this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
54 points (100.0% liked)

Gaming

30536 readers
142 users here now

From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.

See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait, you're saying you basically coined the term "mods?" That's epic!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I could see this being one of those words that's coined by multiple people in different places at once, since it's an intuitive shortening of modifications, but even if so, wow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Entirely plausible. My perspective is naturally limited to just what I know.

load more comments (3 replies)