Unreal's highlevel of packaing and managing assets for years meant modding was locked off. Unity games often shipped on PC with loose files and hacking C# broke after each update but at least was an option.
Over time the modding community has leverage this high level by building unreal native tools. The net result has been the same sort of cross tool use we saw with Gamebryo. Back with Gamebryo the Civilization modding shared tools with sid meier's railroads and even early skyrim and fallout modding.
Now the Unreal tools mean mods can be done in blueprint and should not break after every update like C# based mods. Likewise the common pak format used by unreal games (common because consoles prefer the pak for faster loading), means mods can replace files without overwriting files. Aka, mod conflicts become a reference overwrite issue and not a file overwrite issue.
As a developer of an unreal based game its pretty nice to know modding is no longer locked out. You still need/should provide the community with a modkit, but even those the community can generate on their own if they care.
Comments
Unreal's highlevel of packaing and managing assets for years meant modding was locked off. Unity games often shipped on PC with loose files and hacking C# broke after each update but at least was an option.
Over time the modding community has leverage this high level by building unreal native tools. The net result has been the same sort of cross tool use we saw with Gamebryo. Back with Gamebryo the Civilization modding shared tools with sid meier's railroads and even early skyrim and fallout modding.
Now the Unreal tools mean mods can be done in blueprint and should not break after every update like C# based mods. Likewise the common pak format used by unreal games (common because consoles prefer the pak for faster loading), means mods can replace files without overwriting files. Aka, mod conflicts become a reference overwrite issue and not a file overwrite issue.
As a developer of an unreal based game its pretty nice to know modding is no longer locked out. You still need/should provide the community with a modkit, but even those the community can generate on their own if they care.