Can mods improve your actual rating of a game?

Pighardia

Pighardia

Pighardia

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Hi, another late night thread as i am sitting here at work.:)
There have been a lot of threads about mods recently, mainly for Bethesda games obviously, but also for The Witcher, Deus Ex etc.

It got me thinking about this- Bethesda get a lot of stick for their games on initial release as they are ususally buggy/poorly balanced etc, and rightly so. But as it can all be changed by modding, does that change your impression of the game?

What i mean by this is, for example, Vanilla Fallout 3 is a good game, but it is very buggy and does seem a bit flat in places, which makes it hard to rate it very highly and call it a better game than others. However, modded i would consider it to be one of the best games i have ever played. I could say the same for Oblivion.
But in a way it is wrong to say that it is one of the best games ever because it needed a lot of fixing from the community, and the developers initial release wasn't really all that.

Personally i have no qualms in calling Fallout 3 one of the best games ever, even though it was initially broken and needed a lot of tinkering.

What are your thoughts? (i don't mean about Fallout 3 specifically, but mods in general:))
 
I think higher quality texture packs, if you class them as a mod, are quite a considerable boost to game enjoyment.
 
Stock Fallout was still a brilliant game. I finished vanilla twice and racked up over 200 hours when I played it on PS3.

As for your point though, I believe that a game should be marked on its total content, not just the stock game. Mods were always intended to be a part of the game as a tool to improve the game via the imagination and thoughts of people other than developers.

Because some game does or doesn't have mods, doesn't mean they should be marked differently. There's no point in marking a game that has mods on its vanilla version, as it is an inaccurate representation of the gaming experience. Albeit mark it down if there are problems with mods though, it has to be a two way street.
 
Not really.

I applaud the modders for how they used the engine or got more out of it.

I played Vanilla morrowind/oblivion/FO3 and I loved them, modded they felt like new games and I loved them also.
 
I was talking to someone the other day and he asked me what i thought the best game i've played recently was, and i said Fallout 3. He started listing loads of things that he found wrong with it, and whilst i agreed with most of the points he made, i simply said that i had fixed all of those issues with mods. His response was that they were al things that shouldn't have been in the game and had to be fixed by the community, so it was in some way an invalid choice.

That's not the way i see it, but it got me thinking tbh. The community is all part of the game for me and is why i have enjoyed all the recent Behesda games especially, but they do release some dodgy games straight off.
 
Flight sims are a definite mod job. Modded FS2004 to hell and back back in the day and I enjoyed it so much more but took a long time!

Played Oblivion at stock for ages and then applied a few mods and it was nice for a bit of a change!
 
Admittedly I played oblivion before I had a gaming PC to my name.

But I was modding BF1942 before hand (desert combat yo) and that truly made it feel like an entirely new game.
 
Far Cry 2 would have been a good example if it was possible to mod it (without a lot of hassle) - relatively few tweaks would have turned it from a mediocre game with lots of annoyances to something quite decent.
 
It depends. Usually I don't like mods for games like Oblivion or Morrowind or any other RPG because I want the game to feel as close to the devs vision as possible, to feel authentic. With mods you end up with random people's idea of how the game should behave/look. The more different mods you add the more of a mishmash of ideas and opinions get put into the game and the less immersive it feels. New items are definitely not ok for me because then you get balance issues or they just don't fit the style of the game properly or fit into the whole lore

If the mod is simply graphics related or bug fixes, and is a straight upgrade then it can be fine, but games like morrowind have hundreds of different separate graphics mods you have to installed so the game doesn't feel inconsistent with some nice graphics, some bad etc and the more you add the less authentic the game becomes.

I also feel a game should be done properly by the people we pay to make it. Its no good saying Oblivion is a decent game, as long as you install tones of mods..its not Oblivion anymore

So I play vanilla pretty much every game. Some interface mods can be alright, but gameplay changes, graphics stuff etc I'm not into just because it spoils the style of the game 9 times out of 10

So for me Oblivion has always been about 6/10 as a game, Morrowing 8/10 . I'm sure some mods could improve Oblivion but i'm not prepared to spoil the feel of it and play a dodgy unauthentic copy
 
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Some games more than others. Sometimes it makes not as much difference as I expected, despite going by what others might have said. Just depends.

One mod that I thought was very good was one of the HL2 mods, Cinematic I think it was called. I like HL2 though I am not someone that would put the game in my all time top ten PC games. However, the mod really made it worthwhile and it was nice to eek out more replay from a game that I normally would sum up as a good title, just not a great one.

I still must get round to playing the Morrowind mods that are available. *Hangs head in shame.*
 
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Yea, I find that mods can really elevate a game.

I liked Fallout 3 a lot - but when I first got into New Vegas I realised I enjoyed it much more (mainly due to the hardcore mode and the ability to play it like a proper FPS - but with a great story).

With a lot of the mods, I found that they didn't just change the game, but augmented the devs original vision, by adding things that made sense in the context of the game and you could imagine obsidian would have added themselves if they thought of it or just had the time.

Some small examples in NV are refillable water bottles and enhanced ammo crafting (eg you can recast brass to fit a different calibre round using flamer fuel) - small changes no doubt, but they added to the "realism" of the whole package. Much bigger additions like the NV bounties mission pack add extra depth and a fun story to an already very deep and plot-driven game.

Another mod that I hugely enjoyed a while back was project reality for BF2. This mod gave the game a completely new feel and forced you to play the game in a totally different way, since a single bullet would more than likely kill you, teamwork was compulsory for success and defibrillators no longer had the magical healing ability to replace pre-frontal cortex. I believe these lads moved over to ARMA2, so I should really give them another go.
 
cmndr_andi said:
Yea, I find that mods can really elevate a game.

I liked Fallout 3 a lot - but when I first got into New Vegas I realised I enjoyed it much more (mainly due to the hardcore mode and the ability to play it like a proper FPS - but with a great story).

With a lot of the mods, I found that they didn't just change the game, but augmented the devs original vision, by adding things that made sense in the context of the game and you could imagine obsidian would have added themselves if they thought of it or just had the time.

Some small examples in NV are refillable water bottles and enhanced ammo crafting (eg you can recast brass to fit a different calibre round using flamer fuel) - small changes no doubt, but they added to the "realism" of the whole package. Much bigger additions like the NV bounties mission pack add extra depth and a fun story to an already very deep and plot-driven game.
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Yeah. something like Ironsights in Fallout 3 completely change the game for me, they have included it in New Vegas Vanilla, but it was up to the community to add them in 3.

I find that it is all of the story mods for Fallout/Oblivion which elevate them. I have rarely played a quest mod which has felt out of place in the world tbh. Especially in FO3 where a lot of the mods are voice acted too.

And mods which add NPC's and change cities really feel like they should have been in the game. In Vanilla FO3 towns barely have anyone in them, but with a few mods you can make them seem more populated and it greatly improves the game.

It's kind of the point i'm trying to make. Vanilla isn't so great, but modded, the game feels much more alive and in touch with the developers vision tbh.
 
STALKER complete mod.

I'll just throw that out there..

(That's a yes btw - even though I loved vanilla, going back and playing it with the mod made it so much more enjoyable)
 
IMO if the game comes out buggy and feels incomplete, the game shouldn't be rated highly. The developers haven't done their job and should get a slap on the wrists from the public about it.

Mods are extras and tweaks, sometimes they do improve a game, sometimes they completely change it for the better and that's cool but not everyone who plays the game can and will mod it, so it shouldn't really be used in a rating system.
 
Oblivion would be an awful game if not for mods. I think Bethesda are a little cheeky releasing their games in such fowl states (usually). It's always the creativity and perseverance of the community which makes their games great.
 
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