In the earliest days of Final Fantasy XI, you couldn’t alt-tab without crashing the game. Thus, the Windower program, a little add-on designed to force the game to allow alt-tabbing like basically anything else in the world. The add-on was also disallowed, but the developers eventually adopted a “don’t be an idiot” approach to it; you have native window support now, but if you still want to use it for its other functionality, just don’t shout about it in-game and you’ll probably be fine.
Of course, it’s hardly the only unofficial modification that affects a game’s functionality; multiboxing in World of Warcraft, various map add-ons for City of Heroes, the DPS trackers for Final Fantasy XIV. Every game has stuff that’s not technically allowed, but isn’t any sort of cheating tool; it’s just there to improve your life as a player. So have you ever run unauthorized MMO modifications? Not cheating tools, those are a different story, just mods that alter the functionality of your chosen games?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
