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?
Beat Saber. It wasn’t saved by mods, but almost any serious player will have a number of them installed to dramatically improve the experience. #beatSaber
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.
Fallout New Vegas for sure, although many of the issues were fixed by the devs over the lifespan of the game. Mods are pretty much vital to run that game properly, however. Many issues with the engine and many core bugs have been fixed by the community, and it’s honestly something where once you play with them fixed, it’s hard to go back
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.
minecraft for sure
I would say the binding of Isaac. The game is amazing but I now really struggle to pay without some quality of life mods
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!
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.
Civ 4 had a great modded scene. The Colonization remake/spinoff in particular has a must-have mod in the way of The Authentic Colonization. The main game, though, had loads and loads of incredible mods. My personal favorite was the Ryse series of mods, which tried to more accurately model the rise and fall of civilizations via various mechanics. I have a lot of hours in the random map variant of it, Ryse Rand.
Modding as we know it today really started with Civ (Civ II, to be precise). There were several sites sharing different mods back then. I had one of the most popular ones for a while, to the point where MicroProse asked to post a link on the official site. The mods were ZIP files with instructions, and nobody had come up with a name for them. I started referring to them as “modpacks”, and that stuck. Eventually that was shortened to just “mods”. True story!
(FYI you can see here where MicroProse put links to other websites. Mine was listed in 1997, where the wayback machine doesn’t have entries.)
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.
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 😅.
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.
original Doom has a lot of great mods for it
Coming up on 30 years!
Mass Effect: Andromeda
I had no idea the game had a modding scene. What sorta mods are out there, and what would you recommend?
I also had no idea, since mods for prior games had basically nothing, but wow, the Nexus page has a lot.
not modding much, but what people do with skyrim is amazing
Skyrim vr definitely needs mods to make it worth playing though, the base game is so barebones it’s not immersive in the slightest.
they absolutely did not tailor it to VR unfortunately ):
