Mods only go so far (unless the engine is very opened up and someone has a lot of time to invest) Alan Wake for instance is a bit like BioShock Infinite where they had an almost totally different game up and running with large sections fleshed out before effectively binning the whole thing and starting over, copying some parts in isolation over. Unfortunately with Alan Wake that pre-dates the exposure games in development now get on the internet and most of the early promotional stuff, which pre-dates the 2005 trailer, that was in PC mags, etc. doesn't seem to have made its way online. I was quite invested in the original vision of the game so playing, even if it is a fairly good game in its own right, the release incarnation constantly feels like a let down.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R goes even further back than that and partly the problem is just the time that has passed until release where it wasn't such a revolution compared to a few years earlier but still seeing the leap from current games they were promising back in its early days and then the actual release just feels like a shadow of what I was excited about back in ~2001 or so (not including the links to the original idea with what I think was called Oblivion Lost? not to be confused with the mod).
