The First Mods...

[MaybeLater]

I just want to plant a little seed here saying that, if the modding capabilities are eventually as good as the developers have claimed on the official Discord (they mentioned creating entire campaigns), as a long-time fan of the Jagged Alliance series, I'd love to see mods so that I could play the story/quests/maps/mercenaries, etc. of the original Jagged Alliance, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games, Jagged Alliance 2, and Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business as mods using the Jagged Alliance 3 engine.

If the publisher would allow it, I would even be the sort of person who would actually pay money for DLCs/expansions, if they were geared towards that.

Of course I'd also love to see JA2: Wildfire, etc. as mods later on, but lately I've been playing around with the original Jagged Alliance, and this just sprang to my mind.

What do you all think?  🙂

[Xeth Nyrrow]

I think there might be some modders who would do this but I doubt the developers would want to rehash an old story. I'd rather they spent time making something completely new as a DLC and leave old content to the modding community. Also, your user name is basically the tl:dr answer, LOL

[MaybeLater]

2 hours ago, Xeth Nyrrow said:

I'd rather they spent time making something completely new as a DLC and leave old content to the modding community.

I actually completely agree; it's just that I'd like the modders to be able to use the voices/music and maps from the original games, and maybe be paid a little bit for their work at the same time.

The only way I could see either of those happening is with some sort of agreement and/or oversight by the current IP holders wherein these mods could be monetized.

[Lunokhod]

3 hours ago, MaybeLater said:

What do you all think?

Not realistic and unnecessary. For example JA2 map has about 200 sectors. Do u understand how much work is it? Probably they can remake South-West of Arulco pretty quickly, but what about other sectors? Alot of NPC's, other stuff... Its too much work for just a DLC.

[D13]

Could even be fun to have individual interesting sectors and a mini mission scenario, for those times when you don't want to play a full campaign.

In JA2 I used to save my favourite battles to replay them later with different tactics. For example, Cambria, Tixa, Meduna, and Balime were quite replayable, probably a few more.

[Lunokhod]

57 minutes ago, D13 said:

Tixa

Great sector. Hope JA3 also has a sector with prison.

[Stuurminator]

Realistically, the first mods will probably be weapon rebalance mods, or based on what I've seen from JA2 mods, replacement portraits for all the female mercenaries of teenaged models.

I'd love to see old mercenaries ported to JA3, though, even if they couldn't interject in conversations or whatever. I'm currently playing a 1.13 game using nothing but ported JA:DG mercenaries.

[Carmine]

The number of mods depends on the level of excellence of the original game.

 

[MaybeLater]

On 6/23/2023 at 5:53 PM, Lunokhod said:

Not realistic and unnecessary. For example JA2 map has about 200 sectors. Do u understand how much work is it? Probably they can remake South-West of Arulco pretty quickly, but what about other sectors? Alot of NPC's, other stuff... Its too much work for just a DLC.

It's very realistic, and of course it's, "unnecessary."  We're talking about a freaking video-game here - it's all unnecessary!  😉

Just because it's too much for someone like you to be able to handle doesn't mean that it can't be done; there are several JA2 mods and campaigns that required as much work as these would, but I really shouldn't have expected anything else from you - 90% of your posts are negative.

I'm not suggesting something that hasn't happened before; someone created a mod for JA2 that effectively recreated JA1:
https://thepit.ja-galaxy-forum.com/index.php?t=msg&th=20899

Yes, yes, you'll probably screech about how much less that required and how it's still glitchy, etc. - but it was basically done in a few months time by a handful of folks back in 2013, so imagine what a larger group of folks over the course of a year or so could do.

One last bit:  "Do [you] understand how much work [it is]?"  Yes, as someone who's been playing games and mods in the Jagged Alliance series for over 2 decades, and who has been involved in working with the code/graphics of a different game from 1995-1996, I do know how how much work it is.  Do you?  Do you do much of anything other than complain?

 

In any event, most of the other replies here were actually useful, so thank you to everyone else for that.

For instance, I do agree with @Stuurminator that importing old JA1, JA:DG, and JA2 characters would make pretty neat DLCs.  The idea from @D13 for map packs, etc. from those games would also be as well!

There were a lot of speech extractors, map extractors, etc. made for both JA1 and JA2 modding, and I think I even heard that someone was working on a JA1 to JA2 map exporter - maybe something like that would be possible for JA2 to JA3, which would make creating those map pack DLCs even easier.

I'm hopeful that eventually, if they found those DLCs successful, maybe they could use that towards, "expansions," (or even official mods) that would allow us to play the previous games' campaigns/quests using the JA3 engine.

I really appreciated the RPG elements of the Jagged Alliance series, and considering JA1 is from 1994...  Maybe it's due for a reboot?  I'd love to see a JA3: Metavira, and a JA3: Arulco.

@Carmine , your point is a very valid one though; if enough folks don't wind up either really liking the game and seeing some modding potential, there's really no point in what I'm hoping for.

Anyway, if anyone wants to play JA1, there was an official 1.13b patch and there's also an unofficial 1.15 patch that seems to make it much more playable on modern systems:
https://www.gog.com/forum/jagged_alliance_series/ja1_unofficial_115_patch/page1

 

By the way, I've noticed that a lot of the decisions that people seem to not really like for JA3 seem to be very similar to how JA1 works.  I'm not just trying to get you folks to love Metavira as much as we all love Arulco; it genuinely seems to me that they're using ideas from JA1 as well as JA2 for JA3 (whether that's a wise decision or not).

[GODSPEED]

On 6/23/2023 at 2:23 PM, MaybeLater said:

If the publisher would allow it, I would even be the sort of person who would actually pay money for DLCs/expansions, if they were geared towards that.

Of course I'd also love to see JA2: Wildfire, etc. as mods later on, but lately I've been playing around with the original Jagged Alliance, and this just sprang to my mind.

What do you all think?  🙂

On 6/23/2023 at 5:53 PM, Lunokhod said:

Not realistic and unnecessary. For example JA2 map has about 200 sectors. Do u understand how much work is it? Probably they can remake South-West of Arulco pretty quickly, but what about other sectors? Alot of NPC's, other stuff... Its too much work for just a DLC.

That ^


Yeah, I understand, you're anxious for the mods. I find it a little unfair to just ASK for mods to be made. I mean, those who make mods actually spend so much of their own free time to mod something they like/dislike and usually end up sharing that with others.

If there is something you find you'd like to change, why not maybe try and learn how to mod yourself?

I'm not trying to be insulting, but you're pretty much asking for others to do something YOU want to benefit from, without yourself contributing. (Sure, maybe if a mod is being worked on and you follow/test it, the one(s) working on it might like playtest feedback.. but I'm talking about straight up asking for huge mods to be made and what are YOU contributing?)