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?
Interesting how we went from mods being called modpacks to being included in modpacks. I’d say Minecraft is the biggest example of modpacks somewhat overshadowing the mods contained within them. Few modded minecraft players play with just one mod at a time, like you would have back in the Civ days. For the longest time, mod complications (usually known as modpacks, but sometimes as modmods, like MiscMods for Europa Universalis 3) were the exception to the rule.
Looking at Paradox games, the build-in mod launchers originally only supported playing with one mod at a time. This changed around the Victoria 2 HoD days, which supported loading multiple mods at once. You look at Darkest Hour, EU3, and Vanilla Victoria 2, and they only supported loading one mod at a time (ignoring that the Vanilla Victoria 2 mod launcher didn’t actually work, but that’s neither here nor there.) Mods have really come a long way. I’ve seen some incredibly ambitious ones, like total conversion mods trying to convert March of the Eagles into a Cold War game and Imperator Rome into a alternate Victoria sequel. Neat stuff, but time will tell if we see results.