I have a complicated relationship with mods. I love the idea of them, but when I get down to it, I tend to get so bogged down in perfectionism (The game should be this way!) that by the time I get it working and playtested, most of the time I'm so burned out on the game that I can't be bothered to actually play the game I've been building. I've had this problem with all of the TES games and FO:NV, but I still managed to slog through FO3 & DA:O heavily modded.

I can't help but wonder if mods are actually detrimental to the whole affair. After all, it's very difficult for games like the big mod titles to present quality experiences as is, weighted down with vast worlds, side quests, hundreds of locations, etc. I remember at my very first job at EB Games, I expressed shock that my assistant manager preferred Morrowind on the Xbox to the PC. She never used mods, and that blew my mind, since I was under the impression that modding was sort of the point. I'm starting to understand her. She was of the opinion that if you felt like you had to mod a game to have an ideal experience, the game developers had failed.

In 90% of games, I can blow through in a sitting or three, taking the game as it is and as it was meant to be. But with gamesas games, I feel this requirement to mod the [censored] out them. Every glaring weakness (Those textures? Really) can be repaired. gamesas's inability to create convincing NPCs? Let's fix it! World feels too small? Make it bigger! Towns should be bigger? OKAY! I can enjoy oldass pixelated sprites in a game, but when I have the option to fix it, it feels like a duty almost.

Do any of you have this problem? Do you all feel that mods contribute to gaming, or create a distraction from the main dish? Does having too many options limit gamers in the long run?

I feel they contribute. Your ex-manager was wrong because its impossible to make a game that would be an ideal experience for everybody even assuming developers weren't limited by time and budget.

Yeah, i see mods as customization options, that i apply to make the game better for me.

I feel that mods contribute. Having too many options will overwhelm some people but having no options at all, I feel, will bore way more people. I think the main problem with mods is someone downloads a truckload of mods, installs them all at once, and breaks the game or has no clue what is original and modded. Or what all the mods do. Look at the game as Monopoly and the mods as "house rules". Players set them up to make the game more interesting. Families playing aren't going to use drinking rules in their set. That would just be wrong.

Bethesda have a rather strong mod scene that impress me now and then, but it's quite rare I actually try the mods myself these days. I used to use mods though, but somehow that gone down with each game, I just can't be bothered anymore With Morrowind I used a ton of mods and made a couple myself, with Oblivion I used a couple of mods and made a single mod myself and with Skyrim I barely played with any mods at all (pretty much just a single mod which a friend of mine made) and never made one myself.

It is rather nice to be able to change something if you really dislike something with a game though, like when I played Dragon Age: Origins I used a mod to increase my inventory. Bit cheaty perhaps, but I don't care

This. I always play every TES game completely vanilla for first couple of playthroughs. Then I add features, not just because I want to fix things, I also add features that I'd like but aren't in the game. It does not mean that devs completely failed, I'd mod any other game if I could just to add additional content. Mods are simply the reason why I play a TES game two times longer than I play another game that I started at the same time (usually). You simply can't make a game in which everyone will like every single feature, that's just impossible.

In your case though, I think you just got spoiled with all the sweet mods we keep getting. I find modding my game as my own little piece of art, it's like making a game somewhat "mine". I didn't go that far with Skyrim, but in Morrowind I barely installed any whole packs, every single texture was literally hand picked, and I enjoyed that.

I use mods as, well, things that enhance or make a game have a feature I like. I don't believe the game should be that way unless the mod has content that was meant to be in the game. Wesp's plus patch for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines is an example of when considering the mod to be essential for the experience makes sense. Those perks you can choose actually should have been in the game. Sadly, the game had to be rushed. I also feel some of what Fallout 2's restoration patch added is how the game was meant to be played, but I have never played it without that mod.

Some games, sadly, can't be experienced anymore without all those extra mods. You can make a mod yourself for Age of Empires II that is pretty much just a file you whip up in notepad and save as whatever the file name for a command line file would be. If you ever get the game's original version, please look up how to do this. It will make the game's color problem on newer hardware be fixed.

Diablo II also can't be played without mods anymore unless you like the color green. Playing vanilla Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines probably was a nightmare, though. I would rather not know what it is like without good patches. I'm currently trying to figure out if there are any mods that fix Soulbringer. I hate how the speed is likely being slowed down and isn't really meant to be that slow and how the text just is hard to read. I can read cursive easier than the text in that game as it is right now and I struggle to read cursive in many cases!

Mods not contributing to gaming would be a hard to make sense of statement.(not a bad or false one as this is a subjective topic in most cases) If it wasn't for the DayZ mod, Arma II wouldn't have began to get the sales it got. Many people probably would have never played it. Same goes for other games that become mod ponies for some. Doom and Doom II are pretty much this in some cases and look how mods made those games so successful. The dev made levels are amazing in most cases, but the wads are what brings you to the PC versions. Heck, even a guy from the company that made Bioshock made a Doom WAD based on a level in the first Bioshock. It felt almost exactly like the real level, only with Doom monsters.

Now the idea of a Bethesda game always requiring mods depends on the person. I feel they all stand on their own very well and am happy with Oblivion in vanilla. I only have a fan made patch on that one. The game is fine otherwise for me. Morrowind is fun both modded and not modded, but some aspects of the game need to be worked around on newer hardware by installing mods. I have been using a mod that disables the snow in Bloodmoon for years because the snow never showed up for me. It just gave error messages.

Sometimes, clever or unconventional use of a mod can fix the problems you were having in the game previously. The mod I use for disabling snow is http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/30763/? Mods can be used for more than just one thing even if they were made for one thing. That weather ring mod was unlikely to have been made to make the game not have snow in Bloodmoon at all, but it certainly can be used as a good glorified patch of sorts.

No one has ever addressed my problem I had with the snow flake textures in Bloodmoon, so this mod was my only choice. Most games are fine without content mods. Heck, some are fine without fan made patches.

I can take any game without modding it and play it extensively and be happy. That's never been a problem for me. Though it doesn't mean I won't mod a game or won't have a desire too, but to actually mod a game I have to seriously consider it to be a worthwhile use of my time. Even the Bethesda games, most of the time I don't think modding them is a good use of my time which is why I do it on a limited basis whether I'm playing one of their titles on PC or console. When I do feel like I could or should mod something, I usually find a reason for it to be worth my time.

I just think any game can be played vanilla and get full enjoyment out of it and modding is completely optional, unless the game is inherently flawed in a major way.

Mods are complicated and it depends on the game on PC.

Though the game I probably mod the most is Rock Band 3 on Xbox 360, technically speaking. Rock Band 3 Customs are fan-made additions for the base game BUT no modding is actually happening so Idk if this counts or not. I mean technically speaking it should but at the same time, no modding is actually happening to the game or console... I'm just adding the files onto my harddrive and the game will load them by default...

Now with PC games, I'm different. I tend to get mods which fit the game/world when it comes down to modding Morrowind (and most likely to the other TES games as well).

However with Minecraft, not much lore in Minecraft so I get whatever I feel would be fun to have for Minecraft. (Portal Gun comes to mind as a perfect addition to Minecraft, in my opinion). BUT Minecraft isn't mod friendly actually and so many issues had came up within the last few years with the modding aspect of that game that now I just don't care anymore... I recently tried to update but just couldn't comfortably. So far, 1.2.5 version of Minecraft is my favorite version due to the modding community was the best, in my opinion, at that time.

Good point about VtM:B. The original release was disgustingly buggy. Mods that improve playability in shoddy releases are awesome, especially if that release is as good once fixed as VtM:B.

I suppose the problem I have is with fluff mods and content mods, particularly the latter. Customization and new content are great, and often has a place (NWN is great for this, new modules that you can run with your group), but in games where the only thing you can do is add stuff into the existing world, the cohesiveness of the game is at risk. A terrific mod for Morrowind was the... Underworld, I think the series was called. It was a Vampire content mod, and it was brilliant. The only problem? The story had absolutely no place within the Morrowind gameworld. It was more something out of Vampire the Masquerade. Within the context of the world, it made no sense. Another type that makes zero sense is the everpresent Anime Character/My Little Pony type mods. Again, why does every fandom have to show up where it doesn't belong? And then there things like the Macho Dragons mod, which are awesome and hilarious but completely break the tone of the game.

I feel almost like people are too creative for the game. NWN, the Infinity Engine games, and so on had systems in place so that these modders could make their own world separate from the main game. They could be as creative as they pleased without it damaging the main package. The limitations of TES modding are such that everything has to fit into the world, or nothing does.

There are some terrific mods out there, stuff like Frostfall and Hunterborn that I consider 100% part of the main game. They fit, and they add immersion without involving themselves in the story at all. But other stuff, stuff that adds content, it's very difficult to make fit with the main story, and it breaks up the presentation, which already suffers from Open World Syndrome.

I don't know. On one hand, I love mods, and I love the challenge of getting stupid amounts of mods working together. But I find that as awesome as a lot of them are, a game is better when you take it for what it is, rather than throwing a lot of improvements at it.

Just because a mod exists doesn't mean you have to use it. If people want to dress their characters in chainmail bikinis or schoolgirl outfits or use some other mod that doesn't fit my idea of Tamriel well its a SP game, doesn't affect me

http://i.imgur.com/5bf84d6.jpg. Joking aside, I never understood why people get so bent out of shape by how other people mod their single player games. I can understand multiplayer games where they can lead to cheats and advantages but in single player that's just acting like the fun police. It doesn't have to be all immersion and lore correct as long as they are having fun. More power to them. That's the point of buying games in the first place.

What I'm about to say is my own personal playstyle, which is no better or worst than anyone else.

For me, mods add to the experience of a game, not replace it. For example, I love vanilla Skyrim. Nothing wrong with it. Since I've played it for a ton of hours in vanilla I added mods on my second character. It's like a totally different game. Kinda like I got a Skyrim size game for free Becsuse the mods transformed it.

Some games need to be modded, because everything can be improved and the developers are unreliable. I mostly just get bug fixes and some game-enhancing [censored], and I can't say that I relate to OPs problem. The game I've modded the most is Crusader Kings II, and attempting to play the game vanilla now is impossible.

I think that you just have to be smart when it comes to modding. Investing too much time into it is stupid if all you want is to enjoy the game. Get the essential stuff and change what you don't like, or get what's lacking. That's it. I guess "enhanced vanilla" is what I'm going for most of the time.

I enjoy modding in games that allow it (you know, not the whole "hacks" kind of mods that people stick into just any games)..... it gives the game more longevity, and allows for customization. That said, I'll almost always play the game "straight" first - can't know what you want to change without seeing how it is first, right? Also, wanting to see how the game was originally meant to be.

Now this, I don't have any problem with. They're not in my game (unless I pick the mod and use it), so how could it mean anything to me? Honestly, I've never understood the concept of getting upset that other people might mod in ways that you wouldn't..... who cares? There's a heck of a lot of mods out there where I read the description or look at a screenshot and immediately think .... but it doesn't offend me, or make my perception of the game any different.

(It also may be because I don't idolize "the lore".... sure, fine - a game has it's background & story. It's not some sacrosanct thing, though. Adding magic wands to Fallout, assault rifles to Oblivion, and sailor suits may clash tonally or visually, but "going against the lore"? Meh, whatever. )