I’ve spent the last three days going through some of the craziest mod videos I’ve ever seen. Modders take decompiled games with Claude and mix them with other games. As the week went on, more and more clips of these mods were posted to X/Twitter.
Someone created a mashup of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: World at War; another handset Escape from Tarkov with Skyrim. There is even one who takes the Insomniac one Spider-Man and combines him with Batman Arkham Citywhere the player can swing into Batman territory.
These mods are everywhere online right now, although thankfully they haven’t yet been filtered onto modding sites like Nexus Mods. But, with the volume of these mods and the accessibility of Opus 5.5, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the doors are completely knocked down. And if that happens, it could completely change the face of the modding scene.
Why now?
Claude Opus 5.5 launched last week, promising cheaper tokens and more efficient code work. I’m sure Anthropic was intended to be used by professionals, but players have used it to create some of the weirdest mods I’ve ever seen.
Opus is a model that can power AI agents, which can be deployed to create entire games, from the engine to the art and enemy behavior. Brendan Jowett has a great video on YouTube of the model in action: it develops small slices of video games and compares them directly with the same tasks from the OpenAI Astra 6 model. Although the results of both are far from what one would expect from a full game, Claude’s new model has clearly come a long way.
The problem with the examples in Jowett’s video is that while the models are good at piecing together disparate parts of a game, the enemy AI (lol) and art assets are lackluster, to say the least. In one installment, a space combat simulation, the space fighter flies at a diagonal angle, while moving in a straight line forward and firing. In another installment, enemies completely ignore the player character.
As good as Claude Opus 5.5 appears to be, it’s still light years away from developing something like a true mashup of Minecraft and Elden Ring from scratch. But the model does not necessarily have to start from scratch.
The big driving force behind a lot of these mods is decompilation, where people point Opus at a game and let the agent break it down to its source code (here’s a practical blog if you really want to get into the weeds). Earlier today we covered Halo: Combat Evolved being decompiled and ported to run natively in a browser. Once this step is complete, it takes little effort to take this source code and integrate huge swathes of games into other games as mods, and with very little user input.
Add in relatively affordable tokens, and it should come as no surprise that the generally pro-AI users of X/Twitter have gone wild with this, creating hundreds of mashups. And it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down any time soon; What started as a weird video my boss sent me on Tuesday has now evolved to the point where I can’t even open X/Twitter without seeing a deluge of these mods.
Piracy?
The obvious problem with all of this is that these models break open games developed by real people, obtain the source code, and then mix the elements without consideration or permission from the original developers. This isn’t particularly new – the modding scene is definitely no stranger to mashups, all of Thomas the Tank Engine’s mods are proof of that. However, this trend could expand into new territories, thanks to decompilation.
This could be another reason why none of these mods were found on any distribution platform. Nexus Mods does not outright prohibit AI-generated content, but it does not allow users to use AI tools to upload content for which they do not have the rights.
In a blog post from 2023, Nexus outlined its rules regarding AI-generated content. The policy states: “In order to avoid any issues with your mods, we encourage you to avoid using these tools unless you have explicit permission to use all assets. This is especially true for AI-generated voice acting, but also covers images, models, code, and anything else you can create with this technology.”
Each of these passthrough mods uses images, models, and code that the people generating them do not have the rights to. But it’s only a matter of time before a platform holder allows these mods to be hosted, and I’m sure a massive legal battle will take place immediately afterward.
The Modding community hates it
Long before all those Claude-written mod videos started popping up online, people had been creating mods by hand for years, usually out of pure love for the game. So it shouldn’t be surprising that many mod authors aren’t fans of the phenomenon.
Mod authors have expressed their frustration on X/Twitter over what is happening. “I modify games and I’m not afraid to use AI to do it. I hate this bullshit ‘trend’. Pure stupidity, there’s nothing creative about it”, kran27_ job. “AI has a lot of potential in the modding world, but the biggest buzz is these crappy jingling buttons.”
Kran was not alone, with discounted modder ready to walk off the stage saying, “Man, I’m really disappointed. If this becomes the permanent state of modding, this might be my last project. I don’t want to be involved in an AI garbage factory.”
I can’t escape the feeling that most of these mashups are born from people simply playing with a new AI model and seeing what will happen, and I hope this strange trend disappears soon. Modding is one of the best aspects of PC gaming, and there is a lot of amazing content that people create simply because they love a game. After all, some of the best games started as mods, and without them we would never have games like Half-Life or League of Legends.
I hope this is just a trend, rather than a sign of where the modding scene is heading. Luckily, since these mods seemingly only exist to drive engagement on Twitter (at least so far), you don’t have to worry too much about them if you just want to start a new modded version of The Witcher 3 Remastered. If anything, it just means that if you want to avoid AI content, you need to pay even more attention to who you get your mods from.
Jackie Thomas is the senior technical editor at IGN and the queen of PC components. She’s been covering gaming hardware for over a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
Gn tech
