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Nov 06, 2024

Doom modders are annoyed at the "chum-bucket" of wrongly credited mods in the latest Doom remaster | Rock Paper Shotgun

Can I see your id? Last week, Bethesda released a remastered edition of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with lots of extra episodes and improvements. One of these new features is a built-in browser for

Can I see your id?

Last week, Bethesda released a remastered edition of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with lots of extra episodes and improvements. One of these 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, lots of good fan-made mods are now playable on the Steam version of ye olde Doom. That's neat! Ah, but there is some demon excrement on the health pack, so to speak. The mod browser lacks moderation and lets people upload the work of others with their own name pinned as the author. That's prompted one level designer to call it "a massive breach of trust and violation of norms the Doom community has done its best to hold to for those 30 years."

"This is a massive breach of trust and a shitty thing for [id Software and Zenimax] to do to a community that created the phenomenon they are now monetising," said game designer JP LeBreton in a post on cohost. LeBreton is known for his work on the BioShock series as a level designer, plus his more recent work on Psychonauts 2. But he's also a regular creator of Doom mods. He explains the problem with the recent Doom remaster in that post, but let me break it down.

Essentially, there are two avenues to install and play a mod within the new Doom remasters. Firstly, clicking on "Featured mods" will bring you to a curated list of mods that are officially endorsed and correctly credited. Things like Sigil 2 by Romero Games, or Harmony by Thomas van der Velden. The second avenue for finding mods is found by clicking "Browse". And it's here where we find the "giant chum-bucket of random shit people have uploaded", says LeBreton. At the time of writing there are over 700 mods available here, browsable with some very basic filters. An upload button also appears in the menu. The issue is that there seems to be very little moderation going on at all.

"[You] can pretty much just... upload whatever files you feel like with it?" says LeBreton. "And put whatever text you want to go with it? And it goes through an approval process of some sort, but given how quickly stuff has gone up in the past couple hours, there's clearly pretty much zero vetting going on..."

Aside from the possible appearance of copyright-protected stuff, or (knock wood) some "hentai-strewn school shooting simulator WAD from 1999", this opens up the basic problem of people taking credit for another's work.

"I don't particularly care about the copyright concerns of Nintendo or whoever, though," says LeBreton. "What I immediately saw and hated was random shithead's names beneath community works, clearly uploaded without anyone's permission."

There is a "report mod" button, but this simply offloads the responsibility for moderating content onto original creators, says LeBreton, which in some cases is impossible in a modding culture that has been going for three decades, as some popular Doom modders have since died. Others may simply not want to play whack-a-mole to ensure their mod is properly credited.

Some mods in this "chum-bucket" will also be simply broken, LeBreton points out. A popular mod called MyHouse.wad is listed in the browser, for example, and it requires capabilities that the remaster does not include. Sure enough, it crashes when you start playing (something of a shame, considering MyHouse.wad is an extraordinary work of horror). The main gripe remains for this mod too: it has been uploaded not by its original author Steve "Veddge" Nelson but by a user called "MrMysteryMan76", who writes in the description: "This is not my mod. You can find the origional [sic] on the doomseeker website." Some modders are taking to Steam to ask people not to upload creations without the author's say-so.

If any of LeBreton's own Doom maps and mods become available on the browser, he says that it will be "explicitly" without his permission. I can understand the annoyance. As a Quake mapping dabbler, I'd be miffed if I saw someone uploading my maps for that game with their name as the byline. In my case, they're not revolutionary levels but when you work hard on something, you don't want BilboBorginborf69 to slap his name on your weirdo crypt, even if they've uploaded it out of enthusiasm.

It's not clear how Zenimax will address the issue. The company has a rocky track record with modders. Much of the Bethesda library is open to modding, for instance, and they seem to understand that a lot of good things result from this. At the same time, they have been known to break things modders have been working on, and a "paid mods" fiasco some years ago understandably caused mixed emotions among modders. My own 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 moderating and ensure those mods creators are credited correctly.