2002’s Neverwinter Nights gets a patch in 2025 from “unpaid software engineers”

But it's officially distributed by Beamdog as a patch. So it's a little bit more than a mod.

I think the reason for the distinction is that this is a community-led effort that was incorporated as an official patch for everyone on the actual game install delivered by storefronts, so it's not entirely the same as modders releasing a patch on moddb or something like that.

Edit: and then I refreshed and there were a bunch of other similar comments lol, didn't mean to dogpile.

I think it is a picture worth painting.

In the golden age of modding? People were buying games like UT2k4 and NWN and Oblivion for the mods. It was a huge shock when (after the Make Something Unreal contest made it clear that it was just as hard to make your own game as to make a major TC) UT3 had next to no mod support from the community.

And people still (kind of rightfully...) refuse to play a Bethesda game without the "community patch" and so forth.

For the games that support them (and even some that don't), mods are a major part of the marketing and support of games. And yet the studio/publisher makes bank whereas the people fixing those bugs just get abuse.

And that ignores stuff like the recent Bethesda games where experiments were made for paid mods. People immediately lost their shit because fuck that person who made the really cool crafting mod I can't play without, I already gave Microsoft 5 bucks ten years ago!

So yeah. I think there is a lot of reason to start looking at things like they are. Mods, especially "unofficial patches", are work done by unpaid engineers. People can still decide they don't deserve any money but they should at least have to "say" "unpaid labor doesn't deserve anything".

Yes, it's a more honest term which reflects the quality of work that was done by people who weren't compensated for their effort.

Calling core engine reworks a mod when the technologies were not widely used and needed to be put into the engine to be implemented is also misleading. This is not simply editing some game file values.

same here, i got it super cheap at a SAAN here in canada from the discounted bin. One of the best games I ever played.

Wish I could play the new one, but life has dealt me a shit hand the past 6 years so doubtful I'll ever get to

You really should check out the enhanced edition if you can. It comes with everything official ever made, works on modern hardware, and the multi-player works well (and seemlessly to boot - no more scrounging for hakpaks). I play on servers at least a couple times a week.