Yeah, I didn’t want to say ass in the title. Sue me. I’m sure you’ve seen Tycho over at Penny Arcade rant on the modding in the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 3. Basically, he thinks it’s crap that you need a USB flash drive (or other memory card type) to copy the mods from your PC to the PS3. Personally, I could care less about this. Who doesn’t own a PC and some sort of memory card these days? It’s not that big a step. It’s not completely necessary either. If you try to play online with someone using a mod, it will be automatically downloaded to your machine.

What bugs me is that you need to copy one mod at a time via your USB drive. So in my case right now, I had to make 5 trips from my computer to my PS3, loading one mod each time, then starting over. There is only one file that is used on the USB key to transfer the mods and that file can only contain one mod at a time. I think Epic REALLY needs to come up with a better way of doing this. Yes, we all love mods. Yes, we love user created content. Yes, we know it’s a totally new concept to console gaming. But we need a much more streamlined way of getting them. Direct downloads from the PS3’s Internet Browser would be ideal, but allowing multiple mods to be copied over at once on a USB drive would work perfectly as well. And with the Unreal Editor update coming very soon, the amount of mods available on the PS3 is going to increase exponentially. Imagine wanting 25 mods, but needing to make 25 trips with your USB key. I think I’ll pass.

This has nothing to do with the PS3 being good or bad, so it shouldn’t turn into a flame fest. This is Epic’s implementation of mods for the game on PS3. It’s the first time it’s been done, so there are growing pains involved. Just pointing out some optimizations that need to happen sooner rather than later for mods to become more mainstream on consoles.

That’s my 2 cents. What do you think?