From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
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I don't know if improving is the right word, but the amount of transformative mods older games like Doom, Half-Life or Unreal Tournament (and not just shooters ofc) had, was wild.
Team Fortress started as a Quake mod, Counter-Strike as a HL mod, DotA as a Warcraft 3 mod.
Farming Simulator 22 and Snow Runner are both just absolutely different games when you add mods. The community is pretty active and the mod browser is built right into the menu, even on consoles. You can literally make your own game using mods. Without them, it could grow tiring after a while.
7 days to die. The base game is in an...interesting state.
Fallout New Vegas for sure, although many of the issues were fixed by the devs over the lifespan of the game. Mods are pretty much vital to run that game properly, however. Many issues with the engine and many core bugs have been fixed by the community, and it's honestly something where once you play with them fixed, it's hard to go back
Warcraft 3 and the little thing called DotA.
Not seeing anyone mention Crusader Kings yet (unless I'm blind)
Gameplay isn't for everyone but full conversion mods let you experience basically any world you want
Specifically CK2 for me, there's Tamriel mod that's amazing
The original Doom for sure. I don't know if they count as mods since they're technically running on a modified version of the engine, but there is still a massive community making maps, mods, and even new game modes for it. Most recently the "MyHouse.wad" map for it has exploded in popularity. I've had so much fun over the years with doom mods, it's a treasure trove that most people have no idea exists.
There's even entire new games built on Doom. Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (stupid name, I know) is a fantastic free open source karting game with a decent community, and it's technically just a doom mod.
If anyone here is going to play a single doom mod to see what's up, I recommend Doom: The Golden Souls Remastered. It's good fun.
original Doom has a lot of great mods for it
Coming up on 30 years!
Well, as you mentioned, Bethesda games in general. I always mod Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to a ridiculous degree. But some more:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has a great modding scene. I personally find "Start as a Jedi" essential for replays. And most of the mods (including that one) work on the excellent Android port.
Also, I love randomizers. I do a Symphony of the Night randomizer run at least 4 or 5 times a year, the Super Metroid x Link to the Past combined randomizer is amazing, and I'm finally going to dip my toe into Dark Souls randomizer soonish.
Doom 1 and 2 would be a lot less interesting without mods, some of which change the game rather dramatically.
Without mods, these games would have just been historical footnotes, not something a significant number of people still play.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion has a lot of love and care put into mods. Being a sci-fi game, plenty of Star Trek / Star Wars / etc. conversions that do more than just reskin the models.
Assetto Corsa. Outlived it's shelf life by many years, and holds up to racing sims with much more modern engines, all thanks to the incredibly dedicated modding community.
There's a ton!
Project Zomboid mods are fantastic. There are insane amounts of them, and they add so much to the game.
Games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 become essentially infinitely replayable with mods. There's a tool called Wabbajack that essentially makes "modpacks" a thing for these games (and several others), and it's amazing. You can install and configure hundreds of mods in like 30 mins.
One of my personal favorite mods was "Hyrule Conquest" for 0 A.D., which is a complete overhaul of the game that turns it into a deep, lore-friendly Zelda RTS. It's still being worked on and it's still super high quality. The dev made some major changes to the play style that a lot of people love, but I personally strongly preferred the old style. It was more like Age of Empires before, but now it's more like Battle for Middle Earth and I don't care for it. If that's a selling point for you, it's very much still a great mod with a lot of love and passion put into it.
While not "saved" by modding, Kerbal space program is certainly not as interesting.
KSP is a perfect example of a game that doesn't need any mods to be an enjoyable experience (albeit a steep learning curve), but is SO enhanced by them. The visual mods give you breathtaking views to keep you going, while the parts mods (especially the science parts mods) add additional direction and goals beyond the stock games initial appeal of just figuring out rocket science and orbital mechanics. The KSP community is one of the best communities I've ever been a part of on the internet, and I've been around since early dialup modems.
KSP visual mods make it so much more beautiful
Minecraft is an obvious answer of course, but there are some other really good games out there that get made much better with mods. Some of my favourite examples of this would be Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) with the cool hero mods and bot mods, and then Ghost Recon Wildlands with the amazing First-Person mod.
Terraria, is still an excellent game but the Mod loader makes it tons better with plenty of feature mods and quality of life plus it is available from steam so easy set up.
Cities Skylines is 8 year old and released their final DLC just recently. I'm positive their very impressive mod community can keep that game alive for 8+ years more, if Cities Skylines 2 should fail to measure up.
X Com2 has amazing mods. Most of the content available for Battletech is from mods by like 2 orders of magnitude.
I won't even play beat saber without the mods. Half Life Alex has full games released in the engine as mods too!
Oh yes Beat Saber absolutely needs mods, my favorite custom songs won't even work without them. It just keeps fricking breaking every time Beat Saber updates and I can't play any good songs anymore.
Project Zomboid. Lots of mods that add new stuff (cars, weapons) and quality of life improvements like "Has Been Read".
Skyrim VR. The game without mods is probably one of the worst VR games ever, but with mods it becomes one of the most fun VR games.