Take Two & Rockstar In Battles With Modders With Mixed Reactions
Take-Two Interactive has come out swinging with legal action or threats of legal action against both free and paid modding tools for its flagship product Grand Theft Auto V. One of the targets was a paid GTA hacking site known as Force Hax. For a monthly fee this site would allow someone to cheat significantly on GTA 5 online enabling all sorts of things like almost unlimited resources and invincibility. Force Hax marketed themselves as, "The Dark Side of GTAV PC Modding' and boasted it was an 'Undetected GTAV Modmenu for PC' that 'Bypasses Latest Rockstar Anti-Cheat'". For those willing to shell out a between $6.99 per week to $31.99 for three months, Force Hax made a player masters of their domain often at the cost of new and underfinanced players.
Their site has been wiped clean and now only displays the message, "After discussions with Take-Two Interactive, effective immediately we are ceasing all maintenance, development and distribution of the Force Hax cheat menu services. We will be donating our proceeds to charity and we apologize for any and all problems Force Hax services have cause to the Grand Theft Auto 5 Online community".
While this move has been generally supported in the community Take-Two Interactive has caused a landslide of down rating on Steam and other platforms for censuring another tool that allowed players to mod the single player mode, or story mode. The very popular Open IV has also been attacked by Take-Two drawing fire from angry players all around the world. The Open IV move has caused such an uproar from fans that there is now a change.org petition that has been started by disgruntled users and currenly has 41,387 supporters.
From the change.org site:
"For 10 years now the Grand Theft Auto series has been edited and modded by people to make the game more enjoyable. >Hundreds if not thousands of people have bought one or all of Grand Theft Auto: SA, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Grand Theft >Auto V just to mod it. The modding of these games have been done mostly in singleplayer and with the help of OpenIV, a >software that lets you get into the game's files and replace vehicles, scripts, textures, etc. The closing of OpenIV leaves >10,000s of people without access to be able to mod their games, and leaves 10,000s of people without the ability to continue >their hobbies. All modding used by OpenIV is for singleplayer use only to make the game more enjoyable, the software >OpenIV was never used to mod multiplayer or Grand Theft Auto Online so it does not harm anyone. Myself, and other >members of the LSPDFR and GTA modding community ask that OpenIV be allowed to continue distributing and running as a >modding software, and that the modding of the Grand Theft Auto series, including SA, IV, and V be deemed legal again as >Rockstar Games has said in the past. Thank you."
What Do You Think of Modding
Given the aggressive tactics of Take-Two regarding modding what is your take on the situation? Are you for Open IV on story mode and against sites like Force Hack? Are you against modding all together. Many games like Bethesda's Creation Engine games are made to be modded in the first place and even have official modding sites and tools built into their platforms. Sometimes these mods are great and sometimes they seem to just make it harder for you to get a stabil playing experience or even down right crash the games. So please tell me what you think about this latest move by Take Two and if you like this article, please upvote, resteem, and follow!
I think they should allow story mode mods to continue. It adds lots of cool things like better graphics and allows access to places that you would otherwise not get. I support OpenIV but I am really against the online hacking tools. While modding the story mode enhances the game experience I think that the online hacking just discourages new players or those without money to buy shark cards because they are being constantly wiped out or killed with no chance of defending themselves. So OpenIV is a good thing online hack just suck.
I kind of feel the same way. I have had fun doing some outrageous stuff in story mode that has extended game play for me but really get tired of getting shot and robbed without any ability to defend myself online. While I can see why Take-Two wants to protect their IP it also seems like a great way to lose users. It is a fine balance. I say let story mode have all the mods it can get but online must be kept clean.