Last week, Bethesda released a remastered edition of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with many additional episodes and improvements. One of these recent features is a built-in mod browser and support for many existing mods that previously required a different version of the game. Basically, many good fan-made mods are now available on Steam Steam version elderly Doom. That’s cold! Ah, but there’s some demonic excrement on the medkit, so to speak. The mod browser has no moderation and allows people to upload other people’s work with their own name as the author. This prompted one level designer to call it “a huge breach of trust and a violation of the norms that the Doom community has tried to uphold as best it could for 30 years.”
There are basically two ways to install and play mods in the recent Doom remasters. First, clicking “Featured Mods” will take you to a curated list of mods that are officially approved and properly labeled. Things like Sigil 2 by Romero Games, or Harmony by Thomas van der Velden. The second way to find mods is by clicking “Browse.” And that’s where we find “a giant bucket of random shit people have uploaded,” LeBreton says. At the time of writing, there are over 700 mods available, which you can browse through using a few very basic filters. There’s also a submit button in the menu. The problem is that moderation seems to be very inactive.
Putting aside the possibility of copyrighted material appearing, or (touch wood) some “hentai-laden school shooting simulator WAD from 1999,” there’s the basic problem of people taking credit for someone else’s work.
“But I don’t really care about Nintendo’s or anyone else’s copyright issues,” LeBreton says. “What I saw right away and hated was the random names of idiots under community works that were clearly uploaded without anyone’s permission.”
There’s a “report moderator” button, but that simply shifts the responsibility of moderating content to the original creators, LeBreton says, which is sometimes impossible in a modding culture that’s spanned three decades, as some popular Doom modders have since died. Others may simply not want to play whack-a-mole to make sure their mod gets proper recognition.
If any of LeBreton’s own Doom maps and mods become available in the browser, he says it will be “explicitly” without his consent. I understand the irritation. As a Quake mapper, I’d be annoyed if I saw someone upload my maps to the game with their name as a caption. They’re not groundbreaking levels in my case, but when you’re working demanding on something, you don’t want BilboBorginborf69 slapping his name on your weird vault, even if he uploaded it with enthusiasm.
It’s unclear how Zenimax will address this issue. The company has a tough history with modders. For example, a gigantic portion of Bethesda’s library is open to modding, and they seem to understand that good things come of it. At the same time, they’ve been known to break things that modders have worked on, and the “paid mod” fiasco of a few years ago understandably left modders feeling mixed. In my opinion, if your multi-million dollar company is going to employ “look at all these mods!” as a marketing point, you could at least do a little modding and make sure the creators of those mods are properly credited.
