Like the title. What games are made better with mods, and foster a great modding scene that retains momentum and delivers excellent content?
My personal favorite is Fallout: New Vegas, but games like DOOM, Half-Life 2 (really all source engine games), and Minecraft have extremely unique mod scenes. Of course, Skyrim remains a modding titan. STALKER: Anomaly is already an amazing mod project and has mod lists for it like GAMMA.
I don't know any that are as big as Bethesda games or Minecraft modding scenes, not even close, but FromSoftware games tend to have some really big mods that changes lots of stuff, never got to play any of them other than a bit of one that recently came out for DS3, but is something I want to do after I'm done with Shadow of the Erdtree.
Other than that Valheim seems to have some interesting ones too. Guilty Gear Strive have a lot of alt colors/costumes you can mod into the game.
Oh a big one is The Binding of Isaac, there is a shit ton of mods on the Steam Workshop, I tend to use a lot of non-gameplay mods there. The modding scene in this one is unique and tends to be quite friendly. There's a lot of fun and quality work on there.
The Valheim modding scene is really picking up steam. On thunderstore I've seen some mods that would allow for an mmo-rpg experience with classes and npcs, alongside with the usual: more enemy types, weapons, and armor.
slay the spire mods are pretty fun, i love the characters that the community creates. some of them are anime/touhou related but others make some unique (and silly) ones as well. yomi hustle also has a very big modding scene especially for adding custom characters, theyre pretty cool but i havent messed around with it much
I've only messed around with it versus some ai in single player, I should try and find a good coop server to play on with some people. The AI in BF 2 is kind of pants on head and it detracts from the fun.
Mount & Blade has great mods. I only recently got around to playing Bannerlord and haven't modded it much yet, but I played Warband for hundreds of hours with and without mods
Edit: haven't played it in years now, but Ark was a very fun game to mod. Like holy shit there were so many amazing mods for that game around 2015 or so
Sadly Bannerlord doesn't really have any noteworthy finished mods yet because the game didn't get into a stable state until very recently. The Warhammer one is "playable" for certain definitions of the word, and added in a pretty neat combat magic system. I think the higher fidelity is really slowing modders down too.
Agreed. Since Bannerlord is kinda barebones and has balance issues, modders probably have to deal with fixing some of the stuff already in the game on top of adding more systems.
The major mods I've heard about (has been a minute though) have been Shokujo, Realm of Thrones, and Realms of Arda.
I came here to post Morrowind but it's already been mentioned so I'll give a shout out to ARMA 3. I don't think anyone even plays that game without mods.
The older Total War games have a ton of great mods, Medieval 2 in particular. There's a ton of amazing mods, both historical (like The Italian Wars for pike-and-shot action) and fantasy (like the LOTR mod, Third Age: Total War).
The various Paradox grand strategy games are great too.
I had a personal adventure mode mod that added a ton of reactions for the player to use: butcher any corpse, leather curing and crafting, bone crafting, weapon sharpening, item decorating. Also changed necromancers to different elemental magic schools, each with their own set of spells to unlock via tome/slab
I had another that removed all the fantasy races and creatures, then split up humans by biome into the standard western fantasy trope races (Northmen, steppe riders, desert people, marsh people etc), each with their own distinct appearances, clothing/armor/weapon styles, cultural preferences, and even custom conlangs based on real world language groups