I had an idea for a game that’s been circling in my mind for a couple years now and would like for it to support mods. Before I start working on it, I just wanted to know if UE4 is the best free engine out now for adding mod support or is there another?
Most of that is going to depend on what you mean by “mod support”.
I guess just allowing players to add their own content to the game.
Now we need to define “content”. You need to be specific about what you want to achieve, or it’s not really possible to give an answer that isn’t any less vague.
I wanted to make a Mario Party style game and wanted to allow mods so players can make their own minigame, boards, and characters. Something like that at least.
What would probably be better would be to make a game customization tool within your game, so they wouldn’t be able to create new meshes but you could create a library of things that they could use.
I honestly thought mods would allow for more creativity.
If people have to use the editor then that’s a big barrier, since you would have to be much more skilled in game development, and at that point they don’t need to make mods for your game but could just make a game of their own.
You can’t just click a button to enable mod support. You have to really understand how the engine works and integrate things yourself.
Now that’s not true at all. There’s quite a huge difference between being able to make one piece of content, and an entire production quality game. Also, what if you don’t even want a new game, but just this one thing added to your favorite game?
If you’re making new content and new gameplay then you’re already doing quite a lot of work already, that’s not that far off from making a full game. For something like that, it’d probably do better if custom games were a feature built into the game rather than mods.