DICE could “kill” ARMA with mod tools

DayZ creator Dean Hall said that Battlefield developer DICE could essentially make military shooter, ARMA, irrelevant by providing mod support for modern Battlefield titles.

Speaking at the PC Gaming World Congress, Hall explained that developer-controlled servers take away the ability for mod support, and that the Bohemia Interactive (which Hall works for) ARMA series would be toppled by Battlefield mod support.

“It’s like, I think that if DICE wanted to kill Arma, all they’d need to do is release some modding tools tomorrow. Psh, gone. It always really hurt me when Battlefield 2 was the end in terms of modding, so I’m pretty obviously supportive of the whole modding idea,” said Hall.

“That’s the challenge that we’re trying to deal with with DayZ at the moment. How do we have the stability and security of an online community like Wargaming has, at the same time as support modding? I don’t have the answer for that.”

Dean Hall

Uber Entertainment co-founder Jon Mavor elaborated on the point, saying “There’s going to be games that are going to allow it and there’s going to be games that aren’t, and the difference is going to be: ‘Do you have access to the server?’”

Chris Roberts, who’s Star Citizen has generated huge buzz thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, also added to the challenges of the private server scenario.

“I’m doing it in Star Citizen; you definitely can mod and you can run your own servers, but if you want to be on the big persistent universe everyone else is on, obviously you can’t mod in that situation, because it wouldn’t work if someone built a battleship that could blow everyone up,” said Roberts.

Check out the entire panel discussion below: