Results
Welcome to the 20th Anniversary Modern Category results! With votes across twenty new legends to join the line-up of epics, the freshest of faces have been decided!
ModDB has been running for twenty years now, and seen many generations of modders come and go. The modern era of ModDB has had to survive a shift in the industry away from modding support, but these mods stuck it out and as we see a renaissance in UGC, they're poised to guide the next generation of creators. In the end, only five mods from the poll could take pole positions, and you can find them below!
It's no secret in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community that the games all launched in rough shape with a lot of content removed, and whilst still compelling enough to generate their own communities, the true test for modders has been restoring much of this original design goal and expanding the scope of the game to what fans expected. Call of Chernobyl stands as one of the most influential mods in this community, evolving from a map pack to a total overhaul aimed at restoring a classic. Though the project has since reached its conclusion, it still presents a great front for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans looking for something more.
There's little to be said about Black Mesa that hasn't already - as one of the all-time examples of a modder success story, its spot in the results is well-deserved (even if the 1st place winner has skewed the percentages with its sheer amount of support!). Black Mesa has had a long development journey, from ambitious mod to Valve-backed standalone commercial title, to the then highly-anticipated Xen remake. That journey is beginning to reach its end, but Crowbar Collective has plans for the future, and we're so excited to see where they lead.
Created by the very same people behind Nehrim, which also placed in our category results, Enderal is the team's effort to replicate their monumental success on a new foundation - Skyrim - and thus take it further than the original ever could've. Bringing us back to the immersive and remarkable world introduced in its predecessor, Enderal continues the story in a fantastic example of continuity across the years, giving us ample reason to be invested in the world as it evolves. The team now work on standalone releases, but who knows? Maybe we'll be back in this world when Elder Scrolls VI eventually hits storefronts.
Mental Omega has had a long history on-site, beginning development back in 2004, but despite all its fantastic additions, struggled to get player attention in the highly-competitive MOTY events - until 2015, when it finally received the recognition it deserves and made a modern name for itself despite its older origins. The team continues to update the mod to this day, enhancing this RTS classic with more units and ways to fight, proving that hard work and consistent effort is a determining factor in the success of a mod.
The sweeper of this vote was The Chronicles of Myrtana, receiving more votes in one poll than all previous polls put together and demonstrating the monumental impact this game-sized expansion mod has had on the community. Boasting a whole new story in the classic Gothic II and writing that some say is on par with the original game, it also features a full Polish voiceover, and speakers of that language can enjoy an all-star cast of professional-quality Polish VO to narrate their journeys. Meanwhile, the team continue to work on new patches, cultivate their community, and enjoy their spot not only as our most recent mod of the year, but now, the top modern mod in the last ten years.
Congratulations to all the modders and community members who participated in the 20th Anniversary event! This is the final results article, and we just want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has been a part of ModDB. Whether you're a veteran or a newbie, a hardcore modder or casual player, ModDB's success and history is in large part thanks to you - the users. Thanks for Changing The Game, and here's to another twenty years of modding history!
Well done with the anniversary contest! Unfortunately, there's no Crysis mods in here - and there's a reason for it. Crytek willingly destroyed a very promising and powerful modding community, hundreds of mods and maps have been destroyed when they took down the filebase (contained 2600 files), forums with tens of thousands of users have been removed (contained CryEngine knowledge since 2005), the community-driven wiki with hundreds of great articles had been removed. And though we are trying to bring some of it back by the means of community, it will never be that great again.
It is horrifying to realize what's happened. I would like to have an article about the demise of Crysis modding, if that is possible, to expose Crytek's actions.
An article would be very interesting, didn't know about that gross misbehaviour.
I can't speak to an article directly calling out Crytek at this time, but I can say two CryEngine mods were featured as part of the Classics category voting: Moddb.com
Seen those. MWLL is definitely a hit. Crysis Co-op would've been released in 2020 if not for the recent Crytek's actions. As for the old and popular Crysis mods, I would mention Outcast: Legacy of the Yods (Open Outcast), it was later transformed into a standalone game on CryEngine 3, but there's still an original demo version for Crysis Wars.
I’ll never understand why Crytek did what they did…
My guess, Crytek destroyed CryEngine 2 modding to start selling their commercial CryEngine 3 SDK. They lured people into CE2, community members made this engine a popular choice among creators, they made all these mods and projects and popular content and created a hype around this engine for the next 4 years after Crysis 1 was released. Modding community was 100% self-maintained, Crytek only paid for the domain name and forum hosting. We didn't get any tutorials or support from the actual Crytek employees, so the crymod.com/filebase/crywiki were a 100% user-generated content.
It is the community that made CryEngine 3 licensing possible, but after it became possible, Crytek didn't want a competitor (which was CryEngine 2 at the time), or any attention to their previous products. They wanted to sell CryEngine 3, and they wanted everyone to use only this engine, so they threw in to the community a free and broken and stripped-down CryEngine 3 Free SDK that was impossible to use, and they took down all modding resources, while selling the commercial version of CE3 to the rich buyers for a price starting at 1 million euros. Most community people soon ran away, and eventually that was the end of Crytek, for it went bankrupt in 2014, as it couldn't compete with better-managed engine businesses like Epic and Unity.
Crytek was always too greedy. They were using modders for profits and always treated them as third-class people. But apparently their CryEngine 3 was a commercial failure, and CryEngine 5 (they omitted 4) is a disaster and a miserable epic fail and it's now mostly an internal engine.
is called rat capitalism, so sad
CDPR did the same with the Witcher 2 SDK and the mods on their servers (although it was not nearly as severe).
This is exactly why we need to stay away from developer/publisher driven sites and also steam workshop. Who knows what will happen with all those things uploaded there. It's a big single point of failure just waiting to happen.
agree, but the masses will always walk pre-paved path.
SteamWS is already pretty critical, on the other hand moddb's modio
is also not the most liberated place.
Obiwan, our last hope is on the reverse engineers, like bf3 venice unleashed etc. :)
These users didn't knew about back up of their files?
Stupid question. There was about 50k users and thousands of active modders, with lots of those who wasn't active on the website anymore. It's impossible to get everyone in the line backing up the files, when there's thousands of those files.
Crytek never gave any notice, they just pulled the plug off, and the filebase was gone. In 2019 they announced a website redesign and they cowardly mentioned that they will terminate the modding forums in the last paragraph of the post. They gave people only 3 days before they did it.
Glad to see a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mod on this list. Slava Ukrani!
List like this without Rise of the Reds in it doesn't feel right
The results were user decided, but you can see ROTR was featured in our category line-up here: Moddb.com
Well deserved win for Chronics of Myrtana, its the Gothic III we all wanted, but never received.
So pleased to see Call of Chernobyl on this list. It's still a fantastic mod, and its enabled so many other mods in the community. All done with difficult a difficult sdk and codebase.