The game that stands out to me is Fallout 4. The new dialogue system only hinted at what the protagonist was going to say with vague choices like “sarcastic” and that led me to reload saves frequently to either check out other options or because the protagonist came off as way too intense an railroaded me down a conversation route.
With Fallout 4 it’s more of a quality of life thing but with Fallout 3/NV I feel like I need to mod the games for the sake of stability. I’ve lost a lot of progress because I was exploring the Capital Wasteland/Mojave without passing through an auto-save point so I rely pretty heavily on things like CASM.
Fallout 3, for a long time on Steam, used Games For Windows Live DRM which shutdown in 2013. This meant a majority of people needed some kind of games GFWL disabler to even launch the game. Some people used Tale of Two Wastelands (TTW) which essentially combine Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas into one game.
I am wondering what other games do people only play modded?
I feel like there must be a lot of niche games out there that have some kind of quality of life mod a sizeable chunk of players use.
Maybe it’s an older game that relies heavily on mods or an open source engine recreation to run on modern systems.
I suppose another question would be which mods are essential in those situations
Minecraft. When you play with mods the vanilla game seems bland. Even if it’s just shaders and a new texture pack, I probably wouldn’t play it without mods.
We play with at least the datapacks from VanillaTweaks. Lots of quality of life features there.
I don’t really think of visual-only as mods. The mod scene being unsupported and thus always behind (and somewhat locked to those versions, too) what I wanted to play always bothered me.
I made my own resource pack (odd and mediocre TBH) and I really liked making 1.8 models (which also stopped me from enjoying mods in older versions) and for a decent amount of time it was the only thing keeping me interested in the game at all (I never fixed the models for the 1.9 changes that broke the display settings and stopped playing shortly after that, never migrated my account). I never got to mess with data packs, I’m sure that would’ve been helpful.
EDIT: I should say that Optifine was a bit of an exception for version availability and was definitely a solid choice especially if you needed performance. Some expansion to resource packs as well with negligible cost (at least with 16x), though some things like CTM top/bottom weren’t needed after 1.8 added models (to be fair, they added overlay CTM and entity models and I basically missed both of those aside from a simple prototype overlay).
I’ve looked at Minetest which is basically 100% mods, I probably could make my own thing but I don’t really have an enjoyable base to start from.