Postby aubergine18 » Sun Dec 06, 2015 10:07 am
I think Cities:Skylines proves that justification to be 100% inaccurate on all counts. In C:S there's no DRM and modders are able to decompile and reverse-engineer the entire app, and then share modified versions of any aspect of the app via the workshop. Furthermore, the team at CO and their publishers, Paradox, actively support that level of hacking of their app. In the upcoming TAM mod, which contains plagiarised networks, AIs and patfhinder, amongst other things, all written in C# that's then assembled when the mod is published, we've got staff from both CO and Paradox as beta testers. For almost every core game mechanic in C:S, there's a mod that replaces it or augments it, to the extent that the catch phrase "There's a mod for that" emerged before the game was released and still is in widespread use today. 50% of CO's dev resource (1 developer) was assigned to making the game as moddable as possible during the 2-year dev time (4 man years on the coding front) it took to create and release the game. There is literally no issue with doing such things, in any game, other than irrational and often delusional, counter-productive fears.
The only real change that would be required is to disable achievements in games where the dev tools are or have been active. And even that should be moddable, because in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter.
