Unofficial modding support for the game

[r457.ao2]

Greetings everyone,

We are Orange and Blue from Army of Two also known as r457 and gh057 behind r457 mods[www.nexusmods.com]. We were getting several requests recently to explain how to mod Aliens: Dark Descent, so we set aside some time and put together this short guide on Unreal Engine 4 modding for games with no official mod support.

It is not a step by step guide on how to make a mod. It's a general info on UE4 modding and where to look for information and tools.

The full guide[forums.nexusmods.com] is available at Nexus Forums and we encourage people to gather there and share their research as it was before with games like XCOM.

However, because it's our right to express ourselves and also because we have this opportunity here, we give half credits to Focus Home / Tindalos Aliens Dark Descent game we have just finished and the end of the game was a full deception, not to say mocking players on both story and gameplay. (And we are not even talking here about the game being still plagued with a lot of bugs.)

We had plans for other mods, but taking into account the state of the game and judging by the last update from the developers adding even more issues, we might not invest more time into it (and to let you know - we tried to communicate, but we were ignored as long as they realized we're modders and not youtube influencers). We're glad, however, they decided to implement death clock removal we did without any modding support.


r457 from Army of Two

[Nekavandre]

Thank you! Really enjoying your work. At the moment you are leading the way and your efforts are not going unnoticed.

[0utlaw]

Appreciate your mods guys, I'm using some of them now.

[Tashrinbackup]

Dang, was hoping the save mod would be patched (can't seem to get it to work)

[Frank Machin]

I also appreciate your mods and modders in general. You guys give games longevity and variation.

[BlackWater821]

Looking forward for more mods guys, thanks !

[OotaOTT[RU]]

Support for custom mods kills any game!
If the game needs mods, then it's a bad game.

[jamesjamozo]

Originally posted by OotaOTTRU:

Support for custom mods kills any game!
If the game needs mods, then it's a bad game.

Having Mod support kills a game? Wtf are you smoking?

[Coyote]

I think its just a bad look to combine personal feelings about the game with a post about modding.

I for one do not want a wedge driven between people who want to mod and the developers.

[DarthMagus]

Originally posted by r457.ao2:

Greetings everyone,

We are Orange and Blue from Army of Two also known as r457 and gh057 behind r457 mods[www.nexusmods.com]. We were getting several requests recently to explain how to mod Aliens: Dark Descent, so we set aside some time and put together this short guide on Unreal Engine 4 modding for games with no official mod support.

It is not a step by step guide on how to make a mod. It's a general info on UE4 modding and where to look for information and tools.

The full guide[forums.nexusmods.com] is available at Nexus Forums and we encourage people to gather there and share their research as it was before with games like XCOM.

However, because it's our right to express ourselves and also because we have this opportunity here, we give half credits to Focus Home / Tindalos Aliens Dark Descent game we have just finished and the end of the game was a full deception, not to say mocking players on both story and gameplay. (And we are not even talking here about the game being still plagued with a lot of bugs.)

We had plans for other mods, but taking into account the state of the game and judging by the last update from the developers adding even more issues, we might not invest more time into it (and to let you know - we tried to communicate, but we were ignored as long as they realized we're modders and not youtube influencers). We're glad, however, they decided to implement death clock removal we did without any modding support.


r457 from Army of Two

I thanked you on Nexus and I'll thank you here. I get where you're coming from and it sucks you aren't getting any support. Hopefully it's because they're all too busy squashing game breaking bugs and adding QoL features to the game. I'll still ask that you make a manual save mod, as I won't be updating the game unless they add that feature, as more bugs have shown up since their last patch and I'd rather be able to save myself than hope they get it all right.

[TiredTyrant]

Originally posted by jamesjamozo:

Originally posted by OotaOTTRU:

Support for custom mods kills any game!
If the game needs mods, then it's a bad game.

Having Mod support kills a game? Wtf are you smoking?

Russians react differently to mods from what I've noticed. Don't know why.

[Kedryn]

Much appreciating the mod that allows pause on map. Thanks much!

[r457.ao2]

It's nice seeing some are using what we put on forums and Nexus trying to mod the game with UE, but avoid falling into a trap of editing every number inside the tables just because someone asked you to do it: it leads to cheating and this is the reason we were avoiding to do it ourselves to respect the developers' vision - even with all the problems, it is still an Alien universe game and removing the difficulty defies the purpose of playing it. For once it's a game that translates the atmosphere of the movie and that is why it's important to preserve the original vision of it as much as possible. Imagine tomorrow in sport you could have a football ball which is capable of following every move of the player who's doing crazy things and finishing with a goal impossible to save - it will be a clear cheating and it will defy the purpose of football as a game.

As an example of what could have been done instead and what we were thinking about: adding a synth soldier you could deploy with your squad modifying a bit the table because the current synth values are not well set to reflect what we know from the movies. It could have been a unique class with unique abilities to extent the tactical layer. Or we were having plans to allow the players to temporary stop the aliens coming from nests by destroying them and stopping the spawns for a short period of time. And so on and so forth.

You've got room to mod the game with actually interesting and balanced things other than just cheating with editing values inside tables. It's up to your imagination and creativity and this is why, from my point of view, nowadays games are failing - it happens mostly because rare are the ones not to copy-paste the existing gameplay over and over again. Recently we were invited to test ARC Raiders and that's the perfect example of a game which is turning into a generic one because instead of following the original idea that could have made this game better someone decided to jump on a hype train and produce instead yet another looter/shooter/extractor without any soul (and opposite to it is Helldivers 2 - we are impatient to know what nasty and fun mechanics they prepared for the players). It's up to us, modders, to also fix that. It has been done before us in brilliant ways for many well-known games like XCOM, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, The Witcher, Valheim, Minecraft... the list is quite long.

We took time to write this maybe a long text for reasons. Turning mods into a mirror for cheat engine cheats is doing no good and only making developers reluctant to add mod support into their games. It's a shame when people accuse developers of taking the path of least resistance (though, it's mostly managers and shareholders shutting down creativity and focusing on quick money) and then do the same by resorting to cheats.

[Rex]

Any way to add in a cinematic photo mode for taking screenshots and looking at the environment? There is a lot of attention to detail on the maps and being able to take some screenshots with the help of a free float camera would be f****** awesome.

[Glitch112]

Been trying to learn how to mod this game and change some aspects such as adding real military camouflage for the marines and swapping helmet options and such. I've never modded anything before but I've managed to follow up to viewing your project in UE as well as getting the headers, now I'm stuck and not sure how to continue. A bit further guidance would be really appreciated it possible, thank you.

[NobodyUknow]

Wow, thank you for your efforts and helping to assist the community with learning how to mod the game in new and interesting ways. I'll definitely take a look at this soon and see if I can make something useful ^_^