Weekend Question: What game would you never play without mods?

[PCG Jody]

I ask the PCG staff a regular Weekend Question and post the answers on the site. If you'd like to throw in an answer here, I'll squeeze the best into the finished article!

This week's question is: What game would you never play without mods?

Obvious answer: Skyrim. How can you enjoy replaying Skyrim without being able to bypass the intro, sort your inventory by weight or value, or fly the paraglider from Breath of the Wild? OK, the last one is optional, but Skyrim is the number one game I would only suggest playing unmodded your first time through (The number two game is every other Bethesda open-world RPG.)

I guess if you count unofficial patches as mods the same goes for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, but I'm thinking more of full-blown modifications rather than fixes.

 

[Brian Boru]

Far Cry 5
Another of Ubisoft's drawn-out boring FC intros, which I only want to see once.
Then there are the hated-by-many capture sequences which made me stop playing for nearly a year until the excellent Resistance mod took care of both of those problems.

Civilization
I played Civ4 for ~a year vanilla—wonderful game, but the UI tedium eventually got to me. BUG/BAT mod made it playable again, to the extent I play it every year.
Started Civ6 recently and went straight for mods, have ~30 installed—no point suffering UI deficiencies when I don't have to.

General replays
With games good enough to warrant replaying, I'll usually look for an 'unlock' mod, so I can have access to most of the good stuff from the get-go.

 

[ZedClampet]

Welp, I have 285 mods currently going in Farming Simulator 22 (by the time I finished playing Farming Simulator 19 I had over 800 mods), but this would only be a close second to Satisfactory, where I only have 48 mods, but they are incredibly significant to how I want to play the game; for instance, the mod that makes the game peaceful, removing all enemies, both plants and animals, and the mods that allow access to vehicles earlier in the game. I've played this game over and over. Unlocking trains, drones and jetpacks later was cool the first couple of times. Now I just want them as soon as possible. Same goes for enemies. They were fun at first, but now they are just a nuisance. Also, the mods that replace the highly annoying bio-energy in the early game are a must have. So, yeah, it's Satisfactory for me.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Whoa! I didn't know someone made a paraglider for Skyrim. That's awesome!

 

[mainer]

Outside of the obvious answer that you already listed, my next most modded game would be Fallout 4. I'd never play that game without mods (outside of the first playthrough when it released). Make your settlements bigger and fancier, make your settlers smarter, improve the factions, additional quests, additional crafting options, and there's even a FallUI mod now that's based on the SkyUI, and a Photo Mode mod that's the best Photo Mode I've ever used. Your choices in mods are nearly as endless as they are for Skyrim.

 

[DXCHASE]

None, i play games mostly vanilla and if theres some feature i want, ill go download it.

 

[Frindis]

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Don't get me wrong, the game is absolutely amazing with some of the coolest side quests, classes, and skills. It is a fantastic game from the get-go, but it also has one of the most heartbreaking moments in video game history: The god damn Elizabeth Dane quest where you have to use a boat which is for the majority of the time: bugged! Bugged you say, YES! It means you can move on with the main story because you can't get the prompt that says you can enter the god damn boat! It was insanely frustrating if you did not back your saves, managed to get a save from a friend, OR got the unofficial patch that fixed this.

 

[Zloth]

Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. The game is certainly playable with no mods at all, but, assuming you've got the PC to power to spare, why would you? Some graphics mods to make the explosions look fierier, leave smoke trails behind the missiles, and maybe give yourself some cockpit glass makes the game look better. TTRulez's AI mod makes allies and enemies act smarter. The Pilot Overhaul makes your mechwarriors more interesting and lets you edit their portraits and voices (very handy for avoiding duplicates in your lance), and vonBiomes add some interesting new places to do battle.

(Probably not such a great idea to bring an Archer into an old growth forest.)

 

[Slasken]

I would never play Cities Skylines without mods. Thankfully, the game has had great mod support since the beginning. I don't use only a assets, as it really halts the performance, but I do use a lot of other mods for traffic and other QOL mods. I went crazy with assets before, and it halts the performance down to single digit fps when you get a big city.

 

[DXCHASE]

Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. The game is certainly playable with no mods at all, but, assuming you've got the PC to power to spare, why would you? Some graphics mods to make the explosions look fierier, leave smoke trails behind the missiles, and maybe give yourself some cockpit glass makes the game look better. TTRulez's AI mod makes allies and enemies act smarter. The Pilot Overhaul makes your mechwarriors more interesting and lets you edit their portraits and voices (very handy for avoiding duplicates in your lance), and vonBiomes add some interesting new places to do battle.

(Probably not such a great idea to bring an Archer into an old growth forest.)

Ok, so this would be an exception for me, i played this vanilla wise and it was really terrible. I downloaded a trainer for it and it improved its quality 10 fold, but i still played without mods.

 

[Zloth]

Ok, so this would be an exception for me, i played this vanilla wise and it was really terrible. I downloaded a trainer for it and it improved its quality 10 fold, but i still played without mods.

There's still more play time waiting for you! MercTech puts in enough new stuff to make it almost a new game (and you can turn off features individually if, say, you don't want to mess with buying ammo). The "Yet Another" series of mods makes a bunch of changes, too.

There's a new DLC showing up next week. It's small, but the free parts of the update are liable to mess with some mods - particularly the big ones.

 

[Sarafan]

It will be a little controversial, but I can't imagine myself returning to Deus Ex without the Revision mod. It fixes some bugs that were left in the original game and this alone is very good, but its main advantage is the new content. A lot of the locations underwent a major overhaul and the new areas are hardly distinguishable in quality from the original content. They fit ideally.

What more the mod improves graphics in a meaningful way, proposes a remixed version of the soundtrack and a new approach to skill points and augmentations (there are few options of this feature to choose from). The big advantage is that all of these changes are optional and you can disable certain parts of the mod in the menu. You don't like the new soundtrack? No problem, you can use the original one. Don't like the skill-tree changes? Pick the standard one. Same goes for new character models and some other aspects of the mod.

Revision is highly configurable. I can only recommend to try it. Not everyone likes it, but there are chances that you'll never return to the original game without this mod.

 

[mainer]

It will be a little controversial, but I can't imagine myself returning to Deus Ex without the Revision mod. It fixes some bugs that were left in the original game and this alone is very good, but its main advantage is the new content. A lot of the locations underwent a major overhaul and the new areas are hardly distinguishable in quality from the original content. They fit ideally.

What more the mod improves graphics in a meaningful way, proposes a remixed version of the soundtrack and a new approach to skill points and augmentations (there are few options of this feature to choose from). The big advantage is that all of these changes are optional and you can disable certain parts of the mod in the menu. You don't like the new soundtrack? No problem, you can use the original one. Don't like the skill-tree changes? Pick the standard one. Same goes for new character models and some other aspects of the mod.

Revision is highly configurable. I can only recommend to try it. Not everyone likes it, but there are chances that you'll never return to the original game without this mod.

It's the only way to experience the original Deus Ex in my opinion as well. With the overhauled/expanded areas, new areas, changes to the skills & argumentations, bug fixes and music, it's a new playing experience, while still being the same game. And, as you said, everything is configurable.

The folks that created Revision update the game frequently also, the most recent being May of this year:

Deus Ex: Revision - Patch 1.7.1 is Live - Steam News

Removing the game's most annoying mechanic.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Sarafan]

It's the only way to experience the original Deus Ex in my opinion as well. With the overhauled/expanded areas, new areas, changes to the skills & argumentations, bug fixes and music, it's a new playing experience, while still being the same game. And, as you said, everything is configurable.

Glad to hear that I'm not alone on this one. A lot of people prefer GMDX over Revision though. Personally I pick Revision because it introduces a more complex changes.

 

[ZedClampet]

The comments on this article lean heavily anti-mod.

 

[Brian Boru]

The comments on this article lean heavily anti-mod.

You mean the Disqus comments? Look in favor of mods to me, only a few saying 'never'.

 

[Sarafan]

The comments on this article lean heavily anti-mod.

To mod or not to mod, that is the question...

 

[ZedClampet]

You mean the Disqus comments? Look in favor of mods to me, only a few saying 'never'.

There were only 5 comments when I posted, with four being negative.

 

[redmark_]

I think Minecraft. It's good on its own but it's more fun with mods.

 

[PCG Jody]

There were only 5 comments when I posted, with four being negative.

They got better.

 

[Mcfnbjhbf]

СА

 

[heKtor0010]

I honestly feel strongly about Elden ring being played with no mods. One it is a beautiful game on its own and two who doesn't like the challenge!

 

[Rolfil]

I would say it depends on the type of mod.

I tend more towards what I would call Quality of Life mods. For example in survival games like Raft there are mods that allow you to gather materials off the sea bed by hand, a mod that lets you craft storage with more slots and one that increases the stack size.

There are games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 that have a ton of mods that introduce new content. Some of this is of incredible quality and adds to the time I'd spend playing the game.

Then there are mods that I'd call basically cheats. Like say a power station in Cities Skylines that produces near infinite power that I would avoid.

 

[Colif]

Torchlight 2. Mainly as I have played it on and off a few times in the last 10 years and the base game needed more extras to keep me interested after so long. I need mods to add new areas, equipment and enemies.

 

[technomadic_rony]

Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. The abundance of meme mods are just amazing. If I ever decide to pick up Skyrim again, I don't think I'll go for the vanilla version.