So my mod-manager for Fallout: New Vegas (and Fallout-3 and others) recently got an update and now the game won't start. So I'm uninstalling all my mods. A time-consuming process. But it got me thinking about another of the nice things about a ~new~ Fallout game ----- we get a clean start.

I have around 146 mods (not all running at once) for Fallout New Vegas and I've used many of them for so long that I almost forget they're not part of the base game at all! Since it'll be a while before mods for Fallout-4 become available, for a while, at least, we will be running a "clean" game, created as the developers intended.

There's something to be said for going back to your roots, as it were. Of course that may also mean that you remember ~why~ you wanted to install mods in the first place.

As usual, my first mods will likely be texture / weather / color / lighting patches... unless, by some miracle, the game actually releases "clean" with a perfect appearance. It could happen, I suppose --- the videos we've seen certainly look good. How it'll look on ~my~ rig may vary, of course. At least we know we won't need to mod away the green tint that Fallout-3 put over -everything-.

It'll be interesting to see what, and how many, mods are "necessary" to make Fallout-4 the game we want it to be. Aside from new perks, new quests, new Companions, there are often UI "fixes" needed, etc. but I am hopeful that the base game will be good enough that I won't feel a need for any mods... until I ~see~ a new mod, of course. Then I may be, all, like, "Oo, I gots ta have that mod!"

It's funny you say that, because a lot of mods I've tried have actually shown me exactly why Bethesda didn't design the game that way.

I'm not so sure it's really fair to judge a game by how many mods it takes to make it "playworthy", as it were. The thing about mods is, you wouldn't be installing them in the first place if you didn't already think they were an improvement over the base game. In a lot of communities I've seen that evolve into rhetoric like "the developers are incompetent, modders do their jobs so much better"; that attitude is actually pretty tame in Bethesda's modding community, but then there are modding communities like the one around Minecraft where they have no respect at all for the original developers. It's a big problem for the Paradox gaming community, too.

I mean, the game has to be worthwhile in the first place for any decent modders to invest their time in it; there's lots to enjoy in the games despite any issues we have with some design choices.

To be honest, saying a mod makes a game playworthy is almost a nonsense unless the vast majority of players agree the mod is necessary. To this day there are mod users who actively prefer Skyrim's default UI to the SkyUI modded one.

Mostly, I see mods about making a game more to your own personal taste. Bethesda have to make a game that has broad appeal. That means it can't be too extreme, too quirky or (dare I whisper it?) too challenging.

For some people, the must-have mod will be one that disables explosive dismemberment - either because they just get shaken out of their suspension of disbelief by a light pistol making someone's head explode, or because they just don't like that much gore. For others, the absolute necessity is a mod that makes 'Bloody Mess' say "Good lord, old chap, that's a bit much!"

For both lots of people, their mod of choice makes the game playworthy - and neither mod means the developers are incompetent. Just that they can't please everybody in every detail

New Vegas had a lot of content that was first introdused as a mods for Fallout 3. Iron sights, better crafting, weapon mods and so on. Fallout 4 already has that buliding and settlement feature, which is popular mod for Skyrim and got implementation in F3 and NV as well. Ability to call Vertibird full of power armored dudes also comes from very popular mod. Action point powered sprint added by Project Nevada is very well known to everybody there and it will be in F4. So, that fresh start of yours might be just not entirely fresh, if you know what i mean.)

I usually mod in new content, especially quest content, rather than making changes to the base game's graphics or gameplay.

I have done some gameplay mods on Fallout rather than TES, though. Oftentimes I mod in a gun specific to my character that I can then tweak myself to get the shooter action feeling right. Im also running a mod for Fallout 3 right now that nerfs the Broken Steel enemies hard so that its not just annoying to fight those giant sacks of HP. A game at a technology level at atleast WW2 is kinda hard to balance the gunplay around. The medieval weaponry in TES is a lot easier to get right, mostly because there's only so many ways the various forms of weapons can be different from eachother whereas with guns it just gets exponentially worse trying to balance and develop a armoury of guns.

The only real gameplay problems ive had with the previous two games seem to be fixed, though. Fallout 3 had absolutely terribly balanced high level enemies, whereas I see the enemies in Fallout 4 going down in a realistic number of hits. New Vegas didn't have a lot of fun automatics to play with, but in Fallout 4 we've already seen a lot more automatics that look like a lot of fun.

And my god, the gunplay in Fallout 4 in general looks up to par with games all about shooting. Maybe for the next TES we'll have swordplay that is closer to my old favourite of Dark Messiah for first person melee.

I used a very small amount of mods for FO3 and FNV because there just seemed to be less mods that I felt necessary than with Skyrim. I can relate to you being ready for a clean start. That is how I feel with Skyrim. I have so many little mods to improve the appearance and add things for immersion that really should have been in the base game, such as footprints. How did could they leave footprints out when most of the game you are running through snow? It boggles my mind. With Fallout 4 I hope they get the little immersive features done well so I can rely on less mods this time around.

Yeah, when I watch my brother play vanilla games on console it's like watch a different game. There are aspects of the vanilla games that I need tweaked in order to continue playing, usually balance related for replay value. It will be a bit relaxing having a new system where balance issue are unknown and every feature is a surprise not yet taken for granted.

That being said, Bethesda games have done the same thing for me in regard to other RPGs in that I cannot tolerate most non-bethesda rpgs for longer than an hour or so.

Unmodded fallout is my only fallout experience ever soooo woohoo! I am looking forward to whatever we console players do get via mods now but they've never been possible or essential to my enjoyment of the game so Fo4 will be a thoroughly intriguing experience.

Just got through re-installing a "bare minimum" number of mods and it ended up being around 34. To be fair, though, they were things like Fellout, which modifies lighting in the game, and then a mod that made streetlights work, and another mod that made their area of effect larger, and another mod that controlled interior lighting, and four mods worth of landscape textures and one more of flora augmentations. One new perk line, about three mods to install a quest line (Arefu Expanded with patches, etc) and of course a handful of clothing mods. No real ~gameplay~ mods except that one perk line that I added in. The rest are more or less visual changes. Improvements, I'd say.

So if Fallout-4 can impress on its -own- then even when mods become available I may not feel the need for -as- many of them.

FWIW, I certainly did not mean to imply that the base game (Fallout-3 or New Vegas or Fallout-4) was a BAD game. Far from it. And I'm not saying modders are somehow ~better~ than the devs. As someone above noted, the devs have to appeal to a broad range of players and they are under time constraints that modders generally don't face (since they're not being paid).

And as only 6-8% of the player base use mods at all (Bethesda quote), modding is a vastly minority pursuit,

though clearly that will change with the introduction of console mods.

I may well install a few XB1 mods in due course,

but I will be very cautious and will stick to a few leading 'tried and tested' mods.

Skyrim didn't need any mods to make it 'playworthy', though there were many that enriched the experience. Same with Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

Oblivion, on the other hand, needed mods to fix it. Without something like Oscuro's Overhaul to fix the level scaling and an alternate character advancement system like KCAS the game was a mess. Thing about Oblivion was that it was the game most in need of fixing, but it's problems were of a sort that mods could actually address. As a result, while it was one of their worst games out of the box, it was one of their best games with the proper mods installed.