If a game needs mods to be good, is it a bad game anyway?

[klogaroth]

If you're talking the Interplay Fallouts then it's not that they were bad games on release, it's that they're 20 years old and what people expect from a game has changed. Plus sometimes games that old need work from the community to even load now. Unless you've got a PC from the mid 90s running Windows 95. Also when looking at their modding scenes I wouldn't compare them so much to the later Fallout games. They've got far more in common with the likes of Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale.

[Lotus Victoria]

I've been playing Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Atmosphere: Great.
Soundtrack: Amazing.
Graphics: Okay, for 2007 standards (Beautiful Lightning, though.)
Gameplay - Terrible. Your weapons do crap for damage, even in the highest difficulty, and most of them use stock sound effects. Thankfully, that can be easily fixed with some mods.

Still a great game though. They've fixed the damage thing in Call of Pripyat and it's 300 times more enjoyable, even without mods.

[Baconeggcheese]

Vanilla Skyrim is a fucking abysmal game, the DLC's improved on it a lot but it was a massive disappointment imo. But the concept was enough to kickstart the modding community into overdrive, creating a game I keep going back to six years later.

I was thinking in response to the OP *I dunno, I couldn't get more than like 30 minutes into skyrim but people seem to like it so* and then I just read this. So I guess its just because I never bothered to look up how to mod it or nethin.

[pateuvasiliu]

Generic western composition is better then good music?

Kay.

Witcher, ES and literally every form of western fantasy be it game, movie or TV show all have the problem of their music being generic as fuck and always sounding the same.

Witcher 3 is a great game, it's certainly not because of the generic western fantasy OST.

Oh and for the guy claiming JRPGs aren't hard, I doubt you would get past the first act playing an SMT or FE game on the hardest difficulty.

How the fuck is it generic western fantasy when their music is fucking Polish?

Go back to your anime soundtracks.

[MonsieuRoberts]

I may refuse to play Bethesda RPGs today without hundreds of mods, but that doesn't make Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, New Vegas or Skyrim garbage games.* Nor does playing them on console make them trash. That's how I experienced all of them my first time.

Mods have added gratuitous amounts of gameplay for me. I can replay those games over and over, and have, simply to try out a new mod, to fart around on Nexus, to simply change a game and make it work. It's cathartic for me. Something I can do every few months from scratch. I really enjoy it.

But there's another side to this coin, where mods are propped up as fixes or replacers. I've played my fair share; Dragon Age Origins, Nier Automata, Mass Effect Andromeda, Samurai Warriors, Witcher 3, and even WoW to some extent with how detailed and streamlined some add-ons like Weakauras and VuhDo, like ShadowedUI or TellMeWhen can get. There's fixing something wrong with the game, and there's essentially overhauling entire facets of the original game's design to be "playable" or "tolerable".

And what can be said about the games that feature mods like these? Are they simply past their prime, antiquated and yet important to the history of gaming? Or are they broken, incomplete products that somehow have garnered such a cult following or diehard fanbase that they will do whatever they can to make them better? From small UI adjustments to cutting out entire gameplay sections, from complete UI re-imaginings to literally playing the game for you, it really depends on the game and the person playing that game.

Not all games with mods are shit. Not all mods are for shit games. It's really on you to decide.

*Note the absence of Fallout 4. A good FPS RPG, a bad Fallout game imo. Still tons of fun to level, craft, shoot and explore however. I don't think the (hopefully errant) changed direction of the franchise means Fallout 4 is inherently bad, it's just not a good Fallout game. Mods don't change that for me. They do make the game more fun however.

[Dagoth Ur]

Sometimes all a game needs is a decent concept to play from.

Vanilla Skyrim is a fucking abysmal game, the DLC's improved on it a lot but it was a massive disappointment imo. But the concept was enough to kickstart the modding community into overdrive, creating a game I keep going back to six years later.

Somehow, working around the fact that the game's engine is literally cancer given digital form and that all of Bethesda's devs are braindead fuckwits (I would call them monkeys, but that'd be insulting to monkeys) modders manage to make a horrible experience not just playable, but actually GREAT. When modded I consider Skyrim to be one of the best games of all time.

After all these years in the industry I can't believe Bethesda still can't quite understand how to make a -game-. They have a concept, they fill it with deep, rich lore but then when the game comes to actually being made they use the worlds shittiest engine, accidentally create several tens of thousands of bugs, add some god awful voice acting and story before sprinkling in some nightmarish character models and then hold it all together with sticky tape for modders to peel away and then fix to the best of their ability.

Take one look inside the creation kit to see just how fragile that pile of shit is, it gets me so angry because many these issues are so easy to fix that anyone with access to the game files and some basic as fuck computer knowledge can do it. They're so inept they couldn't stop their precious creation club micro transactions from being pirated to hell and back.

EDIT: Engine and bugs aside, New Vegas is a fucking amazing game without mods. I've played through it twelve times without and once with mods and I enjoyed every single play-through. Mods just made an already good game even better.

This needs to be written in letter and slapped on Bethseda's forehead. They have such amazing fan communities like Nexus and Teslore, yet they keep pulling shit like releasing Skyrim half unfinished because of no other reason but freaking 11/11/11 "cool" release date.

Don't get my wrong I still love that game, but when you find out about all the cut content like civil war and Windhelm arena it just gets you pissed.

Here's a hope they learnt their lesson for TES6 since it's taking forever for it to even be announced.

[MonsieuRoberts]

This needs to be written in letter and slapped on Bethseda's forehead. They have such amazing fan communities like Nexus and Teslore, yet they keep pulling shit like releasing Skyrim half unfinished because of no other reason but freaking 11/11/11 "cool" release date.

Don't get my wrong I still love that game, but when you find out about all the cut content like civil war and Windhelm arena it just gets you pissed.

Here's a hope they learnt their lesson for TES6 since it's taking forever for it to even be announced.

I wonder if ditching their engine and working with something from this decade would help or hurt the modding community.

- - - Updated - - -

EDIT: Engine and bugs aside, New Vegas is a fucking amazing game without mods. I've played through it twelve times without and once with mods and I enjoyed every single play-through. Mods just made an already good game even better.

Obsidian knows how to let you play a role and define your own purpose. That's awesome RPG design, and essentially lacking in FO3 and 4.

I play New Vegas for the story, and 4 (formerly 3) for the breadth of mods and familiarity. And for the ability to not get absorbed into conquering New Vegas every single playthrough. :P

[Dagoth Ur]

I wonder if ditching their engine and working with something from this decade would help or hurt the modding community.

Big thing Bethseda's engine does is making literally all the clutter interactable, so it potentially wouldn't be the same game where you can pick literally anything up and throw it around the world.

But yeah, changing it would probably affect modding community to some extent, but modders are generally very flexible so I think they would be able to manage it.

[Bigbazz]

These games are diamonds in the rough, but if we look at some of the most modded games over history we see a lot of games that were really great to begin with.

Elder Scrolls series in general, Half Life, Unreal Tournament, Doom, Quake/Q2/Q3, Warcraft 3.. I mean these games are all top tier games on their own merit with huge impact in popular culture and gaming trends, and these are also core among the most modded games ever... To go back to your Fallout examples, they were great games for the time on their own merit too, nevermind the modding community.

One game that comes to mind that literally was successful purely on modding though was Rfactor the racing simulation game from around 2005 which was seriously barebones and lacking before modding, the game is still popular today and has even been the foundation for many standalone game titles sold as different games with what is essentially a modded client with lots of content.

[kail]

If it needs mods to be good, then yea it's bad by itself. I haven't played a single game like that though. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games were very fun for me as is along with many other modable games I've played.

[Tech614]

How the fuck is it generic western fantasy when their music is fucking Polish?

Go back to your anime soundtracks.

Being in central europe apparently makes you an eastern video game developer now.

Good to know, now I can laugh at you for liking a "shit anime game" since that seems to be the comment your type try to discredit every eastern game with.

[Jastall]

I wonder if ditching their engine and working with something from this decade would help or hurt the modding community.

Hurt. The main reason they still use the clunky piece of shit that is Gamebryo is that it's easy to mod and there aren't third parties that can tell them they can't mod X part of their engine or else. A new engine means they have to not only build it from the ground up, and also need to ensure it's as moddable as their old engine which is no small task and is possibly why TES might no release this decade.

[PACOX]

The games known for mods (FoNV, Fo4, Skyrim) are good enough on their own but made in such a way that promote modding. That can be said for any game where the player drives a lot of the direction of the in game world, so just about any semi open RPG.

A bad game isnt worth modding in the first place. Mods usually can and dont fix the fundamental flaws of a game but only tweak whats already there.

[Aeula]

This needs to be written in letter and slapped on Bethseda's forehead. They have such amazing fan communities like Nexus and Teslore, yet they keep pulling shit like releasing Skyrim half unfinished because of no other reason but freaking 11/11/11 "cool" release date.

Don't get my wrong I still love that game, but when you find out about all the cut content like civil war and Windhelm arena it just gets you pissed.

Here's a hope they learnt their lesson for TES6 since it's taking forever for it to even be announced.

They can take as long as they want to release TES6, I just hope their game isn't so allergic to the things they encourage that it needs to be 'cleaned' before it can be modded safely like... just about every other game they've released and that the game can survive puling anything more than 60 FPS without attempting to kill itself. That'd be a nice start.

Obsidian knows how to let you play a role and define your own purpose. That's awesome RPG design, and essentially lacking in FO3 and 4.

I play New Vegas for the story, and 4 (formerly 3) for the breadth of mods and familiarity. And for the ability to not get absorbed into conquering New Vegas every single playthrough. :P

God the amount of times I'm doing some irrelevant side quest and ask: "Would this choice lead to a positive outcome for the New Vegas I want to conquer and build". I really end up overthinking that game way too much.

[Nutri]

The only mods I tinker with are visual enhancements and a few QoL mods.

Let's take Fallout 4, I only use environmental texture packs, lightning enhancement, water enhancement, npc HD texture packs.
For QoL mods it's stuff like 'full dialogue' mod, easy sell, tooltip enhancement etc.

I shy away from game changing mods or replacement mods. Anything that alters how the game functions. I don't want mods to be cheat codes. When looking at mods like that, I think they are fine and enhance the enjoyment of the game.

Another example is the 'realism mod' for GTA V (the car handling adjustment doesn't make the game easier, maybe even more challenging). The game just looks extremely more beautiful and awesome with the realism mode. Anything from textures to collision to weather to lightning. Just stunning. Why that isn't baked into the base game? It takes quite a rig to run enhancement mods so it's perfectly understandable. The dev allowing things to be modded is in my opinion good for the game.

[pateuvasiliu]

Being in central europe apparently makes you an eastern video game developer now.

Good to know, now I can laugh at you for liking a "shit anime game" since that seems to be the comment your type try to discredit every eastern game with.

Sure as hell doesn't make your music generic western fantasy.