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.
Remember the days of half life having three billion mods? Still haven’t had the LAN with everybody where we play through them all.
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.
Came here to say this
How well does it install on Linux?
Multiplayer for GTA San Andreas was quite revolutionary at its time.
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.
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.
Withers big naturals
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.
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.
Similarly, Blue Sentinel for DS3 is a better, more effective anti-cheat than Elden Ring’s use of Easy Anti-Cheat. Heck, part of the performance enhancements fron Seamless Coop come from the fact it turns EAC off.
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.
Allowing you to collect all three triforce pieces in Ocarina of Time using arbitrary code execution.
Oh that’s neat. I remember someone just saying “Cut out 3 yellow triangles, tape them to the TV, and have Link jump and get them.” Lol!
If you’re curious, here’s the setup and execution: https://youtu.be/2x_pqyrf9lA?t=706
And the end result: https://youtu.be/2x_pqyrf9lA?t=2815
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.
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.
In terms of actual impact, a Fallout: New Vegas mod named Tale of Two Wastelands that takes a Fallout 3 copy and brings all of it into the Fallout: New Vegas world.
The mod makers didn’t create the great bulk of the content, made a converter, but it amounts to a new experience with an AAA-game level of content addition.
Does make me wonder about other mods that can leverage pre-existing work. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a mod where someone imported a real life map of Massachusetts, for example. Some flight sims can do similar stuff.
“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.
My favorite m&b mod is Nova Aetus. Adds so much new stuff to the game. Custom troops, greatly expanded city building, and statecraft, religions, non battle locations outside of fiefs. Hidden loot and side quests. Colonies. If you are looking for a mostly mechanics mid that expands the game into a much more complex game, this is what I think is the best, although some other mods do story and setting better.
Expanded Stardew Valley! So much added stuff!
Rounding out my top three for Stardew are the pause and teleport mods
Came here for this!
