*edit. I should note a good modding api and/or editor is great for any game.
I started programming though making mods for battle for middle earth 2.
However, we must make sure to keep in mind the ways in which capitalists will exploit the goodwill of developers and free software wherever it may be.
i reinstalled skyrim recently and was blown away by the modding scene, which is probably going stronger than ever ten years after its release
theres graphics mods to make it look literally like a 2021 release, theres all these incredible and deep and thoughtful reworks to whole gameplay systems, heaps of new items, and whole bunches of additional quests and places etc etc. its a hassle and a half but you can seriously tailor it to be any of a wide range of fairly fundamentally different games. i made it a slow as molasses game about cautiously exploring and roughing it surviving in the wilderness, and spending days back at the cottage doing farming and in-depth spell research and enjoying the vibes, but other people have made it into an adrenaline action game or a souls-like or all sorts of other things.
so yeah moddability is awesome, even though the tradeoff will be a whole bunch of bugs they decided to let the community fix
Some guys went ahead and used the engine to make a whole ass new game in an entirely different universe, all free (and it's quite good).
Modding rocks, IP is a fuck, and people will work without the profit motive
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i dont have access to that computer right now, but i remember the key ones for the wilderness survival were the old classic combo of frostfall+campfire (with all the overly pedantic and punishing options on), but with sunhelm for food/drink/exhaustion. and a no fast travel mod and a deadlier combat mod (smilodon i think), and a slower xp mod, and a less suicidal wildlife mod, and most of the simonmagus overhaul mods for perks and alchemy and cooking and spells etc. and an economy mod and loot scarcity mod so i wasnt drowning in cash and fancy loot. and immersive spell learning + dinos spell discovery + grimoire so i could craft/study spells for a few hours before sleep at a campfire or an inn, or spend whole in-game weeks at home in research while doing my crops and herbs and alchemy and crafting and woodchopping and cooking and arranging my spellbooks etc. and i remember tel jerdein was the name of the cottage and its unbelievably cozy and nice for a wizard, sitting under cover on the top deck on a rainy day with my plants and reading spell books, looking out at the misty valley.
and yeah a tonne of graphics mods but definitely the most impactful was somehow getting rudy enb to work on linux, holy crap what a difference but it seriously hurt my pretty decent computer. cathedral grass, cathedral weather, majestic mountains, smim, relighting skyrim, and skyrim 2020 textures were the other main ones i remember.
these projects have really impressed me, for years they were only playing with animations & the combat calculations to make it feel different; now there's new combat functions with the animations like attack combos i really want to try them out... god its a lot of effort to set up tho
Absolutely, modding is fantastic. And in some ways; It gives a unique avenue for artistic expression. A platform for 3d and textures art, memes, machinemas, and so on.