I rarely ever mod my games outside of fan patches to fix bugs but I’m looking for games that have some quality mods.
Project Reality for Battlefield 2 comes to mind. That’s a quality mod that’s now it’s own standalone game.
The Living Desert for New Vegas, because I could follow those guys around and see what they do forever. It’s so cool to give the game more organic interactions.
Plus, it interacts with Functional Post Game Ending. The base game feels downright inconsequential without those two installed.
The community behind TTW has helped to get a load of the mods working well together too. (so you can go through 3 with a load of the same mods in New Vegas. Another good one is Sweet 6 Shooter perk pack
Gonna keep it to things not already mentioned.
Big standalone fangame/total conversion:
- Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos, built off of Gothic 2. Was my GOTY when it came out, and I consider it better than anything the actual developers released since Gothic 2. I really dig the way it expands the original game’s systems, like apprenticeship. I have some complaints about it but it’s nothing major, and I overall greatly enjoyed my time with it, planning a new run when the big 2.0 update drops.
Mod packs:
- Morrowind Sharp, it’s like Viva New Vegas for Morrowind, I always use it as a base for my own setups, but it’s great as is for new players to get a patched, QoL enhanced and face-lifted vanilla-like experience.
Individual mods:
- Global Escalation for Squad - just a huge expansion-sized load of content
- Beautiful Cities of Morrowind, for bringing the game’s settlements closer to their concept art, implementing a lot of the new fan-made resources to make places more distinct and detailed while having a clear scope and keeping within vanilla-like territory
- Kenshi Kaizo, touches up and expands the existing content without bloating itself by filling the map with all sorts of new factions of varying quality and lore-adherence
- The Stardew Valley mod that adds a whole bunch of cat skins so I can have my irl cat in the game. And on the topic, SDV Expanded and Ridgeside Village when I just want more Stardew Valley stuff.
Requiem Overhaul for Skyrim completely revamps how the game is played, you need to mostly pick an archetype, casting spells with armor on institutes a huge penalty in mana cost etc unless you pick talents for it that aren’t available until late game, damage has been tuned way up for everyone so you have to ideally dodge most attacks and enemies drop loot that makes sense like their heart and some claws instead of finding 50 coins and a mace on a wolf.
Just installed it yesterday but the Multiverse mod for FTL basically turns it into a sequel and improves every aspect of the game. Go from 10 playable ships to around 100, have to actually consider choices instead of “I will blow everyone up for marginally more resources” and just an overall more Star Trek vibe with races having different factions etc.
casting spells with armor on institutes a huge penalty in mana cost etc
I like that, D&D mechanics are something I appreciate.
Yeah it brings it more in line with the earlier games, like you need fire magic or silver weapons to damage undead and the enemies/dungeons are level locked, so you can absolutely stumble into an area that is way beyond your character to handle. It’s been a while since I did a playthrough but I usually wouldn’t even try the first main quest dungeon until level 15-20 and had to run around killing bandits around Whiterun for a while.
The only caveat is that you will be getting your shit kicked in for a while and it’s very possible to get 1 shot by a 2h weapon, arrows do a ton of damage as well if you aren’t wearing heavy armor.
Requiem is great, but after playing with it for some time, I went back to Ordinator. I prefer the way it deals with unique abilities. Couple that with class mods (like that one that adds Shor’s Realm, where you pick bonuses and debuffs based on previous TES’ classes, and you have a robust system. It also gives Speech some use in combat, by giving you bard-ish spells and stuff. Was finally able to play my bardbarian that way.
too many to list.
modding is praxis
modding is praxis
True! I’ve used so many mods I would find it hard to choose lol
nobody mentioned Long War so i’m mentioning Long War. ever think 30-40hrs wasn’t enough for your XCom 2 campaign? ever thought it was kind of immersion breaking that these incredibly well equipped aliens couldn’t swat down a ridiculously high-profile smash-n-grab resistance op foolishly headquartered in a single hovercarrier? Long War turns your chaotic gunfight missions into guerilla insertion and extraction missions, broadens your conflict from a months-long to a years-long endeavor, makes it MUCH harder to eject the aliens from earth while simultaneously making it a much slower process for the aliens to complete their doomsday plan, really makes you undertake missions on a global scale as opposed to the one- or two-region conflict that the base game tends to become, extends the available troop roster while forcing you to actually use more than an elite core of troops (because you have way more bases to cover), extends the max troops on a mission from 6 to 12 while allowing the aliens to field a LOT more forces (think 40+ enemies in some situations), making for some really HUGE fights near the endgame. really a spectacular rebuild mod, two thumbs up.
another really good mod for Stellaris is the Star Trek: New Horizons mod, a total conversion mod that was so good paradox got the envy and put out Star Trek: Infinite, which is just their own stab at a total conversion mod for Stellaris except they expect you pay 30 bucks for it, plus DLCs. New Horizons very worth it, give it a shot if you like trek and already have Stellaris
Long War is the goat
DFhack probably. The best mods in my opinion are the lightweight ones that should be base game.
Enderal for Skyrim was real good
Fall from Heaven for Civilization 4 is a fantastic overhaul mod that turns it into a fantasy world with interesting factions and characters and mechanics.
Last time I got a copyright letter was for torrenting Civ 4 in 2015 without a VPN. The game came out in 2005.
Last time I got a copyright letter was for torrenting Civ 4 in 2015 without a VPN. The game came out in 2005.
I’ve never used a VPN before. Are there any that are free or open source?
Proton VPN is now free and open-source and (I believe) they just made it so you can use it without an account.
Sweet, thanks!
Under no circumstances should you use a proprietary VPN. Any VPN service worth using is just a nice front end to either OpenVPN or Wireguard. I personally use mullvad.
There are too many good ones. Enderal, the entire Viva New Vegas modding guide, Tale of Two Wastelands, it’s truly difficult to nail one down as my favorite. I play Bethesda games entitely modded these days and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Enderal was really good. Don’t think I ever finished the game because I lost my save, but there was a lot to that game and the map was designed really well (especially the capital city).
Agreed! Never finished it either, but I love passion projects.
Ramblelime on YouTube does mod reviews for Bethesda games and his videos are great, they are legitimate long-form analysis videos for an underappreciated genre.
Plus, he has given comrade vibes, he personally identified with a group of Communists in one Fallout mod.
Enderal
Nehrim always looked cool but I never got around to trying it. Total conversion mods look like something I would enjoy.
I love total conversions, even sloppily made ones like Dust and New California, or even overly ambitious ones with team and writing issues like The Frontier (obv excluding the sex pest shit). The amateurish charm is undeniable to me.
I really liked the RTS mods for the modern Fallout games. Building towns and collecting resources is my SHIT
Cool but I’m not much of an RTS head
Ooh what mods are those?
Real Time Settler is pretty fun to play with.
There’s a mod for New Vegas that adds item descriptions to any item that you can pick up and they made up lore for all of them and a lot of the unique items have jokes in their descriptions. It really adds a lot to the game
Deus Ex has a few great ones, Nihilum, 2027 & The Nameless Mod are all pretty good if you’re looking for more imsim content
Half-Life of course has a pretty massive modding community, and they’ve made a lot of good stuff over the years - Echoes and Field Intensity for the 1st game and Entropy Zero 2 for the 2nd are basically on the level of proper expansion packs. Minerva, Mission Improbable, Uncertainty Principle and Downfall (all for HL2) are somewhat shorter, but still really good. There’s also new campaigns for the Portal games, but I haven’t gotten around to playing those yet.
Mount & Blade has a ton of total conversions, for various historical periods and fantasy settings
Medieval 2 was already mentioned, so some other cool mods for it are The Italian Wars and 1648, for the pike-and-shot fans among you
The Blizzard RTS games have a ton of custom campaigns, although I haven’t played many yet. StarCraft 2 in particular has recently been having a ton of new campaigns made (although mostly in the format of overhauls of the existing campaigns, rather than being entirely new missions, but they can still be pretty extensive with the new units and mechanics)
MGS V has had a decent amount of modding done to it too - nothing too massive, since the modding tools are very limited, but Infinite Heaven allows you to tweak a whole bunch of stuff (and, in combination with some other mods, significantly lighten the grinding, which I probably wouldn’t have been able to stomach the game without), and allows people to add new custom side-ops
I like all of Drayano’s Pokemon ROM hacks. Essentially just puts all of the content you would want from a Pokemon game into it. All Pokemon catchable, more challenging trainers but not overwhelmingly so, side content the works. Storm Silver is probably the best one. If you’ve thought about replaying a Pokemon game, play the Drayano version of it
For me Pokémon Unbound is one of the best pokémons ever made, highly recommend. The story with chimeras is too much but the game itself is awesome.
Regarding Stellaris mods, Gigastructural Engineering & More gives you the ability to build absolutely super high sci-fi structures.
Other great Stellaris mods include Ancient Cache of Technologies and The Zenith of Fallen Empires. There are a ton of great Stellaris mods, really.
Im not a big fan of Hearts of Iron 4 but by god does the My Little Pony mod - Equestria at War slap hard.
Star Wars Empire at War is a pretty mid rts with great mods:
spoiler
EAWX is the biggest, excels in scripted mechanics that tilt the game more toward 4x. resource management, faction mechanics, planet loyalty, etc. it’s more barebones than other space strategy games due to modding limitations but they try to make the best of it. currently they’ve got a legends-canon mod following the battle of endor & a clone wars mod following the cartoon with legends add-ins. and soon they’ll release the first fully functional KOTOR-era mod, ever, it’s very exciting since like 3 other projects didn’t make it out of beta
AOTR is basically the setting of the original game but with its own brand of expanded complication and content. i really like their ground combat, they figured out making the infantry a modern and potent component of forces (integrated support weaponry, among other changes). it’s really hardcoretm though so not beginner friendly
Rise of The Mandalorians is a completely finished expansion-style mod that dropped in 2019, it fully replaced & revamped i think, everything in the game actually. it’s also exactly the style of the original game despite some important technical innovations these other mods ended up using. it’s a very cool comparison as a love letter to the game in full, instead of how these other mods try to wrestle the game into things it wasn’t really designed to do.
Medieval 2 Total War was the last total war game that’s workable without dev tools. modders have been trying to recreate the ability to change the map on later titles for 15 years lmao
spoiler
Third Age Total War you’ve already heard of it, everyone has. before we had Fantasy Warhammer sucking up all the development at the Creative Assembly, we had Third Age sucking up all the oxygen on the total war forums. it’s so old and was so extensive when it dropped that it’s easier to think of as a base-game in its own right, for which there are dozens of sub-mods. most major is probably Divide and Conquer, which makes the map a lot busier and exciting in all the corners. its also gone through so many developers that anyone who’s played it a long time probably has a couple of faction designs they miss (white-armored samurai variags
squeaky’s dorwinion 
) then there’s Last Alliance, which takes you to that 5 minute prologue bit at the beginning of Fellowship and goes pretty buck-wild with the faction designs that didn’t appear directly in that movie sequence—bronze age coded wildmen & rhun. it’s pretty fun but suffers from similar problems as og Third Age regarding boring parts of the map. there’s a few more big projects but i wouldn’t call them totally playable (Silmarillion, Reforged)Stainless Steel is a similar heavyweight, its last mainline release is still a good expanded version of the original game that doesn’t depart too far. but my god the submods & things built upon it. i don’t even think you can list them there’s so many. Bulat Steel is a major russian one that is semi-famous for extremely detailed units, they also helpfully install the entire original game for with it
Tsardoms is the most finished and historically accurate mod out there, i’m an enormous fan, it’s about the rise of the ottomans, can’t recommend it enough. Balkans, Anatolia, Italy
they even have 2 separate releases, one for experiencing the precipitous decline of the roman empire in the 1340s and one for dealing with an already gargantuan Ottoman empire from its peripheries in 1450sBroken Crescent is old and not too historically locked in, which is a shame because its the best mod with a focus of western asia, one copes with it by adding in units from other mods so it looks more up to date
some would say EBII is super historical and fun too and to that i say EB projects version of ‘fun’ is punishing players for having it
but fr it doesn’t run very good, its map is full of empty space like RTW and all the shit they put in to make it hardcore and historically accurate just makes it a slow slogas for Bethesda game mods, i’ve played a lot and certainly have opinions but i’m still on the bespoke build mindset so any ‘favorite’ or recommendation comes from a place of “for what” because i don’t think you need or should have mods for things you aren’t going to be doing. there’s much mods for Fallout 4’s settlements but if you aren’t going to be playing wasteland sim city there’s no point, yknow? every mod besides patches/bugfixes is optional. besides big naked booba ofc
