Can mods improve your actual rating of a game?

Most time I've spent with a modded game was almost certainly with Bridge Commander.

Great game when it came out, fantastic after being in the hands of the modding community :)
 
To answer the OP, i'd say yes if the devs released the game knowing full well that the modding community is going to have at it.

Initially it seems cheap to release the game as is and have the customers fix it up, but then given the amount of content in Fallout New Vegas (The only one i've played a lot of) I don't think it's completely unreasonable. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of people are ever going to experience every drop of content from that game.

I personally found some of weapons to be imba etc, but then it occured to me that balancing even one measly pistol with every stat/perk combo, including the rate/time of getting those stats and perks, with every event in the game, in the amount of orders and ways they can be experienced is an insane task, so I don't think it's too bad for them to lay the groundwork and paint most of it for an epic game instead of giving us a smaller, more polished product (That the modding community is just going to go at anyway)
 
Evilsod said:
I don't see why Ironsights are essential. It has an aiming mode which only makes the gun slightly more accurate thanks to the increased zoom, not perfect 'down the barrel' accuracy, with the exception of scopes which do, presuming the gun has no spread I think.

I never really looked into **** that much. I can't remember why now but I think I just preferred some of the things FWE contained. Plus the last update they did added a few more things such as the activatable stealth boy which really adds a whole new area of usefulness to it whereas before it was something you'd use once in a blue moon. Besides, FOIP allows several of the FWE mods like WMK and EVE to work together fine.
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playing without Ironsights, i am finding that i can't aim properly for some reason. The reticule will be exactly where i want it, but i don't know if t's sometthing to do with drift or not, but i keep missing. I turned it off on my last play though as it isn't 100% compatible with ****.

One of the best features of **** i find is a very small one. A delayer for the dlc, so that when you exit the vault there aren't 4 different radio signals. You have specific requirements for starting the dlc's. FWE probaly has the same thing?
(i really tried to get FWE and **** working together but it was a bit unstable.)
 
The StrikeFighter 2 series (Lite flight sims) were games I only bought due to the extensive number of mod's available as the standard game is graphically a bit......Meh (the planes look nice but thats all). The Mod community created new & better looking terrains, aircraft, weapons, effects, environment systems, campaigns, missions etc which enhances the lifespan of the games.

Oh and the same with ARMA2:OA/CO/RT too!
 
Pighardia said:
playing without Ironsights, i am finding that i can't aim properly for some reason. The reticule will be exactly where i want it, but i don't know if t's sometthing to do with drift or not, but i keep missing. I turned it off on my last play though as it isn't 100% compatible with ****.

One of the best features of **** i find is a very small one. A delayer for the dlc, so that when you exit the vault there aren't 4 different radio signals. You have specific requirements for starting the dlc's. FWE probaly has the same thing?
(i really tried to get FWE and **** working together but it was a bit unstable.)
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You are aware that guns on Fallout have a spread for a reason right? The spread that varies with both condition and with your weapon skill? Of course you can't hit anything properly. THAT is a skill that comes with high weapon skill, perfect condition weapons and failing that, the select few weapons that have zero spread.

You can delay DLC with some things, can't remember if FWE has that option. Can't say I care though, I can just not do it till later. Besides, whose to say when is appropriate to do them other than an arbitrary number. When does it actually delay them to?
 
Evilsod said:
You can delay DLC with some things, can't remember if FWE has that option. Can't say I care though, I can just not do it till later. Besides, whose to say when is appropriate to do them other than an arbitrary number. When does it actually delay them to?
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I think it's well done actually. For example, the Point Lookout dlc starts when you enter the bar in Rivet City, the woman approaches you and asks you to go to Point Lookout to look for her daughter.
Opeation Anchorage and The Pitt both start the same way, but you have to be within the (much smaller) range of the radio siganls, so you actually really do pick up the distress signal as opposed to always having it on your pipboy.
It was a liitle niggle i had with the GOTY edition that as soon as you exit the Vault for the first time, you already have 4 distress signals to answer. This way makes them seem much better integrated into the game imo.

I know the guns have spread and everything, but i always put small guns up the most and there is something about the accuracy sometimes that just seems a bit off to me. Ironsights+**** when tehy work together is good because you easily see the reticule swaying and moving as you aim.
 
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Yes.

I would give Shogun 2 an 8. Because of all the mods available allowing you to shape your game i give it a 9.
 
Oblivion - variety of mods that actually pour some life into the game
Source mods
Mount & Blade / Warband - a different game with every mod
Total War games - same as above
ARMA II / BF2 - mods adding realism
Stalker Complete mods

There's plenty of games that can have a lifespan of years with help of the modding scene.

The answer to the question is a definite YES.
 
I don't think I would rate a game different depending on mods, however, I would rate it one its ability to be modded.

i think it'd be like "I'd give the game 8/10, but with such and such a mod its 10/10" Best to give it 2 ratings just to make it clear to anyone else!
 
Oh I thought you meant arbitrarily restricting them till later to stop you accessing the gear in them. Well from an RPG point of view yeah I can see what you mean but not something I'd go out of my way for.

The only accuracy that I ever thought was off was that of the Sniper Rifles which even though they had zero spread never seemed to hit. Everything else was always fine...
 
Hmmm, difficult question.

My 'default stance' or gut feeling if you like is that games should be judged on how they are released/patched by the developer. HOWEVER, when I think about it, I do rate games more highly if they have very good mods for them, for example when considering Freespace 2 I'm always doing it with the SCP mod in mind.

Take something like Counterstrike, that started out as a mod for Halflife and made the game very popular, people rated it very highly so you can't really turn around and say it isn't relevant to the quality of the game given that a large part of HLs longevity was due to CS.

What I would say however is that the vast majority of great modded games are great games even without mods, and I'd include the likes of Oblivion, FO3 etc in that.
 
No.

I would rate the mod and the game separately. Mods however would change my view on whether I would buy the game.
 
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I would have to say "yes" mods can improve your actual rating of a game. Half for fixing games that are riddled with bugs and glitches on release (oblivion to name one) and the other half for adding changes to the game that the dev's really should have implemented in the first place but couldnt due to time/caring

Take Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. Great game on it's own, add a few mods and custom maps to it (BlackOps:Unleashed) and it's fantastic. Vanilla A.I not up to the task? add Sorian A.I and it becomes a far more interesting and challenging game.

I would like to see all pc game releases moddable right out the box but as in the case with CoD-Black Ops, they waited till they could pump out a ton more money from the public by releasing map pack after map pack rather than focusing on the game's core flaws and fixing those. Mod tools came out last week i think and the 1st thing noticed was no custom map support which really put a damper on it. But i suppose Treyarch didn't want joe public creating for free something better than what they charge for ;)
 
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I only do small tweaks, like KOTOR for example, i downloaded a few restoration packs, texture tweaks and it felt better. I do make my own mods sometimes for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, made some pretty good ones in the past, i only do it for myself though.
 
I enjoyed Total Annihlation, but the game was much better with enhanced skirmish AI mods, thousands of additional units and decent maps. Supreme Commander took this further with the fantastic total veterancy system, which made you look after your units as they increase their stats with experience. There was also a mod that increased the number of addons for the Commander & support commanders, so it became a mixed rpg/rts.

Like everyone else, played vanilla Oblivion & FO3, installed mods to increase texture resolutions and additional gameplay content.

Currently sucked back into Mount & Blade: Warband with the Native Expansion mod - the increased range of weapons, town management options and other tweaks have made the game much better. Following some of the online advice, I have now built up my own small army and attacked the Vaegirs unintentionally. Now I have captured one of their towns to create my own kingdom.
 
To a point, certainly. However, it's hard to explain but if a game is too heavily modded, like say the way Empire Total War can be, then I begin to wonder if I'm playing the same game any more. :o Moreover my initial disgust at the original release state of any title will always remain, regardless of communities sterling efforts to make it worthwhile. I hold my grudges!

As a rule I do tend to prefer playing 'out of the box' rather than modded. For instance I never bothered with the Xtended mod for X3, even though very good things were said about it.
 
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