Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



like I'm really interested in situations where a mod was either so fundamental or so extensive that it ended up being on some level the reason you wanted to play the game. Stuff like the big audience around Long War in xcom. It's such a fascinating idea to me, coming to a game for reasons that have less and less to do with the original experience the devs designed, and I'm curious about the.. spectrum of that that exists.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

I'm surprised and intrigued that you remember Equivalent Exchange fondly! I think it exists but Equivalent Exchange and its ilk top the list for "absolute worst game design in a minecraft mod" for my personal preferences, since it flattens all resources into a single fungible resource; instead of building a variety of farms to fit different needs you just build one huge farm for whatever produces the most resource points and exchange it for all the resources you need. To me, it's a mod that actively removes interesting gameplay from the game.

I guess the thing for me is that I'm far more interested in building a small set of highly efficient resource producers ala factorio than a million tiny resource farms and as such the combination of EE and industrialcraft or whatever it was called allowed me to focus on figuring out what combinations of resources were most valuable when leveraged as hard as possible and build gigantic, monstrous strip-mining operations for them and the like. I admit it "ends" things quicker than many other versions of minecraft but it lasted about as long as my attention span did so I call that a rousing success, lmao.

Any Bethesda game. Is that a mod? No. Do you know exactly what I mean? Yes.

To be fair I am kinder to vanilla Bethesda games than most. There's a degree to which I think the criticism they get is a bit snobby if anything. Though I don't want to go too hard on that there is PLENTY to critique there I just wish less of it was about the bugs and more about like, the race politics in Skyrim and such.

Also the Horizons Gate mods made by Prominence on the steam workshop. The base game if GREAT but the amount of mods they have put out makes it a real all timer for me!

minecraft tech mods, i got tired of vanilla before the game left beta but i've played off and on for thousands of hours since in modpacks

arma 3 ace, i've never played base arma at all

battletech (pick your poison, all three big packs ones are fantastic and huge)

star wars (tm) empire at war: forces of corruption, which i owned on disc back when and got a tcm for that i loved, and then one day it popped up on steam and i got another copy specifically so i could download mods from the workshop

hmmmm in general the mods are harder, depends on which part of the game you're having trouble with. if it's the combat eeeh you might have a bad time, if it's building mechs each mod has its own whole thing so that has to get (re)learned (uhh i think one of them uses the default builder but just adds more and the other two have their own thing), but if you're struggling with the metagame and running out of money i'd just crank up the rewards, i don't find managing that to be interesting so i just have them vomit cash. if you're interested in the like mercenary company balancing cash part you'd have to find somebody who's actually good at the game lolol

Oh boy, "takes a deep breath"
So there's the original Hyrule total war with over 8 factions, each with their own individual units, buildings, hero units, and play styles. It also includes single player missions with hand crafted cutscenes and a LOT of fanfiction lore. https://www.moddb.com/mods/hyrule-total-war

The origional creator stopped working on it to instead convert it into Hyrule Conquest where he tried to do the same thing, but instead of modding Medieval 2: Total War, he modded 0 A.D, an open source 100% free strategy game. https://www.moddb.com/mods/hyrule-conquest

Your cohost post got me curious about the current state of the mods, and I discovered the following while falling down the rabbit hole:
Combined, the dude has been working on this for 20 years. Two months ago, he came out and said "I don't like Legend of Zelda anymore and I don't like the fandom so I'm going to stop and focus on the more fulfilling Freespace 2 mod for Star Fox.

HOWEVER, there are fans who have continued development of the original Medieval 2: Total War mod, doing not only bug fixing, but also expanding it. This was updated as recently as 3 months ago https://www.moddb.com/mods/hyrule-total-war-v-38-mr-nygrens-submod

not quite such an extreme example, but if there's a mod for any game that adds the taunts from dredmor and Death By a Thousand Taunts in any way shape or form, i desperately need it, as well as game over screen replacements

aside from how funny it was in dredmor, it kind of made me realize how much i enjoy it when a game trash talks me! it makes harsh and punishing games feel more like a friendly rivalry instead of a CBT session.

it also makes an actual genuine impact on my gameplay for a game over screen to be a playful or nonsensical insult instead of just "YOU DIED" or some variant

despite being such minor changes, it is often the difference between me bouncing off of a roguelike or sticking to it and clocking in 1500~ hours

idk if it counts, but Yet Another MechLab for mechwarrior 5 strictly because it overhauls the mechlab into the one from mechwarrior online/HBS battletech (the basegame mechlab is a massive downgrade especially considering it's coming from the same company that made mechwarrior online lmao)

I have an answer that literally goes two layers. There was a mod for Unreal Tournament called Tactical Ops that I played the shit out of, and apparently did well enough it got its own standalone retail release. But even on top of that, most of my time playing TacOps wasn't the vanilla mod itself, but with an additional UT bullet-time mutator someone made compatible with TacOps. I put hundreds of hours into that game easily.

I was tempted to answer Rimworld, but it's not 1 mod, it's a bunch of them, which is to be expected for that game!
But the big one that actual fits your question is Campfire Checkpoint for Caves of Qud. (Allows you to save at any campfire instead of just in towns).

personally, i think mostly just long war, unless you count like custom games in warcraft 3? there was no one specific custom game that i played it for, but i played that game pretty much exclusively for the custom games

The X-Com Files for the original X-Com. It multiplies the amount of content by 10 (at least) and brings back the starting date by several years, turning the early game into an X-Files and Men in Black inspired game where you haul a bunch of agents in suits around in a panel van to hunt down cryptids and investigate UFO cults, before the full scale invasion happens and the vanilla X-Com scenario is layered on top of that. It absolutely rules.

ok, this is a bit of a weird get, but someone already mentioned Create. in Fallout: New Vegas there's a mod that adds a camper van that you can use as player housing. It's got all the little things you need in a very tight space, a fold out bed, very cozy. You can move it between the main locations of the game by spending flamer fuel. Combine that with turning off fast travel and playing in hardcore mode, that is the best way to play F:NV imo.