'I Feel Like Modding is Kind Of Dying' – Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Modder on AI's Impact on the Scene

Over the past few months, there's been an explosion of AI in the modding scene. Whether it's mashup mods on Twitter or full decompilation done by Claude, AI is everywhere in the mod community, and it could be killing the hobby. I got a chance to sit down with ME3Tweaks' Mgamerz to talk about his new Mass Effect Legendary Edition ME3 Multiplayer mod, where I asked him about how AI has affected the modding community. While he admits that Claude is very effective at modding games, it's causing an avalanche of low-effort content that's hard to sift through. And, while there has always been a range of quality for mods, the inherent difficulty of getting into a game's files and changing things was a natural filter that's slowly eroding. Mgamerz told me, "The difficulty of making mods and getting into it filtered out a lot of low-quality stuff. You see this on stuff like the Switch eShop, I've heard. It's full of slop, because there's no quality control and you can just ship whatever, and then users have to dredge through all sorts of stuff like that." Every IGN Mass Effect ReviewAlthough typing in a prompt to mod your own copy of a game is one thing, the problems start to appear once you start distributing it on platforms like Nexus Mods, where you have to be mindful about how your mod will interact with other add-ons, otherwise you're likely to just break peoples' games. Mgamerz laid out that process, telling me, "In the modding community, you have an ecosystem. For example, I have my mod manager, you deploy mods through the mod manager, it runs a bunch of checks on the mods to make sure you're not going to ship something that's just going to break someone's game immediately." These AI mods can do more than just break other people's mods too — they can also make your game much harder to run if they aren't optimized properly. For example, Mgamerz says, "There's certain knowledge, like you don't put stuff in startup files because it wastes tons of memory. If you stuff everything in there, you boot the game, oh, now the game takes an extra gigabyte of memory for your single mod to work, because you didn't want to do it the proper way."It's hard to argue with the fact that these AI tools are introducing a whole new generation of gamers to modding, but it's doing so without making them go through the effort of figuring out how to make things effectively. We've already seen major modding communities pull their sites down because of this outbreak of AI modding tools that can take months of someone's hard work and spin it around into a 'working' mod after a couple of Claude prompts. And that might end up becoming the default for people who learn how to code exclusively through AI tools.When I asked Mgamerz what the pathway for people who want to get into modding these days is, his answer was grim. He told me, "Getting into [modding]? I feel like modding is kind of dying. If you come in and you're like, 'I want to just do this, no AI. I just want to cut my teeth, find the boundaries, break over them, have a difficult, challenging task,' you pretty much have to work in secret now.""Because if you essentially have an idea and someone else is like, 'Wow, that's a cool idea.' And you're like, 'Well, it's going to take me six months.' And they're like, 'I don't want to wait six months.' They can spend 20 bucks and pump this thing out in a day or two, and it'll probably work, but the user will have no understanding of how."11 Mass Effect Characters and Moments the TV Show Needs to Be a HitMgamerz understands, though, that the prevalence of these AI tools is getting a lot of people interested in modding their favorite games, and that's not a bad thing. He told me, "If you don't release the stuff that you make, I don't see any problem. You made something cool for yourself." Instead, the problem is that, if you install it without considering how it'll interact with other software, it can really bungle other peoples' projects. "Once you hand this product over to somebody else, share it with the world, suddenly it can become everybody's problem. And from my experience, everyone that vibe codes stuff, two weeks later, they're gone. They're not supporting it. So the people that stick around have to fix and deal with all of it."Ever since Claude Opus 5.5 released back in September, it feels like the modding scene has been going through a rollercoaster, and it's impossible to know where exactly it's going to land. Whether the world of Nexus Mods and publicly available GitHub forks is going to start to die down like Mgamerz thinks it will is anyone's guess. But one thing's for sure: Once The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel drops, modding is going to be a completely different animal than the Skyrim days, if Bethesda's next game is even moddable at all.Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She's been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra