An interesting new trend has been slowly gaining traction in the PC gaming community: custom fan-made modifications (or “mods” as they’re more colloquially known) which, instead of adding things to their respective game as most other mods do, remove a very significant element: AI-controlled enemies. While it may seem odd at first glance to remove so much of what gives a game its challenge (and thus, as many would argue, makes it fun), there are a lot of gamers who prefer exploring such games in a much more stress-free manner, and it doesn’t get much more stress-free than when there’s nothing around to attack you.
This recent report from PC Gamer highlights three games in particular which have received no-enemy mods: Alien: Isolation, Dark Souls 2, and Mirror’s Edge. The Alien: Isolation mod was created by Paul Huwe, a senior scientific software developer at NASA who wanted to keep the game’s titular alien antagonist in the game but also make it a lot less dangerous:
“I did find a ‘no alien’ mod, it didn’t remove the alien, but rather spawned it as an inert NPC. In addition to being very jarring, it prevented the alien from performing scripted events which I found both insufficient and experience-destroying. Given all this, I decided to try to make my own mod which would have the alien act like normal, except that it would ignore Amanda. In that way I could explore the station in a far more enjoyable fashion.”
For Dark Souls 2, a modder who goes by the handle Jgwman went ahead and created a level editor mod whose purpose isn’t strictly to remove the game’s enemies, though that’s one of the functions it can perform if a user wants it to:
“Though I created the level editor with the goal of allowing other players to create surprising new encounters, I knew that it could potentially be used to remove challenge from the game, and that didn’t bother me. I’m personally of the opinion that if you’re not harming anyone else’s experience, you should be able to experience the game in any way you like. If someone wants to explore the world of Dark Souls II as an empty sandbox, I’m glad I can help them to enjoy the game.”
The Mirror’s Edge no-enemies mod, meanwhile, is perhaps the most ambitious of all, mainly because it started life as a more ambitious project which would have allowed players to take on the role of a “runner cop” who chased down NPC runners. However, the mod’s creator, Saverio “S1y” Ruggieri, was eventually forced to abandon that angle due to the limitations of the game’s interfacing structure. Instead, Ruggieri built a customized open-world version of the game’s normally linear presentation in which players could freely run around without being hassled by NPC enemies:
“The problem with the standard maps is that they are basically thought of as linear paths, with some variations of the route but which inevitably lead from point A to point B. Hence the idea of creating a new map, which is more or less a faithful reconstruction of the one viewed in the original game. I took care to also include many buildings that were originally inaccessible, elements of the game present among the assets but eliminated from the final product, and many additional graphic effects. All this to offer a free-roaming experience that the basic game did not have.”
The above mods aren’t very well-known, but they do at least prove that there’s an audience for custom game modes where enemies are stripped from the experience. For more on Dark Souls 2, be sure to read about how it’s reportedly in development for the Nintendo Switch, and how a special Dark Souls Trilogy release is coming to both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.