Counter Strike and Team Fortress. Both were Half Life mods when they started.
We played Quake World Team Fortress on the high school LAN. It blew my mind.
As well as DOTA (for Warcraft 3) and PUBG (Arma 2/DayZ mod).
I have a theory that the all the best multiplayer games do spawn from community efforts since they know better how to balance things.
Multiverse Mod for FTL
Its literally just a free sequel
Ooo I gotta look into this!
Multiverse really does feal like early access FTL 2
Black mesa. Half life and half life 2 modder community is amazing.
To be fair, Garry’s Mod is up there too.
The amount of customisation that one “small project” opened up in general, is astonishing.
Saved me typing.
Portal is basically a Half-Life 2 mod. It’s still got the fanboat asset. You can use the console to bind spawning a fanboat to an input, so there’s a speedrun category where you’re not allowed to use portals, but younare allowed to spam fanboats. Literally called fanboat%.
Speaking of Half-Life mods, Entropy Zero 2 is a solid game.
There’s also some great Portal 2 mods out there as well.
Endless hours playing Sven Co-Op. A few clips of my friends and my own earliest YouTube videos ended up in the NoClip documentary about Half Life!
No love for Fallout: London?
It’s not just a Fallout 4 mod—it’s full-blown AAA experience—done so well that I’d believe it was made by the New Vegas devs if I didn’t already know. If you’re tired of waiting for Bethesda to make the next FO game, just play this instead.
Are Skyrim mods allowed, or is that cheating? 😜
Multiplayer for GTA San Andreas was quite revolutionary at its time.
It blew my mind. I’m not a coder, so I have no idea how they did it.
I don’t know about San Andreas, but the GTA III co op mod was something pretty special. It took the other players coordinates and assigned them to your last vehicle, which didn’t despawn.
There were no on foot player characters, but you could drive around together in a game with absolutely no multiplayer or online elements at all.
Thousands of hours on an rp server early on in samp
Same. Started with MTA and later moved to SAMP. Played on the same freeroam/rp server for years - even met one of the guys irl even though they were from a different country.
Omg I totally forgot about SAMP. I spent so much time on there when I was young. Still remember v2 where there was so much lag being in a car together was so shitty but it was the best experience ever.
Dragon Genitals for Monster Hunter World. Gave each monster either a realistic cloaca or an incredibly well-crafted dong, tailored to the individual style of each monster. The details were amazing, like a monster called Bagel Goose has a rock dick, but when he transforms into B-52 bomber mode he glows red hot with lava… and his cock does, too.
There are quite a few honestly. Team Fortress and DayZ are obvious examples, I also quite liked Natural Selection.
Came here to say Natural Selection.
I would’ve picked DayZ mod as well but I really only got into it after the standalone version. It’s still unlike any other game though.
Withers big naturals
Surprised no one has said MyHouse.wad yet
Son of biscuit! You beat me to it!
The thing that got to me was the darkend maze that seemed to go on forever. You keep expecting something to jump out but it never does. It just promptly ends and serves no purpose aside from freaking you out.
A great use to luminal space.
It was this .wad that finally tipped the scale for me in the fact that og doom is probably the best game of all time.
Elden ring seamless coop. I can’t believe that such a small file could create such a better experience in the game.
A Link to the Past/Super Metroid combo randomizer. Both games smooshed into a single ROM, with certain doors taking you from one to the other. Item pools are then shuffled together, sending you on a big scavenger hunt to find Metroid items in Hyrule so that you can explore Zebes to find Zelda items so that you can explore Hyrule.
Unfortunately it’s somewhat lopsided due to how much bigger ALttP is than SM, but the technical novelty of it is amazing and worth a playthrough.
Space Age for Factorio before their basically made it a full DLC for the game
That was a mod? It honestly feels like the finished version of what the game was meant to be
Before the factorio: space age update, there was a mod with the name space exploration. It was a complete overhaul mod, and even tho I never played it myself I did watch a lot of videos about it and I agree with the above poster that it was basically a completely free dlc. It is different from the official update tho
“The Last Days” for Mount & Blade. Intro
Mount & Blade was a medieval combat simulator where you’re a wandering mercenary in a war torn region. The gameplay was somewhat innovative when it came out (originally 2008), but as far as story and setting, it was kinda meh. But the great thing about it were the mods, and by far the best mod was “The Last Days,” a total conversion mod that lifted all the mechanics but put it in The Lord of the Rings.
These nerds put so much detail into that mod, it was incredible. I didn’t know half the factions existed. The map goes beyond Gondor and Rohan and even Rivendell, it goes all the way out to the goblins of Mt. Gundabad fighting against the men of Dale. Each location has tons of detail, some of them are truly massive, and they pushed the limits of the base game with trolls and giant spiders and things like that. Each individual faction has their own faction strength, so you have to think strategically about where to reinforce. The differences between how each factions’ units fight on the battlefield is more emphasized, and tbh the combat is a bit better balanced.
It really hit the nail on the head of what to do with the game engine, and then put real passion, creativity, and effort into making it work (seriously, the last update was in 2017, new stuff was being added after nearly a decade. And there’s comments on the page I linked as recently as 10 days ago, so people are still playing it). Next to it, the base game feels a bit more like a proof of concept. The open world nature of the game really allows you to take in the setting and experience the story from a different perspective, rather than following the heroes from the books. It really made the setting come alive in a way I haven’t found in really any other LotR game (although I’m not super into the setting and haven’t played a ton of them).
The mod was for the original game at first but it update when they put out the sequel, Mount & Blade: Warband, so if anyone decides to check it out, get that one rather than the original.
Inigo in Skyrim. Fully voiced follower who is funnier, more interesting and more authentic than any companion I’ve had in the last decade of games.
I absolutely love Inigo. Every time I go back to Skyrim (once a year or so), that’s always a requirement on the mod list. No matter what my roleplay is, what my build is, Inigo is the Dragonborn’s companion, in my head cannon.
I think I’m subconsciously holding back going back into Skyrim until Inigo V3 is released.
Been playing since launch and never used him because I hate companions (they ruin stealth). Seriously reconsidering for the next playthrough
He’s terrific and I never had him affect stealth archer/mage gameplay.
