Last week, Bethesda released a remastered version of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with a bunch of extras and improvements. One of those new features is a built-in browser for mods, and support for many existing mods that previously required a different version of the game. Basically, a lot of good fan-made mods are now playable on the Steam version of the old Doom. That's great! Oh, but there's a little demon poop in the health pack, so to speak. The mod browser is unregulated, and allows people to upload other people's work under their own names as authors. This led one level designer to call it “a huge breach of trust and violation of the norms that the Doom community has been doing their best to uphold for 30 years.”
“This is a huge breach of trust and it's a bad thing. [id Software and Zenimax] “This is going to be done against a community that created a phenomenon that they're now making money from,” game designer Jean-Paul LeBreton wrote in a post on cohost. LeBreton is best known for his work as a level designer on the BioShock series and his recent work on Psychonauts 2, but he also regularly creates Doom mods. He explains the problem with the recent Doom remaster in that post, but I'll explain it to you.
Essentially, there are two ways to install and play a mod in the new Doom remasters. First, when you click on “Featured mods,” you'll be taken to a curated list of officially approved and properly credited mods, like Romero Games' Sigil 2 or Thomas van der Velden's Harmony. The second way to find mods is by clicking “Browse.” This is where LeBreton says we find “a giant bucket of random shit that people upload.” At the time of writing, there are over 700 mods available here, which can be browsed with some very basic filters. There's also an install button in the menu. The problem is that there seems to be very little moderation.
“[You] “You can pretty much… upload whatever files you want,” LeBreton says. “And you can put whatever text you want? And it goes through some sort of approval process, but given how quickly things have spread in the last few hours, there's clearly no review…”
Besides the potential for copyrighted stuff or (thank goodness) “1999 hentai-filled school shooting simulation WAD” to come out, this also raises the fundamental problem of people appropriating other people's work.
“But I don't particularly care about copyright concerns from Nintendo or whoever,” LeBreton says. “What I immediately saw and hated was that there were random assholes' names underneath the community work, clearly uploaded without anyone's permission.”
There's a “report mod” button, but that puts the onus on the original creators to moderate their content, LeBreton says, which is impossible in some cases in a modding culture that's been going on for three decades, because some popular Doom modders are dead. Others may just not want to play the knock-on game to make sure their mods are properly credited.
LeBreton also notes that some of the mods in this “chum-bucket” will simply break. For example, a popular mod called MyHouse.wad is listed in the browser and requires abilities that the remaster doesn't include. Of course, it crashes when you start playing it (which is a shame, considering MyHouse.wad is a phenomenal horror creation). The main complaint about this mod remains: it was uploaded by a user named “MrMysteryMan76” and the description reads: “This is not my mod. You can find the original here [sic] “Some modders are contacting Steam asking people not to upload their games without the author's permission,” doomseeker wrote on the website.
If any of LeBreton's own Doom maps and mods are made available in the browser, he says, it will be “obviously” without his permission. I can understand the irritation. As a Quake mapping novice, I'd be annoyed if I saw someone upload my maps for that game under their own name. In my case, these aren't revolutionary levels, but when you've worked so hard on something, you don't want BilboBorginborf69's name written on your weird grave, even if they did upload it with enthusiasm.
It's not clear how Zenimax will address this issue. The company has a checkered history with modders. Bethesda, for example, has a large portion of its library open to modding, and they seem to understand that this leads to a lot of good. At the same time, they've been known to break things that modders have been working on, and the “paid mods” fiasco a few years ago understandably caused mixed feelings among modders. My personal feeling is that if your multi-million dollar company is going to use “look at all these mods!” as a marketing point, you could at least do some moderation and make sure those modders are properly credited.