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Comment by bagels | Hacker News Reader

Why can't you play BeatSaber without mods?

You can - it's just far less fun than BeatSaber with mods. The biggest improvement is from being able to select from the community list of songs that are available that may better suit your taste than the songs that come built in. It's a rhythm game so using a rhythm you like makes it much more fun.

Besides song choice, the community also produces higher quality charts than the official ones, and offers difficulty that scales much higher.

Lunatics like these can't be sated by the official songs: https://youtu.be/CKwX349aV98 https://youtu.be/sJQSy3KG-oQ?t=33

That first chart averages 12 notes per second for 5 straight minutes and the player only missed a single note.

Scaling even higher?? Lol I can't even play on medium difficulty on the built-in ones. I don't know how people keep up with the high tracks.

I assume there are sort of natural skill ceilings but if you practice with more difficult scenarios and really push yourself you'd be amazed at what you can do. I've got an essential tremor[1] and I usually play on Expert+ for the vanilla tracks which is usually do-able for me.

1. On that note - my tremor does hurt me here too but unlike twitch shooters (which I loved before my tremor got bad) and things like guitar hero (which require comparatively precise movement) beat saber is usually pretty forgiving about precision of placement and angles - so long as your rhythm is correct you can go pretty far with it.

Mind that "mods" includes "custom tracks".

OG BeatSaber comes with a small-ish selection of tracks, most of them obscure and not generally known. Good or bad, they get boring quickly. Modding lets you expand to arbitrary number of tracks, including pretty much all the ones you like. It's what makes it fun and worth returning to. Not being able to add your own music, makes BeatSaber not worth the sticker price (much less if you're getting Oculus just to play it).

Also note that people were used to this capability, because before BeatSaber became a poster child for Oculus, it was streamed to other headsets from PC, where adding custom tracks was tacitly allowed.

Lack of any songs I actually care about, and the actual note mapping from the devs has been pretty bad up until recently. The modding community has had them beat for ages. Without mods the game would be a breif curiosity before I got bored with the provided songs, most of which don't suit my taste.

The out of the box track selection is quite weak. The game depends on community made tracks to make it playable in the long term.

because they want to use songs they didn't pay for

How do you know that??

No, that's basically correct. Mods are primarily for downloading community-made tracks/maps for songs not included with the game. There are also officially licensed DLC song packs, but they're quite pricy and still only provide access to a limited selection of tracks.

That's literally what the mods do :).

There's moral discussions to be had I'm sure, but the purpose of the beat sabre mods is pretty factual :).

Not quite; piracy of the paid DLC is one thing, but modding is to add songs (which should be read as, entire Beatsaber custom-made tracks) that otherwise are not available through any other avenues.

More likely because they want to use songs that aren't offered except by modding.

If I paid for the song (even somewhere else, even on a subscription like spotify/apple music), I should be able to dance/move to it. I don't think one should have to re-buy every song in a videogame. Especially when the work is done for free to put in the dance moves by modders.

You don't pay for the song when you pay for streaming services, you pay to stream it. You have no rights beyond streaming the song.

There are lots songs for which it is fully legal to listen to without paying for. Many people release songs for people to listen to for free!

This is especially true within the rhythm game community, for which many fans simply like to make rhythm songs and for people to play them.

That is absolutely a valid usecase that should be allowed.

if i want to play a map of alkatraz, which is a song i own, i cannot do so without modding because beatsaber will never release demondice tracks

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