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Gas Bandit's post in What Are You Playing made me think of this. What is the single most important mod you've ever installed. The one that improved or changed the game so drastically, be it gameplay, graphics, music, whatever, that you could never imagine playing that game without it.

I thought about some Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind mods I've used over the years and realized just how they're more about the mass modding than one single important one. Other than mod compilations which just incorporate a ton of other people's mods together, you're not going to fundamentally change one of those games with just one.

The one I would pick would be the Kung Fu mod for Max Payne. It looks cheesy now, but made Max Payne an entirely different game and I had a stupid amount of fun with it.

Back when we were playing Neverwinter Nights when we were first dating, my (now) husband found a mod* where you could build your own little stage/interactive thingy. For Valentines Day he made my character her own little house and included a ton of interactive options. There was an easel for my artwork, if I clicked on something it played my favorite song, he made avatars of our dog and some of our friends whom I could have little multiple choice conversations with...I know there was other stuff, but I've having trouble remembering it all. I loved that thing. I think we saved it somewhere but I wouldn't know where to start looking.

Makes up for the time he killed me in The Sims. (My Sim apparently rejected his Sims' marriage proposal, so he put me in the pool and took the ladder away. Bastard.)


*I think it was considered a mod. I will have to ask when he gets home.
EDIT: He said it wasn't a mod, it was some kind of dungeon creator. My bad.

Oh man, I've run so many mods on so many games over the years, it's hard to choose. Remember quake total conversions? Team Fortress started out as a mod, after all. Also, the line kind of blurs between mods, patches and expansions. I mean, I wouldn't recommend the old C&C Generals game without the Zero Hour expansion, and I insist that the community fix patch is necessary to play Evil Genius.

And don't even get me started on all the fancy stuff you could mod and import into Unreal 2k4. The community map packs alone were amazing. I imported girls from DOA into it as character models, and the little woman always made me put them as bots on the other team when we played together so she could shoot them because she once, ONCE, saw Kasumi hentai on my computer and got jealous. She always felt very gratified splattering them into chunks with the flak cannon at point blank. (We usually played 5 on 5 against Kasumi, Ayane, Tina, Helena and an anthropomorphized laundry hamper. The other 3 bots on our team were Mario, Dr. Farnsworth, and Mega Man)

I wouldn't have been able to the the Halforums House: Halforums Academy thread without the extensive modding community that's built up around converting japanese games into english. The english conversion mods are pretty essential in that regard.

For Skyrim though, the answer is obvious. SkyUI is absolutely indispensable to play Skyrim on the PC.

There's a mod for Deus Ex called The Nameless Mod, which is all sorts of awesome, but that's kinda cheating because it's basically a whole new game.

For Oblivion, FO3, and FNV, I always have to install my favorite overhaul mod. (OOO, FWE, and Project Nevada, respectively) Haven't reached a point in Skyrim where I need an overhaul, but I'm sure I'll get there eventually.

For Just Cause 2, I rather enjoy a mod I use to buy anything I want from the Sloth Demon. And for Saints Row 3 I use a mod that allows me to upgrade any vehicle, not just the ones the vanilla game allows me to.

Oh, and for Dwarf Fortress I mod my game to allow my dwarves to butcher and eat slain enemies. Nothing like making tons of meals out of slaughtered elf caravans.

I've never gotten into modding or trying mods. I find mods are often very buggy or at the very least, feel stiff and inorganic with the rest of the game. I'm overgeneralising, of course. But it's always astounded me just how much modders can pull off. Some have actually used their skills to get jobs, like several people who did Half-Life 2 mods once and now works for Valve.

That reminds me, the hands down must-have mod for BF1942 was Desert Combat. With the Desert Combat mod, it changed from a WW2 setting to a Gulf War setting. So many good memories of nights flying in an apache longbow with Pauline as my gunner, us vs 48 bots.

(the reason why it reminded me was because I think some of the people who wrote the Desert Combat mod ended up going to work for Dice)

ThatNickGuy said:

I've never gotten into modding or trying mods. I find mods are often very buggy or at the very least, feel stiff and inorganic with the rest of the game. I'm overgeneralising, of course. But it's always astounded me just how much modders can pull off. Some have actually used their skills to get jobs, like several people who did Half-Life 2 mods once and now works for Valve.

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Yeah, the guy who made Minerva: Metastasis was hired by Valve to work on Episode 3.

So he's partly to blame for the delay, I think. I'm totally blaming him.

I'm with Gas on this one... most important mod is probably SkyUI because I just wouldn't want to play Skyrim without it. Favorite mod was probably the Moogle Race mod for Morrowind, back in my teenage years.

This thread made me feel like going nuts with Skyrim mods. I know there are tons out there to pretty up the girls. Are there any out there to make the men less fugly?

Team fortress for quake.

On a wider scale the so-called "Hot Coffee Mod" probably could be considered important - it opened the eyes of many to the fact that modding was a thing and deprecated (but not deleted) code was hiding in everyday programs.

One of the most important mods of the last 15 years - the mod chip (chips, really, there were different ones) for consoles. It opened up the door of piracy for me on consoles, for my Dreamcast and PS2.

And speaking of console mods, Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball. Buddy of mine had it. Install it on the xbox hard drive, then you could install the mod that repaints all the bikinis flesh-tone with nipples. Since they were painted on to begin with... it was an almost seamless nude mod on a console. I say almost seamless because a lot of the bathing suits has ties and straps and stuff dangling off the backs/sides, which the mod left untouched because random straps and strings dangling off a naked girl is slightly less disturbing that odd noodly flesh protrusions flapping in the breeze.[DOUBLEPOST=1392832981,1392832787][/DOUBLEPOST]

Bowielee said:

This thread made me feel like going nuts with Skyrim mods. I know there are tons out there to pretty up the girls. Are there any out there to make the men less fugly?

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Yes, actually. I haven't looked into them much but I know they range from the usual nude mods (that even redo the mesh to add polygonal wedding tackle) to retextures and such to change their appearance. Skyrim Mods Weekly covered a couple but I don't remember which week... and the show's been going on nigh 2 years. But if you head over to the skyrim nexus, it makes finding mods easy with their searches and categories, and the nexus mod manager makes modding so very, very easy.

Search things like "Better males" or "buffer males" or "hires males" to get you started, I think.

Baldur's Gate character editor.

Many a night in high school for me was lost to using the various doom WAD editors to insert my own graphics and sounds into Doom. People even put out custom wads you could add into your load sequence. My favorite was the Army of Darkness/Evil Dead wad. Every time you picked up a new gun, after the "Chck-Chk" Ash would say "You can find this in the sporting goods department." There were other things too.

Black Mesa?

The Sith Lords Restored?

Killable Children (all Bethesda games)

I haven't played many games where modding was big, save for WoW. Damage meters, AtlasLoot and I guess a hotbar mod are the only essentials I ever really had.

Torchlight II has a mod called Synergies that adds a couple classes, high level content and some other fun stuff like new items, so there's that too.

I don't think Black Mesa counts as a mod... it's more a stand-alone game that just happens to use HL2. That'd be like saying Cry of Fear is a mod when it's clearly it's own thing... it's just piggy backing on HL.

That said, The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex is pretty amazing. An entirely new game built on top of Deus Ex.

GasBandit said:

Search things like "Better males" or "buffer males" or "hires males" to get you started, I think.

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"Better bodies," I believe. Also the one that makes gold look like gold. And I think there's one that makes nirn roots less noisy or something.

If you want full-blown conversions, there's things like the Morroblivion and Skywind projects.

--Patrick

CynicismKills said:

I haven't played many games where modding was big, save for WoW. Damage meters, AtlasLoot and I guess a hotbar mod are the only essentials I ever really had.

Torchlight II has a mod called Synergies that adds a couple classes, high level content and some other fun stuff like new items, so there's that too.

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Oh man, I completely forgot about MMO mods and plugins. WOW for sure, but also you'd never have gotten me to play Warhammer Online without a number of critical mods - the default UI was a horrible mess. Mods made all the difference there, such as Calling, or this other one which dynamically changed your hotkeys based on conditional statements (IE, button 3 will debuff your target, unless the target already has that debuff, then it will use the attack that does the debuffed damage type, button 4 is a certain melee attack, unless you just blocked your target, then it becomes the melee attack with a "I just blocked" prerequisite, etc). Also I managed to break a "healer's helper grid" mod on my warrior priest in such a way that it let me heal and resurrect without line of sight... which I have to say I abused quite a bit.

Build editor for Sacrifice as not having to play through a campaign multiple times to use new builds in multiplayer was nice.

PatrThom said:

"Better bodies," I believe. Also the one that makes gold look like gold. And I think there's one that makes nirn roots less noisy or something.

If you want full-blown conversions, there's things like the Morroblivion and Skywind projects.

--Patrick

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Those full conversions don't help me when they're not even completed yet

The original Defense of the Ancients mod.

Easily the most important one for me.

Team Fortess mod for Quake.

The St. Patrick's day outfit for Annah in Planescape Torment


I'm mostly kidding. Actually, I had a lot more fun with Morte as an Easter egg.

Hah, just saw this on Skyrim Mods Weekly... if you get tired of the drab, depressing, frigid plains of skyrim, why not run this mod which turns everything into a tropical island paradise!

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/33017/?

GasBandit said:

Hah, just saw this on Skyrim Mods Weekly... if you get tired of the drab, depressing, frigid plains of skyrim, why not run this mod which turns everything into a tropical island paradise!

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/33017/?

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Jesus... so the Warp in the West just moved the jungles of Cyrodil to Skyrim?

There's a WoW addon that tells you when the monk Touch of Death ability is off cooldown by yelling FINISH HIM! ... and of course, alerts you when it goes on cooldown with FATALITY!

Totally made the game for me.

Well, if we're including WoW addons, it was probably Healbot and Grid together. It was the only way I was able to heal as a pally once healing became a twitch-game of whack-a-mole.

Wow. I stand corrected. I have just discovered what truly the most important mod in gaming history was - the Left 4 Dead 2 Lucky Star mod.

GasBandit said:

Wow. I stand corrected. I have just discovered what truly the most important mod in gaming history was - the Left 4 Dead 2 Lucky Star mod.

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If this exists, a Sailor Scouts mod can't be that far behind.

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

If this exists, a Sailor Scouts mod can't be that far behind.

--Patrick

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I've seen it for Counterstrike, and I'm sure somebody's done it for UT2k4... So really it's just a matter of porting the assets over.

Despite saying "coming never," Project P.E.W. is available on the steam workshop.