There isn't anything in what they said and most people keep missing the major point.
Spending 30 seconds changing graphical settings in COD 4, for a game that takes 5-6 hours to complete, and spending a couple hours downloading and installing mods for a game that takes 50-60 hours to complete isn't that different.
The main thing the op failed to mention is, F1 is pretty much an open ended game, where a season can take ages on full settings and people play it on and off for a year, or several, while another game you finish in 1-2 days of gameplay and maybe play through another couple times.
F1 and skyrim are not remotely "short" games, the reason he hasn't completely them is the length of the game, not the modding.
I must have spent all of, ooo, a couple hours browsing the net for texture mods for Skyrim, the reason I still haven't completed it is, played loads, got bored, had work to do for a month, other games came out that took my interest and I could never get back into Skyrim as I'd not played it for 2-3 months and felt completely disconnected with where I was in the game.
That simply doesn't happen with, a generally short indie game, or some other relatively simple game like a COD, firstly its basic and follows simple FPS rules/feeling so you could start any mission in any generic FPS in the same way and immediately remember every key/weapon/etc and mostly because its so short when you start playing its really stupidly easy to finish before something else gets in the way, like life.
In the time it took me to get maybe 2/3rd's of the way through Skyrim, I could have played the last COD 10 times over.
The issue here is Bethesda anyway, useless moron's, each and every game is a half finished gem waiting to be finished, almost reliant on modders to fix it, yet making modders lives unnecessarily difficult, or I should say, mod installers lives. **** low res textures and thousand of people trying thousands of things with generally unoptimised texture packs and the like when they could have just done professional quality high res textures to ruddy start with.
Same goes for gameplay, dodgy leveling, dodgy combat issues, poorly scaling weapons, poorly scaling enemies, if this stuff simply worked right from the start, most people wouldn't bother modding. lastly even if you wait 6 months, or 3 years then buy and install the game, the chance of downloading ONE mod pack that installs quickly and simply, seemlessly and bug free is........ well it doesn't happen. Everyone has their own take on what the game should be and trying to play through a game that is dodgy in vanilla, and random mod X might make it worse for you and better for someone else.
Staying away from Bethesda games I can't think of any game in the past decade that has taken more than a few minutes to install a couple half decent mods, or the majority of games, no mods, just settings to max and away you go.
/trollface
