More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Think you just described a game engine like Godot or Armory.
Ultimately that’s what you are describing there with such a free-form framework. The tools to make anything.
Even at a higher level engines like RPG maker and twine exist within genres.
And that isn’t a mod, so much as a game.
But going back to mods…
And why should that end up with a common look and feel? People have been modding the look and feel of games since the 90s.
Credentials: I made mods and maps in the 90s and commercial games in the 2000s.
Well, if you lower the barrier to entry. More people are likely to use the stock offerings. But that isn’t really a plus. Ideally the games would be visually different. But if you have a simple mechanic like inventory, it could and should generally be similar to others, unless that is what is supposed to be different about your game. W, a, s, d at least is pretty standard now. But it wasn’t always. I have noticed games solving the same problems as many other games, but doing it much worse. And clearly not by intention to be different, just because that wasn’t thier focus. So for those cases, it would improve those games.
I disagree, rather strongly.
The evolution of gameplay comes from the diversity of design.
This occasionally enables games, of varying quality, to break with orthodoxy and to create new paradigms.
The two stick control method we use for FPS, for example, only happened because someone broke with convention when designing Alien Resurrection for the PS1.
It was absolutely planned at the time, but soon became the standard.
My point is that you don’t know what needs to be improved until the alternatives appear.
So no, inventory should not confirm to a standard. It should be entirely driven by the aspirations of the designer and the needs of the game.
There will be times when games don’t get it right, much like in biological evolution, there are mistakes and dead ends, but the only thing you really want to avoid is a monoculture.