FF7: New Threat. Complete pain in the ass to set up, but worth it. If you love the original FF7 it fixes and adds sooooooo much.
I never played it but the Thomas the Train mod for skyrim is hilarious.
Mekanism, hands down.
Followed VERY closely by Fallout 2 Restoration Project.
I can't believe I blanked on them in my own reply, but to piggyback off your Restoration Project nomination: the Talking Heads Addon and Talking Heads Actually Talk Mod for Fallout 2 Restoration Project (updated) are both absolutely insane, and breath some new life into the game while seamlessly slotting in next to the existing art and voice acting.
I love mekanism, often run it as my only mod
Tale of Two Wastelands for Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
Gregtech: New Horizons
Technically a modpack rather than a mod though. I love grinding through technological advancements.
GB Mario 2 in full color
promods for ETS 2 and ATS 2
Rimworld multiplayer.
I really want to check that out, but it is incompatible with my favorite mod: Save Our Ship 2. I refuse to give up SOS2 just to play with another human.
Its pretty smooth but I've had a lot of desync issues because I have a long list of mods I try to play with.
They do PvP on the mod. Its pretty cool you have 4 teams and each player controls 1 pawn and the fight for objectives and capture and craft their way to victory.
Sky UI. Not the same game without it.
So mandatory that mentally I don't even consider it a mod.
Sven-Coop for Half-Life 1.
I've played, almost daily, since the mod was released in January 1999. Over a quarter century. I've got admin in a number of servers, so a lot of days I'm just hopping on briefly to make sure the servers are running smoothly and no one is trolling. New maps are still being regularly released, many by people who have been mapping for it for a solid 15-20 years.
No idea of total hours. It wasn't added to Steam until 2016, but I have multiple thousands of hours logged since then. I've got to be over 10-12k hours since the beginning. Easily.
Everything else in my life has shifted. Sven-Coop is my rock.
Terraria - Calamity.
Expands the game to 2.5x the content.
Absolutely amazing, would recommend buying Terraria just to play it.
Enderal, a whole new game built ontop of Skyrim. Offers an entirely different setting, map, class system, enemies, spells, and has an actual story that you will not soon forget.
Enderal and also its predecessor Nehrim are absolutely amazing! They're so fantastic, I don't even consider them mods, I see them as full games.
PS: Yes, I know Arkwend exists. But I've never played it because I personally dislike Morrowind and its gameplay systems. Especially the god aweful random hit chance system Oblivion got me into RPGs so that will forever be my gold standard for RPG games.
I had genuinely forgotten about it without playing it. Thanks for mentioning it.
Just started that recently, very good so far.
I couldn't pick a single one, but I got endless joy from all the Quake mods back in the day. Not just level designs and sprite replacement, but complete weapon changes that made everything different, Quake Kart, Cujo, etc. It seemed the sky was the limit.
There are so many... I'll just go with a couple
Fallout 3 Wanderers Edition always comes to mind for making that game so much better to play and more stable than the base game. I wouldn't replay FO3 any other way
Elden Ring Seamless Co-op is what ER co-op should have been to begin with. God it's so good I put another couple hundred hours in to replay every inch of ER+DLC with a friend.
I had two seamless coop playthroughs with friends. While the first one was buggy since it had just released, it is hands down some of the most fun I had with them. I'm shocked Fromsoft didn't hire the developer to integrate it for real.
On the other hand, you should also know that you can play seamless co-op with mods. Seamless co-op with convergence mod is absolutely fantastic.
The Elden Ring Seamless Co-op is probably the only way I would have been able to finish the game and the DLC. It allowed myself and 3 others (who probably wouldn't be able to complete it either) to beat most if not all the bosses.
I'll check out Fallout 3 Wanderers Edition.
Garry’s Mod
It’s hard to think of any one mod that got remotely close to changing a game the way GMod did for HL2/CS:S/source engine titles. I spent thousands of hours in GMod as a kid, it added infinite teplaya ility to the HL2 campaign, forums like Facepunch and PHWOnline became my second home. There was a ton of content to be loaded from there and FPSBanana, the thriving webcomic scene was truly special.
I don't know if time has been kind or not, but when I discovered Fall from Heaven II for Civilization VI I never launched the base game again.
I think I haven't played a single skirmish round of Company of Heroes 1 without the Blitzkrieg mod in the past 15 years.
Better Than Wolves it's a minecraft overhaul that was started by the veteran game designer FlowerChild who was pissed at Mojang that they are adding useless features that don't improve gameplay loop (wolves being the breaking point). So he spent many years making Minecraft challenging survival and interesting tech game.
While I haven't beaten the dragon once in that game (not many people have) it still gave me hundreds of hours of entertainment.
Gigastructural Engineering for Stellaris... the megastructures included in the game and DLC are great, but they lack a certain insanity. Plus the mod allows you to terraform any planet (even gas giants).
The Fallout London mod for Fallout 4 was incredible. It's like a an entire new game for free. They really captured the spirit of the Fallout universe. Better than anything Bethesda put out in the past couple years
I tried so hard to get this one to work and it just... didn't. The intro played, vanilla FO4 started. I patched it again, vanilla intro started, crash to desktop. Even tried versions from Steam & GoG. Manually patched it, failed. Downloaded the patcher from GoG, failed.
That's unfortunate. It's a great mod (and the devs have done a bunch to fix crashes and load times).
I'd have to say thanks to SMAPI and Content Patcher for enabling so many Stardew Valley mods in the first place.
Also, Qwinn's Ultimate DAO Fixpack for allowing me to have a mostly bug-free experience playing Dragon Age: Origins. Mostly.
Archolos, and it’s not even close. This is one of the best gaming experiences i’ve had in years
Screw Gothic 3 and 4, this is the real sequel us Gothic fans have been waiting for! A genuine delight to play through, and the Polish voice acting was just as incredible as it was in Gothic 1 and 2, despite being a fan project! Waiting patiently for the Mod of the Decade edition to re-play it again and try out all the new things they add (very excited for the teased mage path!)
STALKER Anomaly with GAMMA on top of course.
This was a tough one. But I'm probably going to have to say JSawyer Ultimate for Fallout: New Vegas. A continuation of the game director's own rebalance mod, it makes the game hard in a way that feels fresh and fair (unlike the baked-in Hardcore mode).
I like to pair it with my runner-up: JAM - Just Assorted Mods, for a more modern HUD and a sprint feature. Of course then you need the NPCs Sprint mod to rebalance combat and- you know what, all of the Viva New Vegas modlist while you're at it ;)
The mod that got me into modding still has a special place in my heart. It was the Shockwave mod for C&C Generals. Shockwave absolutely could have been vanilla if EA deigned to finish the Zero Hour expansion. It was just pure polished perfection for that game.
I'm going to have to go with either the Create mod or Apotheosis, both for Minecraft. Both of them feel like they could just be part of the vanilla game, and at this point it feels wrong and weird for me to play the game without them installed.
I wanted to mention Create too.
I genuinely consider both mods to be more faithful the the vanilla experience than some the actual features added in more recent updates.
I've never been one to mod games, I'm pretty vanilla when it comes to gaming. Play the base game and thats it. Rarely do i even try any dlc. With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed Frelancer discovery back in the day. It is a freelancer multilayer mod that brought a lot more content and enabled multi player once the official servers were gone.
I haven't bothered with mods for years now but Neotokyo was by far my favourite. Apparently it's still played to this day by a group of fans but I haven't joined in. Also the soundtrack is amazing
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
Most impressive:
Assetto Corsa Custom Shaders Patch / Content Manager
Tiniest mod which solves biggest frustration:
Heroes of Hammerwatch rejoin mod
Yep. My answer is "CSP/Content Manager" then "every other Assetto Corsa mod." (Also worth noting Shutoko Revival Project.)
Assert Corsa goes from an ok game without csp/content manager to an amazing game with them.
There's a Sonic fan game I like to play called Sonic Robo Blast 2, built on an extremely heavily modified OG Doom engine with a pretty good modding community, and there's a level pack for it called Sol Sestancia that's just crazy fun to run through with the Neo Sonic character mod. Getting up to top speed to activate boost mode and trying your best not to slow down or stop so you don't lose it. So satisfying.
!Wicked Whims!<
Spoilers on Lemmy work like this:
::: spoiler Some words you want to put The spoiler text Blah blah more spoiler text :::Idk. Works as is for me
Hoi4 player-led peace conferences. Because the game is literally unplayable without it
P.S: I know this isn't the type of mod you meant, but often the small fixes are the most important
I wasn't excluding this type of mod when I asked my question. Small fixes definitely count!
I think it's really impressive what the community has done with Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Project+ is basically the current "flagship" modpack. It builds on Legacy TE (which is built off Project M), so there's loads of new content and more Melee-like gameplay.
Another Brawl mod I like is Brawl -. Its main thing is that it balances the game by making everyone's movesets overpowered.
Changing genre completely, I really like the Gay Awakening and Gay Fates mods for Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Fates. The main thing the mods do is add new romantic and platonic supports to the game. The focus is, as the name implies, on adding gay and lesbian content, but it also adds straight content to a lesser degree (like for the characters that can only support with Robin or Corrin).
Ooh I forgot about Project+! The only way to play Brawl. It turns it into possibly the best Smash game to date.
Sekiro - For the sake of Ashina
Star Trek Armada 3 for Sins of a Solar Empire. Can't wait for STA4 for SoaSE2.
Minecraft - mouse tweaks, Alex's Mobs, The Bumblezone
Morrowind - I forget what it's called, but the one that adds the mainland
Risk of Rain 2 - any character by Enforcergang. Especially classic sniper and rocketI want to highlight two mod makers, instead of single mods. lStewieAl and WallSoGB for their efforts unfucking New Vegas. Being forced to pick a single effort, the engine optimizations is probably the most impressive. Honorable mention to all the various script extenders that make so many fantastic mods possible in the first place.
for Minecraft, the fabulously optimized modpack. gives me over 5x the fps, meaning I can make the game look fancier with higher settings
You know, I actually think it's the miniblocks datapack for Minecraft. That's the only "mod" that is included in every single world I play in. Every other mod in every other game is kind of optional, but I'll never play Minecraft without miniblocks ever again. Not that I use them a ton, but they singlehandedly managed to actually get me exceited for the wandering trader again!
This is going to be a callback, but Ballistic Weapons for UT2004. It completely overhauled the gunplay in ways I’ve never seen replicated. I loved all the extra modes the weapons had and many took a while to learn how to use.
The devs went on to make Viscera Cleanup Detail, so good for them, but I did always wish they made a FPS.
definitely dremor and close second is shitpostpolice. oh boy my lips are so tired.
Antistazi for Arma 3
Any mod that allows me to play as Amy Rose in any Sonic game.
