Comment by charcircuit

1 day ago

I don't think this is true. I think what you may be thinking of is many hit games did not create their own game engine.

No many hit games started as mods. League of Legends is the one that immediately jumps to mind, but I know there are many more coming from Quake and Doom mods etc.

  • League of Legends is its own game built on an engine Riot made from scratch.

    • League's Wikipedia page describes it as "inspired by Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft III." I believe they also hired some of the core Dota devs to work on League. I guess if you want to be pedantic it was a custom map, but that was more a consequence of WC3 lacking support for mods. They ended up having to work around a lot of limitations to make Dota work in the custom map framework.

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Counter-Strike

Every MOBA that exists (DotA, LoL, HoN, etc)

Team Fortress

Killing Floor

PUBG

Natural Selection

Undoubtedly, many more that I can't recall off the top of my head.

  • >Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Natural Selection

    These games used the GoldSrc engine. Any game built on this engine gets called a mod. But this is not what most people actually think of when people are talking about mods. Rust is not a mod of Unity. These are game engines that people built a game using.

    >DotA

    This was a custom map. Not a mod.

    >LoL, HoN

    These were built on in house game engines and were not a mod.

    >PUBG

    This game used UE4 and was not a mod.

    • Calling DotA just a custom map is a bit of a stretch. That was merely the packaging. These "custom maps" had various scripting capabilities that made them more than just some terrain.

      Also custom maps are mods by definitions anyways, with the exception of games where the creation of maps is a component of gameplay.

      1 reply →

    • I like how you keep doubling down, and people keep destroying you. Please keep going. It is very informative for me to watch people correct you.

    • Dota is a wc3 map but, pendanticism aside, there is no distinction between a "map" and a mod in this context.

    • >This was a custom map. Not a mod.

      This is even better. Because it's a map you can start it without modifying your game installation.

      There were "real" WC3 mods, but it was always cumbersome and worked reliably only in singleplayer.

      Gameplay-wise it's a mod obviously.

Ever heard of Dota 2? PUBG? Team Fortress 2?

  • None of those are mods. Dota 2 is its own game built on Source 2. PUBG used UE4. TF2 used Source.

    • They all started out as mods to games. DotA specifically was a Warcraft 3 mod and ended up making Blizzard change their stance on such things because they lost such a massive IP to a different company. PUBG started as an Arma 2 mod and TF was a Quake mod. All the mendioned games effectively have their origins in mods for other games and likely wouldn't exist (at least in the form they are today) if that weren't for that, is what they presumably were indicating.

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You don't need to make your own engine to make a hot game from a mod though?