Fairly self explanatory, what are some of your favourite mods for video games?
These can either be total conversions, gameplay tweaks/additions or even just a simple reskin!
One of the mods I really enjoy is for the game “Star Trek Elite Force” called “Starbase 11” where you can explore a v detailed TOS 60s trek era starbase. It’s a lot of fun!
I don’t mess with a bunch of mods, a weakness of mine for sure.
But me and a friend have started the Dark Souls Seamless co-op mod. Yo, that junk WORKS so well, it stresses me out.
Slightly embarassed to admit I’m still far more entertained than I should be by Shrek Tank for Left 4 Dead 2
I’m going to have to look for this. I only played Elite Force for the first time a few years ago, and I loved the walkable Voyager you could just chill on. Having a TOS starbase sounds rad as hell!
Possibly one of the first two Stoneblock packs for Minecraft, the coziness of caving and the control of your experience of skyblock. That said, I currently am playing with Sky Factory 5 and just learned my colors again… Turns out my long-time skin of choice was almost entirely made with colors that I couldn’t see until I just about wrapped up the initial stages of the game, so it was amusing seeing myself in greyscale for a while.
Stepping out of minecraft though, I don’t mod too often. The most I generally go for tends to be a few QoL mods or music changing. Someone mentioned left 4 dead, and I always will stand by the original Trigun theme as the tank theme. It makes for a great alert and a great time check on how fast you’re killing off the tanks.
I think XCOM 2 Long War 2 might be my favorite tactics game ever. Certainly my favorite XCOM (guy who’s only played XCOM 2)
The game I have modded the most recently is Lethal Company. At first it started as a way to allow more than four players to play, but we quickly found a lot of QoL mods that we fell in love with. Beyond things like improved scanning, more emotes, and proper reward/penalty scaling for larger lobbies, here were some highlights:
The Skinwalkers Mod would capture snipits of you and your team’s voice and then play them from the monsters in the level to lure you in to a false sense of security. Back when the horror of this game was still fresh, this made things so much more intense. I can remember being isolated in the dark and hearing a quick sentence from someone I was trying to find, only to walk into the arms of a monster.
The Lethal Casino Mod is probably my favorite mod in any game ever. It adds a fully-functioning casino with roulette, black jack, slots, and a prize wheel to the planet where you sell your scrap. It adds gambling ontop of an already intense game where every dollar matters, and it has led to some of the hardest times I’ve ever laughed in a game.
The mod that made us essentially hit critical mass was the LethalMin Mod, which adds functional Pikmin into Lethal Company. You can pluck them out of the ground outside dungeons, find them wandering dungeons a la caves in Pikmin 2. You can find onions to bring them back into space with you, have them carry loot back, and have them (usually unsuccessfully) attack monsters. Considering that Lethal Company is essentially a reimagining of Pikmin from the perspective of a Pikmin, this works super well (and as a Pikmin fan it was crazy to see how well it was executed).
Around the time we got LethalMin, we stopped playing as much, and the game had become close to unrecognizable from when it had launched, but I’ve really loved the mod scene of Lethal Company.
I haven’t fucked with mods in quite a while, probably since I was deep into Kerbal Space Program, but when I think mods my mind goes even farther than that, to these awesome Max Payne Matrix mods. I’d spend hours just shooting those marble pillars, and the slow motion elevator door blast always made me so happy to see. I think it was a separate mod that let you play with Matrix kicks and wall runs in the main game too, and I’d run through the parking garage over and over.
my favourite mod is @AlienBob
someone made a total conversion mod for half life that was essentially the goldeneye multiplayer, which at the time was incredible. total conversion mods are magic in my eyes but to do this with the original half life when goldeneye was still quite the technical achievement was unbelievable.
of course counterstrike took off in popularity so it never really became as big as i thought it deserved but it was still a huge favourite for me.
Every few years I’ll spin up Skyrim and try a new Wabbajack modlist. I try not to read much about them in advance so I’ll get to experience the same sense of surprise and discovery when I encounter things in-game as I did when the game was new.
There’s some incredible work out there. Legacy of the Dragonborn is massive; it turns a building in Solitude into a museum for displaying all the artifacts you find, and adds a bunch of quests, NPCs and a new guild. A play with that mod installed will anchor the whole thing around the museum hub; it’s truly game-changing.
Shoutout to Inigo, too. Lore-friendly companion mod with 7000 voiced lines (has something unique to say in almost every location on the map). He’s one of many such companion mods that, in writing and characterisation, go far beyond any characters in the base game.
Morrowind is a nearly perfect game and unquestionably my favorite of all time, except that there are two mods that I believe it should never be played without:
A mod that tweaks how DLC is introduced to the player, particularly by postponing the Dark Brotherhood attacks. Unfortunately, the devs were a little too eager to get new players onboarded to the DLC and made some very questionable decisions there.
A mod that edits the textures of the various signposts throughout the world, to make them actually readable without having to get right up close and hover the mouse over them for a tooltip.
(Meanwhile, Oblivion requires several much larger mods to rework progression in order to remain playable past the first handful of hours. And although Skyrim is simply not salvageable no matter how many mods you install, an alternate start mod and another mod to make the player not the Dragonborn are essential to at least make it a little less bad.)
I don’t even know how to play skyrim without at least 15 mods making it more interesting
That being said, the memorable mods to me are still the goofy ones for left 4 dead. Particularly, in my game the tank was Donkey Kong throwing barrels, and whenever the charger would charge he screamed lines from Terry Crews Old Spice ads
I REALLY like Legacy of the Dragonborn for Skyrim, the game just gains so much when you turn it into a collectathon. It is also easilly compatibile with a lot of popular mods adding even more stuff to collect and dispaly in a museum. It gives me a reason to make my playthroughs with each character longer than I’d go for without it.
Playing Ark Survival Ascended on official servers is a horrible unplayable hell. Playing Ark Survival Ascended on unofficial servers with mods is one hell of a good time. My favorite mod of all time is maybe surprisingly something called visual storage. It’s a mod that gives you a bunch of storage assets for specific material types and the asset changes according to how many things you have. Like the wood pile grows with more wood etc. The mod also includes a system for wireless distribution of materials and wireless crafting and it’s SO comfortable. So nice. I would not play the game without it.
I played Final Fantasy Renaissance recently, technically it’s not a mod because it is a recreation of the first final fantasy on Unity for PC but it has the feel of a romhack and this is my favorite FF romhack i’ve ever played ! It’s based on the NES version but adds more jobs, new mechanics, extra content and quality-of-life options that you can setup as you want
I think “comedy mods“ are usually pretty dull but i have a lot of love for Difficulty Dependent Pete for Fallout: New Vegas, which just changes Easy Pete’s name to whichever difficulty you selected.
I think I have enough Friends of Fargoth around here to be comfortable saying: I actually really dislike Skyrim.
I don’t like that dungeon design was replaced by randomly generated slop, I don’t like that they removed navigation mechanics from a game about exploration, I don’t like that each NPC is loudly announcing your exploits like a PA system, I could go on. To this day I’ve never been able to actually finish the game.
BUT
A TC mod for Skyrim called Enderal is the greatest mod I’ve ever played. All that lost potential restored. Bespoke design, interesting new mechanics, a game unafaid to challenge the player in terms of both gameplay and narrative. All made by volunteers.
If you haven’t played it, definitely give it a try while it’s still playable.
Ohhhhhhh hell yea my special interest! I love mods, particularly for older (90’s, early 00’s) shooters. I’ll just talk about some Quake and Half-Life stuff for now so I don’t write a full book here.
I didn’t really play Quake until the 2021 re-release by Nightdive, but it’s become possibly my favorite FPS of all time now, in large part because of the amazing stuff the community has made. Arcane Dimensions is a huge map pack/mod that is frequently recommended for people just getting into Quake and there’s a good reason for that. Adds and changes tons of stuff but still feels “authentic” to Quake. Absolutely beautiful maps that push the engine to its limits. Highly recommend this one, though you’ll want to use a source port like Ironwail to run it as there are some issues here and there with playing it in the remaster. But Ironwail is great and super easy to set up, totally worth it.
There are also tons of great community map jams for Quake, where people submit maps based on a common theme and within a specified time frame. Last year’s Remix Jam is a pack of multiplayer maps from other games converted into singleplayer Quake maps, with stuff like Halo’s Bloodgulch, de_dust2 from Counter-Strike and even Rainbow Road from Mario Kart. I’m also a big fan of the Halloween Map Jams.
My personal favorite though is the Quake Brutalist Jam series, which has some of the coolest shit you’ll see in an fps. There’s a third one coming sometime soon that’s adding some new weapons and enemies too and it’s legit one of my most anticipated gaming related things at this point.
The big one for me is Half-Life 1, though. This game is like the exact perfect sweet spot for mods where people have made (and continue to make) a huge range of experiences from super amateur art pieces, all the way to fully realized new games. And that’s not even including all the multiplayer stuff!
My favorite old mod is almost certainly Peaces Like Us, a fairly normal HL singleplayer campaign for the most part that eventually becomes a surrealist “museum” for displaying the author’s anime girl drawings and architectural designs. This thing impacted me enough to spend hundreds of hours of my life making a video about it and the author’s other works, if that gives any indication as to how much I like it lol.
One of the best recent mods is Delta Particles, which you can actually just install on Steam like any other game, so there’s no real excuse not to check it out! Super interesting mod about a sort of “sister site” to Black Mesa; one that’s smaller and more drab, with slightly slower gameplay and reduced ammo compared to what you might expect. Has some survival horror vibes at times, but also has some cute and funny stuff here and there too, great game.
I could seriously go on forever about these but the last two I’ll mention are technically not complete yet.
Half-Life Signal Lost is extremely interesting in that it’s primarily based on Half-Life’s original demo campaign (Half-Life Uplink) and stuff from early versions of the game that didn’t make it into the full release. This is a hard one to describe but it basically feels like Half-Life from another dimension. This one has a demo and I highly recommend it if you have even a passing familiarity with Half-Life.
The same author behind Signal Lost is also making Starlight, which I am unbelievably excited for. Looks to be a wonderful mash-up of edgy horror violence amidst pink and purple, Evangelion-inspired landscapes. This is a pretty old trailer but man, it just looks so cool.
I will put forward my beloved Brawl Minus (https://brawlminus.net), the mod for Super Smash Bros. Brawl that “rebalances” it by making everyone equally overpowered. I also want to mention SSB Melee’s 20XX, not for anything in it (it’s just solid stuff I don’t have much to say on) but for how I can never get over that it’s made by the creator of Doki Doki Literature Club.
wow there is a lot of great stuff in there! I loved HL mods back in the day, think my favorite always was USS Darkstar, Sven Coop and absolutely Halfquake
Definitively need to check out a few of the ones you linked.
