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?

  • PenguinCoder@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • mdwhite999@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I would say the binding of Isaac. The game is amazing but I now really struggle to pay without some quality of life mods

  • sionainn@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Cambionn@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      I know I’m a minority in this, but I unironically prefer vanilla Minecraft, it’s simple in a good way 😅.

    • dethmasta@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Skyrim vr definitely needs mods to make it worth playing though, the base game is so barebones it’s not immersive in the slightest.

  • Phantom_Engineer@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • vraylle@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.)

  • Whar@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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!

    • joonazan@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Factorio has the best modding API and user experience out there.

      Some mods are not possible due to no native code mods but the devs add things to the modding API for every reasonable request.