College Football Mod 19 & Open-Source
College Football Madden 19 Mod opens the door for open source game development.
It’s finally happening. College Football 19 is back, on PC, thanks to the modding community. The open-source mindset has finally peaked within sports gaming.
We’ve seen the FIFA Mod community make gameplay enhancements and tweaks for PC. They’ve created more realistic first-touch, dribbling on the pitch, and improved running and collision animations, where EA Sports left more to be desired.
College Football and rosters were my first experience in community mods. This began, way back in early 2000’s; the online gaming community created custom rosters and trusted one another to mail memory cards to be loaded with the game file in order to upload all the player names, likenesses, and skill sets.
In 2019, NCAA Football community is embracing the open-source model, and collectively building a new game off of Madden 19 for PC, titled CFBM19. You can find the demo, here.
The potential and significance of what this means for sports gaming is promising. When communities rally together for game development, we have a voice in game development. We each can own a piece of the project, and add our own interpretation of the sport into the gameplay.
Let’s dive into the possibilities of where this can lead.
Unleash the PC Modding Community
By availing the older-generation testing & design tools for classic titles, big developers can unleash the PC modding community. Simple.
This idea is a bit more creative, unconventional, but within the realm of possibility. If this idea is not executed as written here, it still opens up the possibility to riff off the idea, and come up with some other unconventional releases, as we have seen with CFBM19.
The goal is to persuade 2K, EA and others, to release previously created in-house testing & design tools for original sports titles and make them free open-source tools. Functionally, this will enable the community to create their own gameplay mechanics on their PC’s. Think: slider tweaking and testing multiplied by 100.
The more beautiful mods we can create now will only persuade 2K and EA to hand us more tools to continue.
Testing & design tools will enable millions of fans to create their own interpretations of very specific gameplay elements and fine-tune them. The modding community will be unleashed with a new set of tools to edit gameplay mechanics and to test sliders. For a specific example: perhaps the tools will enable users to test each jump shot animation’s success rates — a point of contention within the 2K community last season.
A campaign of this nature would be gifting back to the community tools to become gameplay engineers, to study and interpret data and feedback, and improve the gameplay on their own. Further, it will educate users on how to perceive gameplay mechanics, data, and how to communicate bugs to dev teams in the future.
Many parties stand to gain from this. Defying traditional business in making some of these old tools available would create buzz. User generated content would have the potential to go viral on the web, and EA and 2K may find some very talented developers and modders out there creating unique gameplay mechanics to inspire new controls, new sliders, and new gameplay flow.
By making use of these old assets, we can re-energize and grow the fanbase of sports gamers on the PC gaming side. This is an engagement devised to cultivate creativity and imagination within the community to push the gameplay mechanics further.
