stalker anomaly, though i’m not sure if it qualifies as a mod or its own game.
Caveat, I don’t play a ton of modded games, but Dwarf Therapist for Dwarf Fortress is such a good mod. Makes the game playable, lol.
Young me (and current me too) was always blown away by the Game Genie on the NES. Simple piece of tech that could do so much with so many games.
Fall from Heaven II. It’s a fantasy themed overhaul mod for Civ IV. Has extraordinarily deep lore and unique game mechanics. I’ve never actually played the unmodded version of Civ IV. I only bought the game to play this mod.
On the Switch 1(or emulated), a Mario kart standalone mod call CTGP.
It’s basically all the maps from all the MarioKarts and even a bunch of fan made maps on 1 game.
Super Mario 64 that added lugi as co-op
Fallout UK
Does pokemon infinite count?
Even without the gimmick of merging any 2 mons to create new ones with some procedurally generated art and thousands of community created ones; it’s the best Pokemon game since black/white 2 in story and hg/ss in scope.
Cursed Halo.
I believe it was a passion project by one guy that took 5 or 10 years but holy shit it’s a masterpiece.
Counter Strike and Team Fortress. Both were Half Life mods when they started.
We played Quake World Team Fortress on the high school LAN. It blew my mind.
As well as DOTA (for Warcraft 3) and PUBG (Arma 2/DayZ mod).
I have a theory that the all the best multiplayer games do spawn from community efforts since they know better how to balance things.
Still remember discovering Half-Life as a kid because I was looking at the CS 1.6 folder my friend gave me, and I got curious about this “hl.exe” since the icon wasn’t the CS one.
Remember the days of half life having three billion mods? Still haven’t had the LAN with everybody where we play through them all.
There are a TON of legit and amazing S.T.A.L.K.E.R mods like Misery, but my favorite is Anomaly. The mod team took assets across the three original Stalker releases, took alpha/beta builds, and combined all of these with a ton of other mods to make an ultimate OG stalker trilogy playground that is open and full of immersive experiences. Almost to the point where you can randomize starting characters and basically never play the same game again with how the NPCs have full independent routines.
Of course this means that a random quest giver can totally just get zeroed out and die before you ever even meet them, but that’s part of the experience lol.
Project Reality, a Battlefield 2 mod.
I think the Galactic Contention (Star Wars) mod for Squad looks very impressive, albeit I’ve never played it.
No love for Fallout: London?
It’s not just a Fallout 4 mod—it’s full-blown AAA experience—done so well that I’d believe it was made by the New Vegas devs if I didn’t already know. If you’re tired of waiting for Bethesda to make the next FO game, just play this instead.
How well does it install on Linux?
Tacking on cause id like to know as well. Last I checked it was VERY time consuming/if not impossible at the time.
Given the amount of fiddling I had to do to get it running on Windows, I do not want to try it on Linux (unless you own it on GoG, in which case it’s apparently easy)
Came here to say this
Was looking for this answer, shame they released the DLC a month after I finally uninstalled FO4 because I needed the space lol.
Mechwarrior Living Legends is a mod for crisis that builds a compltely new game ontop of it and had a thriving multiplayer community for many years (not sure how activity is these days)
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines Unofficial Patch by Wesp5.
That game was already broken at launch, and has become more broken as operating systems advance. Furthermore, Activision shuttered Troika almost immediately after VTMB was released, so there has really never been any official support. But, Wesp5 has been working on the Unofficial Patch since shortly after the game came out in 2004.
It fixes the game to a completely playable state, which is a miracle for VTMB. He basically just finished the game for them.
Furthermore, there was some controversy over some of the changes that the patch started implementing, so he split the patch into two versions. You can download the True Patch, which fixes the game to a playable version of its release state, but Wesp5 also offers the Plus Patch, which restores all content cut from the game before release. He reimplemented character backgrounds, real-world weapon names, multiplayer, quests, locations, music, and the list goes on.
It’s arguable if the Plus Patch actually represents the original vision of the creators, since we don’t know why all of the content was cut. A good bit was cut for time, but there were some things that were dropped earlier in development. Either way, the Plus Patch went feature-complete last year, so what we have now is a fully working version of the game containing absolutely everything that was ever planned during its development.
I don’t know if anything like that has happened before, and the only other thing like this that I can think of is the Saints Row 2 patch that IdolNinja was making before he died.
Mods that add stuff are great, but it’s hard to beat a mod that lets you play one of the greats.
That reminds me of all the effort that was being put into rebuilding SWG. I loved that game, I hopped on and played the rebuild a few times over the years, I should check out if it was ever completed.
I love restored cut content, more often than not with these tragic projects it’s literally because they ran out of time to polish the stuff, I also like to replay New Vegas with that mod that makes it a true open city, that was impossible since the 360 and PS3 couldn’t handle it.
I can think of another example with KOTOR 2, it also has one that restores the cut content fully, though I don’t know if that was a buggy mess since I have yet to play it, it’s called TSL Restored Content Mod.
Man, all of these games we’re talking about relate in some way to the OG Black Isle team. I think their development is just cursed.
