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?
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 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.
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
minecraft for sure
I don’t think anything comes close, Minecraft can be several different types of open world games just based of the modpack
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!
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.
TES3MP was an amazing experience for Morrowind.
Another vote for RimWorld, though I want to point out that the game is perfectly playable without mods, too. It is not uncommon to see someone with hundreds of mods, but the vanilla game is just as fun. People have logged thousands of hours without mods.
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.
Rimworld. The Vanilla Expanded mods alone have more content than the base game + all the DLCs
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does Tabletop Simulator count? For board game people, mods are the whole point.
Love playing settlers of Catan in TTS. Hard to find a board sometimes though
