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?
FTL has complete overhaul mods and expansions that can make it seem new even now.
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 😅.
I love minecraft mods so much. I play BetterMC now which is essentially a Vanilla+ mod pack but even though it doesn’t turn minecraft into a different game I love how it makes the game feel less repetitive
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.
Lol I run about 100ish depending, just mostly QoL and some additional control aspects. More gear etc.
I’m in the same bag, I should have ~100 mods. It still feels vanilla - RimWorld, Minecraft, and Factorio feel really weird in this aspect.
X Com2 has amazing mods. Most of the content available for Battletech is from mods by like 2 orders of magnitude.
I won’t even play beat saber without the mods. Half Life Alex has full games released in the engine as mods too!
Oh yes Beat Saber absolutely needs mods, my favorite custom songs won’t even work without them. It just keeps fricking breaking every time Beat Saber updates and I can’t play any good songs anymore.
At least a downgrade is relatively easy. On a related note I’m looking forward to pistol whips official mod support to drop this summer. I hope it brings a lot of new maps!
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 would say the binding of Isaac. The game is amazing but I now really struggle to pay without some quality of life 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
ARK: Survival Evolved. There are no corner pieces for sloped roofs without mods… I like a good sloped roof, and a building that’s not just a square/a-frame.
Once I tried S+, I could never go back to vanilla. QoL mods became the standard for me.
Stardew Valley is so much better with mods. Less grinding, more fun. I also like the mods for Skyrim and Minetest a FOSS Minecraft-like game.
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Wow I remember trying minetest in 2010. I’m glad to see how good it looks today. I’m going to give it another try.
Check out MineClone2 and Super Duck Hydroplane
NPC Map Locations for Stardew Valley is one of my must haves.
also try out Stardew Valley Expanded, Visible Fish and Chests Anywhere. its great 👍
There’s a ton!
Project Zomboid mods are fantastic. There are insane amounts of them, and they add so much to the game.
Games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 become essentially infinitely replayable with mods. There’s a tool called Wabbajack that essentially makes “modpacks” a thing for these games (and several others), and it’s amazing. You can install and configure hundreds of mods in like 30 mins.
One of my personal favorite mods was “Hyrule Conquest” for 0 A.D., which is a complete overhaul of the game that turns it into a deep, lore-friendly Zelda RTS. It’s still being worked on and it’s still super high quality. The dev made some major changes to the play style that a lot of people love, but I personally strongly preferred the old style. It was more like Age of Empires before, but now it’s more like Battle for Middle Earth and I don’t care for it. If that’s a selling point for you, it’s very much still a great mod with a lot of love and passion put into it.
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.
Farming Simulator 22 and Snow Runner are both just absolutely different games when you add mods. The community is pretty active and the mod browser is built right into the menu, even on consoles. You can literally make your own game using mods. Without them, it could grow tiring after a while.
Factorio all the way. Get bored of finishing the game, or crafting the perfect megabases? Prepare for mods that can take 1000s of hours to finish. Perfection.
As always, the factory must grow.
I got 500 hours in Factorio before tying mods, and over 2000 since (1000+ in an SE run alone). It’s been a year or so, maybe time to start up another game…
It is absolutely time to start up another game. After all, the factory must grow.
That having been said, having a lot of fun trying to optimise everything. Still fairly new to the game myself (~200 hours) but it’s been a blast. It’s so addictive.
One of the great things about Factorio is the ability to pick and choose parts of a lot of modpacks. After first encountering Bob’s adjustable inserters on a B+A playthrough, I can’t play without them, and they work great without the rest of the Bob’s pack.
I’m going to have to look that one up; been scared to mix and match from different modpacks without understanding the modpack, but might need to do just that. That having been said, I am running an absolute ton of mods, mostly convenience.
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.
I really needed mods for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or I would have probably never finished the main story.
I had to get the mods that would autoloot and give unlimited inventory space, otherwise I would have minmaxed the game to tediousness by spamming pick-up and sorting through loot to keep the weight limit.
After getting the mods I could just focus on the story and gameplay without worrying if I’d maximised all my looting.
I second this. I first played the game way after it’s first release, so added some of the graphics mods to the game and some QOL ones as well. Made the whole experience better tbh, even though the game is great anyway
Wow, I never thought of this. I couldn’t ever get really into W3, despite loving the setting/story/basic gameplay. Also loved the Netflix series. But mods might make me enjoy it.
Yeah, getting some cheat mods made Witcher 1 and 2 much more playable. The inventory UI in the second game was from the dark ages of Xbox 360 UI design so having infinite inventory space allowed me to ignore it. I assume it’ll be the same type of deal with the third game once I finally get around to it.
Definitely Witcher 1 needed the mods. I pretty much got this genie mod that awarded endgame armor and weapons and stats , so I slapped my way through the story. Otherwise it was this strange rhythm game to slog through. 2 was a much needed upgrade and all I did was farm nekkers in a cave in the early chapters to lessen the load later on.
The genie mod is great. Would recommend.
Genie mod that provided the teleportation scrolls cut down on so much backtracking in Witcher 1.
