I know most of the Bethesda RPGs have massive mod support, and there’s games like Minecraft that have more mods than anyone can imagine. I would consider those games pretty playable in their vanilla states. Would you say there are any games that were “saved” by modding? Or that are still kept alive by thriving modding communities? What are some of your favorite mods?
The original Doom for sure. I don’t know if they count as mods since they’re technically running on a modified version of the engine, but there is still a massive community making maps, mods, and even new game modes for it. Most recently the “MyHouse.wad” map for it has exploded in popularity. I’ve had so much fun over the years with doom mods, it’s a treasure trove that most people have no idea exists.
There’s even entire new games built on Doom. Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (stupid name, I know) is a fantastic free open source karting game with a decent community, and it’s technically just a doom mod.
If anyone here is going to play a single doom mod to see what’s up, I recommend Doom: The Golden Souls Remastered. It’s good fun.
original Doom has a lot of great mods for it
Coming up on 30 years!
Man, I had so much fun in high school playing jDoom/Doomsday. They made it easy to set up multiplayer ad-hoc connections before there was wifi in my high school, and it ran on our potato laptops and still looked WAY better than the old DOS/Win95 versions.
Doom is awesome, MyHouse.wad is a really fascinating experience, I would love more Doom mods like this.
There’s a nice unreleased yet game named Selaco that uses the GZDoom engine, I played the demo and it was really good.