That Moment When You Think You’ll Have to Reinstall Your Mods

This past Sunday, I had the urge to play some classic Star Wars Battlefront II like I normally do every few days. I’ve been recently playing with the Absolute Battlefront: Galactic Conquest mod and decided to try out some of the maps in Instant Action mode. After playing a few maps, I got on with the business of the day and came back to play some more later on. I tried starting up one of the default maps with the Galactic Civil War sides but the maps would not load. After several attempts, I decided to try out the maps with the Clone War sides. Again, nothing. No maps were loading at all, whether default or custom. And then suddenly, a terrible thought came across my mind. Would I have to reinstall the game? And if so, would I need to reinstall all of my mods?

For those of you who are familiar with installing and playing mods, you know these are fair questions. With Battlefront II, I have almost 200 gigabytes of mods installed. The idea of having to go through the process of installing them all over again would be a chore. The mods include new maps, new modes, new characters, more skin options, new weapons, etc. I didn’t install all of these mods at once, but over time. And along the journey, there were probably hours of troubleshooting involved. It can be very intensive so when you’re installing and troubleshooting mods, the time you’re spending with the game is not leisure-based. You’re trying to solve all the issues to get to that point.

So after hours of troubleshooting with Battlefront II, I decided to verify the game’s files on Steam. Before doing so, I made a backup of all my mods and moved them to a different folder on the same external drive. This is important because when you transfer files to another place on the same drive, the transfer is almost instantaneous on Windows 10. The verification process discovered that I had some missing files that needed to be restored. This sometimes happens when you are playing with a lot of mods. After the files were restored, I then reinstalled just a couple of mods while transferring the other files over from the backup folder. Thank goodness that was all that was needed and I was back to playing my beloved Battlefront II again. Disaster successfully averted.

Yet there was one disaster that was not avoided a few months ago. When I purchased WWE 2K19 for PC in late 2018, I was pleased to find that the game was well supported by the modding community. I’m a wrestling fan that enjoys wrestling video games, so it was great to put in guys who weren’t included in the default game such as Hulk Hogan, CM Punk, AJ Lee, Mick Foley, Rob Van Dam, Kerry Von Erich, Kevin Von Erich, and Mark Henry. It was terrific to also be able to properly update the in-game superstars with their current attire, music, titantrons, etc. It had taken several months but by the end of summer 2019, I had installed hundreds of mods with the ability to make any match to my heart’s desire. And then that all came crashing down in the early part of summer this year. 

I had randomly decided one day that I wanted to play WWE 2K19. But when I started up the game, there was nothing but a black screen. I searched the internet looking for solutions and tried several. Nothing worked. Then I made a huge mistake of overwriting my backup save for WWE 2K19 with a save based on the current state of my game (which wasn’t working). I was left with the lone option to reinstall the game, but everything that I had downloaded in the game and my mods were now lost.

As a result of what happened, I’ve decided to no longer install a mass amount of mods at one time as I did before in WWE 2K19. I’ll just use what I need when I play. It’s a bit more limiting that way because with all the mods loaded, I had a huge selection to pick from. But now, if there is a certain wrestler I wish to use that isn’t in the game, then I will install that wrestler at the time. It’s a much safer approach for me, less time-consuming, and certainly less disappointing.

So one thing to remember when dealing with mods is determining whether the reward outweighs the risk. It does for me in most cases. I happily spent over a day downloading a mod package for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim knowing that my game was going to look significantly better and have a whole suite of new gameplay options. Sometimes I would have to re-download some of the files, but it was well worth it when I finally played the finished product. 

There are some gamers out there that have made it a lifestyle by installing and tweaking their mod lists in Skyrim. They end up doing that just as much as actually playing the game. That’s not something I prefer to do. It’s similar to how in wrestling games, some people spend more time creating wrestlers and ring designs rather than play the matches. For me, taking the time to install the mods is always about getting to the end.

I love mods at the end of it all. That’s why I go through the ups and downs that always potentially go along with it. At least in the case of Battlefront II, I am back on track with everything working as it should. Thank goodness.

-TVGA
admin@videogamersadvocate.com