Potential reached because of Mods?

Soldato
Joined
3 Dec 2004
Posts
2,622
Hi all,

What games would you consider not as polished/finished/tweaked (whatever you want to call it) on release, but were brought up to the level expected/deserved due to to efforts made by an external source i.e mods.

I think i'd have to give Oblivion a mention, the sheer amount of mods is overwhelming and there are a few key ones that really did add so much to the game - fixing the leveling system helped massively.

Also, Baldurs gate 1. Although a great game to start with, the ability to play the game using the baldurs gate 2 engine made everything a lot better. Along with a few dialog enhancments it made for a very enjoyable game.

Finally Planescape Torment. There were a few key members who really expanded on a near-perfect game. Opening up a lot of 'lost' content and fixing 1000's of general bugs.
 
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 (bugs, restored content - which in the case of KOTOR2 made a huge difference)

Operation Flashpoint (buggy, mods improved everything from graphics to adding custom maps and campaigns)

Unreal Tournament series (a strong core game further improved by voice, map and gametype mods - CTF with 4 flags is great fun for example)
 
S.T.A.L.K.E.R with oblivion lost comes to mind, on release it was kinda "meh" but now imo its a 8/10 game.

Also Medieval total war 2 the game was good enough at launch but the AI was kind of bad in the campaign map, there are lots of mods for this but Stainless Steel is the mod that stands out for me as helping the game reach its full potential.
 
The multiplayer aspect of Half life 2 was **** for me. So awesome mods like insurgency helped with that.

I'd say Insurgency is more of a Total Conversion rather than being a mod.

A TC aims to create an entirely new game using modding tools, whereas a mod will add something to a pre-existing game.
 
Battlefield 2, perhaps not so bad when first released but after numerous bad patches from DICE they completely ruined it. Bring along Project Reality mod, and it becomes far superior even to the original unpatched BF2.
 
Quake, definitely. A very good game for it's time, but as a competitive gaming platform it was severely flawed out of the box (not really surprising given that multiplayer was an incredibly niche market at the time). It also helped to bring modding to the masses, both in terms of commercial projects using the Quake engine (Halflife, Hexen 2 etc) and homebrews. In fact it even helped developers like Steve Polge reach their potential (his reaperbot mod for Quake got him a job at Epic doing AI for Unreal).

Difficult to say about FS2 as I've never played the vanilla version.
 
best MOD for me was when they put skiing into 'Tribes' , it evolved into probably the best online competative multiplayer game when Tribes 2 hit the shelves.

Fully customisable HUD, weapons & maps with Cluster, BASE++ , classic amongst many others .. only BF2 has come close for clan matches and ladder games ..

[EM] > *
 
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