basketball:
NBA 2K14 still has guys creating new stuff and updating the game. Even I have created some mods for personal use that I never released to the public. Basketball is really how I first got into mods and patches, through the old NBA Live series. I was a member of the NLSC community dating back to NBA Live 97.
Where to go?
The aforementioned NLSC is still running strong, with a large community and plenty of mods to download:
https://www.nba-live.com/

Baseball:
MVP Mods is of course our favorite. There is however another great option, specially if your english isn't all that good. The MVP 2K Caribe offers support and mods for both MVP and 2K. While their specialty is the caribbean baseball scene, you can find plenty of other cool stuff in there, from the World Baseball Classic to 'regular' MLB patches and add-ons. Make sure to pay them a visit. KC has named some of the site's All-Stars below too.
Where to go?
https://www.mvp2kcaribe.com/

Hockey:
Much like MVP 05, NHL 04 still has a rather large following, even surpassing newer titles such as NHL 09. People have pretty much rebuilt the entire game and keep releasing up-to-date rosters and graphics packs. A bit like the Astros switching from the NL to the AL, the inclusion of a 31st team (Las Vegas) caused some problems from modders, and it appears you can't have a 31 team season, so you have to replace one if you want Vegas to show up in the game. 
Where to go?
NHL Rebuilt 2020 is the place to go. 
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/nhl04rebuilt/

Football:
I have never been much of a football fan, but I have to say that after watching the last Super Bowl, I became a little more interested and did a bit of searching. I ended up having a lot of fun with a little game called 'Retro Bowl', which is available online. Anyway, I think Madden 08 is what compares best to what we have here. Other football games have popped up for the PC and Madden made a return last season. Still, the 2008 version seems to gather the most interest on the web.
Where to go?
Football Idiot is a forum where you can download pretty much everything that you need to play the game. Rosters, graphics and even playbooks are available.
https://www.footballidiot.com/forum/index.php

Soccer:
I will probably go to European Hell for calling it soccer, but I guess if I didn't you guys wouldn't know what sport I'm talking about. FIFA and PES have been in a decades long battle for top spot in soccer games. Some years PES is better, some is FIFA. Again, for me, FIFA 98 was one of the first games that I tried to create stuff for, so it brings back good memories. Both franchises have kept releasing PC versions and kept players interested for years. However, PES 6 stands out as a comparison to MVP. It's a relatively old game with lots of mods and creations available. 

Where to go:
Further research needed, but EvoWeb for PES and Soccergaming for FIFA seem to be the place to go, as @tinpanalley suggested.
https://evo-web.co.uk/
http://www.soccergaming.com/index.php


Feel free to suggest any other games and sports. I'll add them too.

The modding and patching of games has taken a weird turn. Companies have essentially taken the place of the community, releasing their updates within the game or via a third-party application. Many times these are paid updates. What made the gaming community so interesting and vibrant is no more, because it looks like it is increasingly harder to mod newer games. I remember one time, many years ago, that on the day that a NBA Live game hit the stores somebody already created a tool to open it's graphics. On the very same day. As I remember, recently it took Vlad years to develop RED MC to it's final form.
Modding tools is also something that interests me a bit, so maybe I'll create another topic about it later.

[Kccitystar]

This is an awesome thread and I've renamed it since we can talk about these things at length, for sure.

 

NLSC will hold a place in my heart because a lot of the tools we've used are derivatives from the NBA modding community (both Live and 2K) and I've dabbled in modding NBA titles here and there just trying out techniques and stuff. I recently subscribed to their podcast which is a fantastically fun concept that can discuss community happenings and what's happening in the sport. Maybe we should do that given the global reach that baseball has

 

Arguably NHL04 is probably the game that would be the closest analog to MVP 2005 in terms of long term support and investment from the community as the game engine itself has proven itself to be insanely fun and rewarding.

 

Also, special mention to NFSMods and NFSCars as they were the ones that utilized OEdit to modify car meshes.

Why is this important? Some time in 2003, I emailed the guy who maintained the tool (OEdit) to see if they can extend support for ord/o files to modify parks for MVP 2003 through the ord2o tool, and here we are ❤️

[sabugo]

I actually struggled with what I would call this thread. I'm glad you gave it a proper name.

I completely forgot about racing games. The Grand Prix Series used to have a pretty good following back in the day, but I've drifted away from that genre, so I'd have to do some research.

As for the tools required to mod games, I have always been curious about that. Now, I learned some programming but that was back in high school, which means I just know the basics, if that. How does one set about to create an external roster editor for a game, for example? Also, why is it so much harder to create those tools nowadays than it was in the past? Have the developers made it harder for users? Most of them aren't big fans of modders, though some companies encourage this aspect of the games.

[tinpanalley]

Hey, I love this as I'm involved in pretty much every one of these communities.

Only things I wanted to mention are:

- in addition to the fact that the guys at Football Idiot do unreal, ridiculously dedicated, finitely meticulous work, it bears mentioning that several guys also do amazing work with very few tools to keep NFL 2K5 running, which is in my opinion a superior game. But for sure, it's harder to get running without the right gear. Over at OS, you can find a handful of people updating yearly rosters but also doing great classic team work, something missing a bit from the Football Idiot community on the level of what's available for 2K.

- PES Patch is a very contentious site for many people, including myself. They are notorious for permitting the rehosting of other modders' work with no attempt to defend the original creator. They have absolutely no issues whatsoever with downloads hidden behind miles of pay links, most of which are frequently nefarious or questionable. It's about the last place many of us go for PES or FIFA content. I've lost count of how many PES modders have openly complained about that site sharing their work without permission. Unfortunately, the flip side is that it's hard to know where to go for PES and FIFA mods since two main sites moddingway and soccergaming have essentially become rather abandoned amidst stupid content management ethics garbage between members. Anyway, long story short, unless you want to expose yourself to trackers, cookie and cache miners, etc, I'd avoid it and stick to EvoWeb for PES, Soccergaming (what's left of it) for FIFA and Discord for the best communities in FIFA.

- The roster work being done for NHL2K series is phenomenal over on OS. From 2K6 to 2K11, amazing work is done to keep rosters current. Even to the point of community developed editors. You'll even find one @Gordo over there knocking out impressive updates to NHL2K rosters.

 

 

7 hours ago, sabugo said:

Soccer:
I will probably go to European Hell for calling it soccer, but I guess if I didn't you guys wouldn't know what sport I'm talking about.

Unrelated... just because I think this community would find it interesting, in actual fact it is Brits that first coined the term "soccer". So, you have a little fun fact you can whip out the next time someone talks about how stupid it is that Americans call it soccer. Mind blown?

In the 1800s, Brits had Association Football and Association Rugby. Like Basketball is often affectionately referred to as "hoops", Association Rugby by nickname became "rugger", and Association Football by nickname became "Assocer" and eventually just "soccer". If you get your head around the idea of affectionately adding the suffix '-er' to things, it's not as far a stretch as it first seems when you first hear "assocer". So by the 1900s, rugger became "Rugby", leaving assocer to become just 'football' because it was only really in England that anyone used the term "soccer". If everyone in Europe knows what "rugby" is and nobody has really heard the term "soccer", then it becomes football. And also because in linguistics, sometimes things just happen. Without reason. It's just what people said.

So over in the US in the late 1800s people started playing what was called "Gridiron Football", a mix of Soccer and Rugby, and then eventually just "Football". So people in the US playing "Association Football" took to calling it "Soccer" to differentiate and Brits stuck with Football because they didn't like Americans taking so keenly to "Soccer". And there you have it. That should help quiet Brits who wanna snap your hand off for using the term "soccer". But if you're a Brit (or Canadian like me) and you want even more mind blowing info to send the other way? NFL Football with the rules it has today, actually isn't based on the American Gridiron Football at all, it's based on the Canadian version of Gridiron Football. After a game between university teams Harvard (US) and McGill (Canada), the Harvard team came back having played the Canadian version and liking it so much better because of the use of running with the ball, downs, forward passing, goal posts for a try (or touchdown) and tackling, that they decided it should be the way Gridiron Football should be played from then on in the US. And like "asoccer", the trend stuck.

[Kccitystar]

8 hours ago, tinpanalley said:

Hey, I love this as I'm involved in pretty much every one of these communities.

Only things I wanted to mention are:

- in addition to the fact that the guys at Football Idiot do unreal, ridiculously dedicated, finitely meticulous work, it bears mentioning that several guys also do amazing work with very few tools to keep NFL 2K5 running, which is in my opinion a superior game. But for sure, it's harder to get running without the right gear. Over at OS, you can find a handful of people updating yearly rosters but also doing great classic team work, something missing a bit from the Football Idiot community on the level of what's available for 2K.

- PES Patch is a very contentious site for many people, including myself. They are notorious for permitting the rehosting of other modders' work with no attempt to defend the original creator. They have absolutely no issues whatsoever with downloads hidden behind miles of pay links, most of which are frequently nefarious or questionable. It's about the last place many of us go for PES or FIFA content. I've lost count of how many PES modders have openly complained about that site sharing their work without permission. Unfortunately, the flip side is that it's hard to know where to go for PES and FIFA mods since two main sites moddingway and soccergaming have essentially become rather abandoned amidst stupid content management ethics garbage between members. Anyway, long story short, unless you want to expose yourself to trackers, cookie and cache miners, etc, I'd avoid it and stick to EvoWeb for PES, Soccergaming (what's left of it) for FIFA and Discord for the best communities in FIFA.

- The roster work being done for NHL2K series is phenomenal over on OS. From 2K6 to 2K11, amazing work is done to keep rosters current. Even to the point of community developed editors. You'll even find one @Gordo over there knocking out impressive updates to NHL2K rosters.

PES Patch is a prime factor in why we don't charge for mods or will endorse/support that kind of awful behavior from members on our site, because it cheapens the community immensely, and for what, ego? Clout? Whatever. We don't need that shit here.

 

I believe Andrew over at NLSC saw this spring up on his site as well when a discussion came up regarding the state of modding the NBA games and took a stand, and as admin of this site I felt compelled to take one too although that's been an unwritten rule for literally all of us who upload our work here.

 

Baseball:

 

My man @sabugo, you forgot all about MVP 2K Caribe, which to me is essentially the latin american arm of our MVP/MLB community with a ton of users that have made pretty incredible work. While the site looks similar to ours (we're on the same type of board software) the team over there post their work on our site from time to time (greetings and special thanks to @HFLR, @guaro1379, @jeferomer, @Bostonnico, @LUNASONICA), and while the language barrier might be an issue from time to time, we all speak beisbol and share a passion to make the games we make our mods for as amazing as possible, and that's all that matters.

 

There are other MLB2K/MVP communities out there either via Facebook or other channels though. I know the series/games are big in Asia as well.

[Bostonnico]

@Kccitystar  Thank you very much man for mentioning me, since I came to this website I have always tried to contribute a bit to the MLB2k mod, as time permits me. and I have learned many things throughout this time which has helped me a lot to improve cyberface, and thus share a good job every day better with the mvpmods community. greetings friends  👍👍😃😃⚾️⚾️

[Jed]

15 hours ago, Kccitystar said:

PES Patch is a prime factor in why we don't charge for mods or will endorse/support that kind of awful behavior from members on our site, because it cheapens the community immensely, and for what, ego? Clout? Whatever. We don't need that shit here.

 

I believe Andrew over at NLSC saw this spring up on his site as well when a discussion came up regarding the state of modding the NBA games and took a stand, and as admin of this site I felt compelled to take one too although that's been an unwritten rule for literally all of us who upload our work here.

 

Baseball:

 

My man @sabugo, you forgot all about MVP 2K Caribe, which to me is essentially the latin american arm of our MVP/MLB community with a ton of users that have made pretty incredible work. While the site looks similar to ours (we're on the same type of board software) the team over there post their work on our site from time to time (greetings and special thanks to @HFLR, @guaro1379, @jeferomer, @Bostonnico, @LUNASONICA), and while the language barrier might be an issue from time to time, we all speak beisbol and share a passion to make the games we make our mods for as amazing as possible, and that's all that matters.

 

There are other MLB2K/MVP communities out there either via Facebook or other channels though. I know the series/games are big in Asia as well.

It is a privilege to be a part of this community ..... Greetings from Europe ....

[sabugo]

@Kccitystar You're right, I completely forgot about them. I'll add them soon.

@tinpanalley I didn't know about that. I'll make sure to remember so next time I used the word 'soccer' next to a Brit, I'll have a good comeback. I'll be in London next week, so chances are I'll be trying that soon enough.

I didn't know about all that going on with PES Patch. I'll remove that site from the list beause it's the exact opposite of what we do here. I haven't downloaded anything from there in years, so maybe things were different a while back. I just noticed they had a lot of content. I used to visit a pretty good site/blog called PESedit, but it's last post was in September 2016

On the racing front, I did a basic Google search on the topic. Seems that racing fans have been blessed over the years with many titles coming out for the PC. One that stood out was 'Grand Prix Legends'. There are a lot of mods available for that game. Anybody familiar with it?

The 2K NFL and NHL games didn't come out for the PC, so I didn't even consider them. I didn't know there was still an active community behind them. Should I include them here too?

[picklebrad]

I updated NHL 04 to this year's rebuilt version with the new launcher to add Widescreen, Antialiasing and other tweaks. Thia is the best they have ever done! I highly recommend trying this if you are a hockey fan.