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?
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.