I don’t know if time has been kind or not, but when I discovered Fall from Heaven II for Civilization VI I never launched the base game again.
I think I haven’t played a single skirmish round of Company of Heroes 1 without the Blitzkrieg mod in the past 15 years.
Terraria - Calamity.
Expands the game to 2.5x the content.
Absolutely amazing, would recommend buying Terraria just to play it.
Sky UI. Not the same game without it.
So mandatory that mentally I don’t even consider it a mod.
Enderal, a whole new game built ontop of Skyrim. Offers an entirely different setting, map, class system, enemies, spells, and has an actual story that you will not soon forget.
Just started that recently, very good so far.
Garry’s Mod
It’s hard to think of any one mod that got remotely close to changing a game the way GMod did for HL2/CS:S/source engine titles. I spent thousands of hours in GMod as a kid, it added infinite teplaya ility to the HL2 campaign, forums like Facepunch and PHWOnline became my second home. There was a ton of content to be loaded from there and FPSBanana, the thriving webcomic scene was truly special.
The mod that got me into modding still has a special place in my heart. It was the Shockwave mod for C&C Generals. Shockwave absolutely could have been vanilla if EA deigned to finish the Zero Hour expansion. It was just pure polished perfection for that game.
Better Than Wolves it’s a minecraft overhaul that was started by the veteran game designer FlowerChild who was pissed at Mojang that they are adding useless features that don’t improve gameplay loop (wolves being the breaking point). So he spent many years making Minecraft challenging survival and interesting tech game.
While I haven’t beaten the dragon once in that game (not many people have) it still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment.
Archolos, and it’s not even close. This is one of the best gaming experiences i’ve had in years
Screw Gothic 3 and 4, this is the real sequel us Gothic fans have been waiting for! A genuine delight to play through, and the Polish voice acting was just as incredible as it was in Gothic 1 and 2, despite being a fan project! Waiting patiently for the Mod of the Decade edition to re-play it again and try out all the new things they add (very excited for the teased mage path!)
There are so many… I’ll just go with a couple
Fallout 3 Wanderers Edition always comes to mind for making that game so much better to play and more stable than the base game. I wouldn’t replay FO3 any other way
Elden Ring Seamless Co-op is what ER co-op should have been to begin with. God it’s so good I put another couple hundred hours in to replay every inch of ER+DLC with a friend.
I’ve never been one to mod games, I’m pretty vanilla when it comes to gaming. Play the base game and thats it. Rarely do i even try any dlc. With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed Frelancer discovery back in the day. It is a freelancer multilayer mod that brought a lot more content and enabled multi player once the official servers were gone.
STALKER Anomaly with GAMMA on top of course.
I’d have to say thanks to SMAPI and Content Patcher for enabling so many Stardew Valley mods in the first place.
Also, Qwinn’s Ultimate DAO Fixpack for allowing me to have a mostly bug-free experience playing Dragon Age: Origins. Mostly.
Most impressive:
Assetto Corsa Custom Shaders Patch / Content Manager
Tiniest mod which solves biggest frustration:
Heroes of Hammerwatch rejoin mod
Yep. My answer is “CSP/Content Manager” then “every other Assetto Corsa mod.” (Also worth noting Shutoko Revival Project.)
Assert Corsa goes from an ok game without csp/content manager to an amazing game with them.
Gigastructural Engineering for Stellaris… the megastructures included in the game and DLC are great, but they lack a certain insanity. Plus the mod allows you to terraform any planet (even gas giants).
