I know most of the Bethesda RPGs have massive mod support, and there's games like Minecraft that have more mods than anyone can imagine. I would consider those games pretty playable in their vanilla states. Would you say there are any games that were "saved" by modding? Or that are still kept alive by thriving modding communities? What are some of your favorite mods?
Minecraft has a pretty solid vanilla experience but the depth of things you can do with mods is pretty insane. I’m playing a pack right now that basically turns it into a rogue like dungeon crawler.
Yeah, I love modpacks like Attack of the B-Team that add a ton of crazy technology and magic mods. Building massive pipe systems and assembly lines was always my favorite part of Minecraft
Terraria, is still an excellent game but the Mod loader makes it tons better with plenty of feature mods and quality of life plus it is available from steam so easy set up.
The original Doom for sure. I don't know if they count as mods since they're technically running on a modified version of the engine, but there is still a massive community making maps, mods, and even new game modes for it. Most recently the "MyHouse.wad" map for it has exploded in popularity. I've had so much fun over the years with doom mods, it's a treasure trove that most people have no idea exists.
There's even entire new games built on Doom. Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (stupid name, I know) is a fantastic free open source karting game with a decent community, and it's technically just a doom mod.
If anyone here is going to play a single doom mod to see what's up, I recommend Doom: The Golden Souls Remastered. It's good fun.
Man, I had so much fun in high school playing jDoom/Doomsday. They made it easy to set up multiplayer ad-hoc connections before there was wifi in my high school, and it ran on our potato laptops and still looked WAY better than the old DOS/Win95 versions.
I would say that MyHouse.Wad is the thing that inspired me to remember why I loved horror in the first place. It truly is a unique experience and I really love the inspiration with it. Totally convinced me to read the book it is heavily inspired by but really showed me that more people CAN do the Silent Hill thing of a strange place with strange logic and still draw people in.
The music, gameplay, ambience and aesthetics all mesh well and really give me a SH2/3 vibe while still feeling fresh.
Golden Souls is also a great mod and I'm so glad the Doom Mod community exists to bring all these creative ideas that people have to fruition.
Sidenote: It also inspired me to write a weird west setting for tabletops that I hope to release at some point.
Mount and Blade Warband! Base game is just ok, but mods like Diplomacy make it way better. Then you look at Prophecy of Pendor or Perisno and you've got basically an entirely new game with the same engine and it's awesome. I have hundreds of hours of Mount and Blade, and probably only like 25 of them are vanilla.
Definitely RimWorld. There's so many mods that improve the base game. From QoL mods that make you wonder why that isn't default in the vanilla game, to mods that complety overhaul the actual win condition. Just overall a really fun, replayability, frustrating game.
Use mods though. It'll make it better. Check out p-music mod while you're at it.
Fr. I usually run between 450 to 550 mods. Just recently I've been learning how to optimize the types of mods I have loaded for performance, because after some time in-game it chugs.
Yeah, i probably should do the same but, yk you take off one or two mods after hours of scouring your load order and put 5 or so in their place in a couple minutes.
Cities Skylines is 8 year old and released their final DLC just recently. I'm positive their very impressive mod community can keep that game alive for 8+ years more, if Cities Skylines 2 should fail to measure up.
A few off the top of my head: StarSector, ARMA, Monster Hunter (both World and Rise) and L4D(2). All of them are solid game already but modding adds so much value to an already good game.
Seconding Rimworld, but even without mods it is an amazing game with easily 1k+ hours of gametime. My favorite mods are QoL mods, or ones that add additional flavor to my colonists. If I could only pick a single mod to install, ever, it would be Common Sense.
Outside of Bethesda and Minecraft, the other one that comes to mind is The Sims. More of a niche following, but for those that love deleting pool ladders, mods are necessary for happiness, flavor, and adding actual challenge.
I'd say it is definitly not any TES game. While the engine and released tools give amazing modding capabilities, it is still fine without mods. Back in the day, I spend 800 euro on a videocard just to graphically mod Skyrim. And I have no regrets. But I just as well regularily play on the Switch curreny, as I van continue on the train. Similarily I still booted Oblivion on my PS3 a while back. I feel TES games improve with mods, but aren't tge worst without.
Now for a game that "nééds mods" rather "thas great modding capabilities" I would say the first that comes to mind for me is Mugen. That old fighting game game with 1 stage and 1 character out of the box, but thousands of community made characters, stages, and new character select screens. It caused some videos of the ridiculous (in the best way) fights in a time YT was mainly weird but fun.
All of the older Grand Theft Auto titles were saved by modding originally (ignoring the remade definitive edition trilogy of course) GTA III, GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas, and even GTA IV were all released for older hardware and much different technology at the time they were released, so there's some weirdness getting each of the games to run without issues or well on modern hardware and modern Windows. GTA IV specifically has a notoriously bad PC port that is at times hard to play without any mods or community made utilities.
All four games are substantially better with mods, from small things like restoring the original soundtracks for each of the games that have since been patched out due to licenses expiring, improving performance and stability, bug fixes, and even things like widescreen support. (Original GTA San Andreas specifically looks amazing with widescreen support and some other mods throw in)
My favorite mod currently is the GTA IV downgrader, found on GTAForums, it downgrades the version of your game, making it compatible with all of the most important utilities and mods made by the community.
I played vanilla Stardew Valley once, and now I'm on my second go around, and I've installed a bunch of qol mods so that I don't have to keep checking the wiki and my collections to see if I should keep or sell this item I got because I don't know if I need it for an achievement, and now I have a notification that it's an NPC's birthday and I can just check to see if I own or am carrying an item they have. It just makes the game less stressful for a completionist like me.
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