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 for sure
Half of the problem IMO is Java edition runs so poorly mods are necessary to play the game most of the time. And there’s so many quality of life mods that should be base game but Mojang just doesn’t seem to care about.
I don’t think anything comes close, Minecraft can be several different types of open world games just based of the modpack
deleted by creator
The ~700 mods in my current playthrough (and ~700 more inactive) strongly upvote this post.
One of the best goddamn games of all time, only made continuously better by folks like Owlchemist, Oskar and the Vanilla Expanded team, jptrrs … so much amazing work went into that community.
I love vanilla Terraria and Factorio but there are really fun mods out there that expand those games and don’t let me play anything else!
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.
Aside from the obvious minecraft… Arguably I’d say Factorio. They have a robust, feature-rich modding API built into the game that allows for relatively easy, wide ranging game play mods to be made very stable, and the number of mods has exploded as a result. The base game is amazing, but mods exist that quite literally triple the amount of game play and in some cases completely overhaul it into a totally new game. The support is amazing, and I wish more game companies could operate as efficiently as Wube does.
Definitely Minecraft, you can turn it into a completely different game
I know I’m a minority in this, but I unironically prefer vanilla Minecraft, it’s simple in a good way 😅.
TES3MP was an amazing experience for Morrowind.
I already answered differently, but I want to put out that the STALKER fandom is held together by mods. There are everything from almost invisible bug mods to an entire standalone mod. STALKER is one of those franchises where modding just seems like such a natural fit to round out the world and it’s amazing how the vast majority of mods intend to support the tone of the game rather than just adding in the whims of the mod maker.
Minecraft is an obvious answer of course, but there are some other really good games out there that get made much better with mods. Some of my favourite examples of this would be Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) with the cool hero mods and bot mods, and then Ghost Recon Wildlands with the amazing First-Person mod.
Late to this post but to me it’s Minecraft. It has such an insane amount of replayability and can be turned into a totally different game depending on the mods and whatnot.
For sure, playing through Create: Astral with my partner atm. So many good modpacks out there that completely change the game
Thanks to you I discovered this modpack. It seems amazing!
Glad to hear it, I love the more mechanical approach to automation that Create has. Just built our first windmill
I don’t know if improving is the right word, but the amount of transformative mods older games like Doom, Half-Life or Unreal Tournament (and not just shooters ofc) had, was wild.
Team Fortress started as a Quake mod, Counter-Strike as a HL mod, DotA as a Warcraft 3 mod.
Nearly all of the biggest competitive multiplayer/esports genres of today started as mods.
- CS (half-life mod) -> Competitive tactical shooters (CS:GO, Valorant)
- Dota (War3 mod) -> MOBAs (Dota 2, LoL, Smite)
- Team Fortress (Quake mod) -> Hero Shooters (TF2, Overwatch)
- DayZ (Arma 2 mod) -> Survival FPS (Rust, Ark)
- Battle Royal Mods (like Hunger Games for Minecraft or BR for Arma 2) -> Battle Royal (Fortnite, PUBG)
Why?
Multiplayer games require other players! Mods generally come with a ‘built-in’ playerbase and a very low barrier for entry. The vast majority of innovation in the multiplayer space comes from mods, since trying something new as a commercial title has a huge risk of never establishing a big enough playerbase and just dying out before anyone tries it.
Doom 1 and 2 would be a lot less interesting without mods, some of which change the game rather dramatically.
- Project Brutality turns it into a modern-ish shooter.
- Guncaster replaces the usual protagonist with a spell-casting, oversized-pistol-slinging dragon.
- DemonSteele replaces the protagonist with an anime character.
- My House and City of the Damned: Apocalypse turn it into a horror game.
Without mods, these games would have just been historical footnotes, not something a significant number of people still play.
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.
Skyrim
That’s a Bethesda game. (Just fyi since OP said they already know about Bethesda games)
RimWorld. It’s amazing what people can do from QOL to whole new factions or weapons. Amazing and the dev is very helpful during updates to try and not break mod support. Just blown away.
Hell there are multiple mods that add whole new planets. I was so surprised that was even possible considering it seems like the game was made to only be able to handle one.
