RPS: And the last of the four points?
Soren: Modability. We wanted the game to be really mod friendly – I thought there was an enormous potential there. Because for some reason, the strategy genre has not been nearly as mod friendly as a lot of other games that have appeared on the PC, especially the shooter genre. Valve is built off people who went and did things with their engine. It’s not in strategy game developers DNA. We really wanted to do everything to make the game moddable. My ultimate goal – in listing all my paths to get there – was keeping all our data in a standard format like XML, using Python for when we wanted to expose algorithms, and finally releasing the game and AI source code so people could change the rules to work how they wanted them to do. We got all that done and I’m really glad we did.
RPS: How pleased were you with the response to the community?
Soren: It’s been great. I mean, it’s always cool to hear people talk about how they liked Civ 4, they liked this part, I played some multiplayer… that’s cool. That’s the reason why we make games. But the coolest feeling is definitely going into the
CivFanatics modding forum and to see all the cool stuff people are doing with Civ 4. Firstly, because it feels good we’re empowering their creativity. If they weren’t being creative with Civ 4, I’m sure there’s something else they’d do, but it’s neat to see they chose our format over all the other options they had for making cool and interesting stuff. And it’s also interesting because, well, when you do an interview or write an article, it’s not as if there’s a parallel games journalist who’s doing the exact same thing (well, maybe sometimes) and you finding yourself thinking, “Oh, I could have done this differently”. But when you make a game that’s moddable, this is what’s happening all the time. It’s existing in this survival of the fittest. If someone makes a really cool mod, you’re going to find out about it because people are going to be playing and talking about it. The Fall From Heaven mod is really cool and really impressive. It’s got its own forum now, its own wiki – it’s a big deal. A lot of the stuff modders have done, we’ve been able to role back into the game itself. We made the interface moddable, and there were some pretty big improvements we borrowed from the interface modders to put into the patches. Some of the best scenarios in Beyond The Sword were adopted from people inside the community. The Rise And Fall scenario is a great one, which is done by an Italian guy who Firaxis had a long term relationship with – we knew he made great mods, so showed him the game earlier and let him do some really cool stuff.
