Do You Use Mods?

So trying to answer this I found I am very inconsistent. For many games I don't use any mods at all. The most common mods I use are typically to fix UI and I am totally ok with these on a first play-through. Gameplay changing mods I normally don't use but when I do it's on a second playthrough or for a bit of a muck around.

That being said the only time I finished Stalker entirely was with the AMK mod which is a very significant rebalance of the game but I enjoy it so strongly I basically consider it the fully realised version of the vanilla game.

I also love Bethesda games but I am one of those aberrations that actually rarely ever plays my first run with mods of any kind. Yes even UI ones. It sounds like Fallout 4 will be the first game that makes me break that streak with the "show the full line of dialogue" mod being totally essential to someone that role-plays like I do.

@hayt: I debated making the options even more specific and numerous to cover this exact idea (some games but not others), but I figure people would just gravitate towards whatever general idea fits them best, and they'd get more specific in the comments (like yourself).

I also find myself bouncing back and forth between using them and not, but I always seem to wait until my 2nd run (unless the fix is BADLY needed, like a 60FPS bump or a horrible UI), so I just went with that option as it fits me best.

Very rarely. And if I do, it's mainly just to improve or fix things. I tend not to use stuff like 'turn all particles into ducks'. Generally, I like to play games as they're intended - as vanilla as possible. The biggest exception for me is Scribblenauts Unlimited, I added a bunch of characters/objects into the game. That game is already filled with wacky nonsense, so it would be a shame not to add more wacky nonsense to the mix.

I basically do the same as @hayt, though I have no problem with using UI mods on my first playthrough of a Bethesda game.

Discounting stuff like the mod I installed to get Deus Ex running in 1920x1080 I've always play through a game the way it was intended first, but I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to playing a game from the start with mods if I heard it just made it a better experience, like that dialog mod for Fallout 4 or the KOTOR II mod to restore the cut content.

I could check options 1, 2, 3 and 7. It all depends on the game for me, most of the "day one/first playthrough" mods are ones that are specifically to fix or balance asinine design decisions made by the developer. Stuff like not being able to merge objects together in Fallout 4's settlement building.

I've made mods before but I generally don't release them. I made a small very fast and loose animation tweak for Skyrim a few days after it's release to fix the god awful Naruto run and arm jitter for dual wielding weapons. I wasn't going to release it but a few friends were whinging about the animations too so I uploaded it. Turns out that was a common thing people hated and now it has ~4k endorsements (even though it has known bugs that I can't be arsed to fix because there's better mods out there now.)

I do a lot of my own texture modding and level/environment work just as a small hobby I generally don't release anything because I have no intention of providing long term support so it's best kept to myself.

Yes, Yes and Yes.

Typically for games with massive mod support, since I enjoy such games and jump into them day 1 minute 1 of steam download/installing them..I don't use mods on the first run as there are none.

But such games tends to draw me back because a good modding scene essentially makes a second, if not third if not fourth game content wise. The amount of stuff in Bethesda's games for example at least double if not triple the content (and often its better then anything in the main game)

Then you've got stuff like, I will start the witcher 2..but find it doesn't grab me. Give is awhile, go with the community suggested overhaul and now I mainline the game for 50 hours. If such mods exist when the last of the witcher 3 DLC is released, I'd likely use those as well.

Then you've got games with limited mod support, but which make for a good second playthough. Stuff like the mods for Dragon age origin, or BG2.

Oh and then there are the complete overhauls. FTL has a mod that retools every ship in the game, adds a host of new weapons and events, and is compatible with a mod that is essentially "endless mode" where the price of everything is much higher to allow for a nice long-form run. Of course the other good example is Long War, but that kinda goes without saying given the start of the thread.

So..all of the above that involve mods. Noteably of course, I am PC gamer almost exclusively, now that we live in a time period where none of the games that I want/feel the need to play are console exclusive.

I think it's somewhat weird to consider authorial intent so strongly as to always run mod-free on the first time through a game. In the vast majority of games, I play through (at least most of) the first time without mods either because none are out that I feel are essential or it's a new game so mods barely exist.

It also really depends where we draw the line for a mod. Technically the changing of an ini file for a game that doesn't have a good FoV support in the settings is the same as a mod that changed that "hidden" setting. So does every game that I look up on WSGF or go diving into settings to fix count as modded on the first playthrough? What about Just Cause 3: the mod I downloaded literally just blocked a few files so the pointlessly long intro video didn't play. I also do that myself if there is an easily visible bink file or the like that can safely be renamed to skip brand logos after the first time I launch the game.

But, stepping beyond minor things that maybe don't touch "the game" and are more fixing "bugs" (if your FoV is only set for me on a couch then it's not the right FoV for me sat at my desk) or annoyances in the stuff around the game... I played (LttP, as I often am) Fallout: New Vegas the way the game's lead designer/project director intended. That wasn't how it shipped or was officially patched but rather with the JSawyer mod. So, was everyone else just playing the beta version of the real New Vegas? Was their experience out of the box the "modded" one? If we're saying we shouldn't change core features of games so we can experience them the way they were intended before going back and seeing them done differently via mods?

Also (to stick on a theme) the Bethesda game UIs are junk and playing on PC with mouse/keyboard with that UI means you're just getting a worse game. I'm going to say I classify that as a "fix" rather than a "mod" but I'm guessing most would say a significantly different UI is quite a long walk from playing a game the original way with only compatibility fixes. As noted by other above, everyone knows that even if they think they desire purity, Bethesda can create a crisis of faith there.

Everyone should play games however they want, I'm just somewhat dubious that an ideological differentiation of the first play-through makes as much sense as I think most of us would say we grew up assuming to be true (either via authorial intent or other reasons).

As for making mods...

I grew up on PC games so if you couldn't rewrite an autoexec.bat and config.sys to get more stuff into HiMem then your gaming options were rather limited at times. Which naturally grew into poking at other files and making sure that when Total Annihilation came around the unit limit was only a suggestion, custom version of C&C/Red Alert floated round as we made custom mods of rules.ini with different values for each unit type to cheat but also to create our own house rules. Back by the era of Duke3D then getting to run the level editor (build.exe, the engine name) was considered where it was at. I think most people I gamed with (on PC - Europe so it was more common here and even before that micro-computers had keyboards and writeable tapes) also poked at editing tools that came with games and later were the first things that got shared off the internet. Most of us were no good at it but that didn't stop everyone from trying. By the time Action Quake 2 and then Counter-Strike first arrived, we played as many of our maps as official ones at some small LANs.

So put it all together and you've got all the training required to go full into mods and most of us made various terrible and derivative things before either making more interesting stuff or walking away from creating mods. But it seemed very much of the era. You had to have gained most of those skills just from playing games on PC. Like how if Super Mario has shipped on NES with the Mario Maker level editor: of course kids who played that and wanted to get the most out of it would get a good feeling for Mario levels and take that through into later life. By around 2003 that modding was turning into actual indie game development in spots while others gave up or even just continued for personal enjoyment of creation. I'm still friends with someone who was making good maps for CS Beta 3 onwards in 1999 (that could go right up there with cs_seige, cs_mansion, cs_militia, ca_assault, and cs_tire for keeping a LAN eager for more for hours at a time - this was long after the hotness of CS had worn off and no one was prepared to play another game in cs_desert) and they still load Worldcraft (now Hammer) and make stuff to relax.

I've got no qualms at all about installing mods on my first run through a game because the mods I tend to gravitate towards are of the 'annoyance remover' variety.

Yes second playthrough or later this is probably my favorite graphics mod of all time.

Rarely. The most I'll usually do is edit or delete a few files to improve performance, remove distracting effects or skip developer intros. I like to play it as is for the most part.

None of those options really fit me. It really depends on a lot factors. First and foremost it depends on the game. Some games, like Bethesda's stuff, I mod heavily. Games that are less open and more about a developer driven experience I'm less likely to mod as much.

Another point of consideration is the mods themselves. I have no real reservations about mods that do things with the UI, visuals, performance improvements, and other non-gameplay related aspects of a game. Mods that affect mechanics or intended design are things I'll definitely stay away from in a first playthrough in most cases.

@ll_exile_ll: I understand that it varies from game to game, but if you find yourself willing to install anything extra on your first playthrough of any game (whether that's something as small as a UI tweak or a performance fix), you'd fit in the first category far better than someone who wouldn't, even if the opportunity presented itself as an easy fix with no downsides.

It's less about doing it for every game (or how extensive of a mod you are willing to use on your first go) and more about if you are willing to do it at all. Trying to encompass all options ("yes, but only non-gameplay or content fixes on my first run" "yes, but only for genre X" "yes, but etc") would lead to a 20 choice poll.

As we're talking PC, I'd find it interesting if people consider a canonical visual representation important or just that mods will rarely make things much better (so even if they used more pixels, thinking the end result is a less cohesive aesthetic with some modded in HD textures not from the original devs - at least in most cases that would mean using official art only is important for seeing what the game "looks like").

I was playing Rise of the Tomb Raider last week. But not that one, this one. Not like this, but like this. And those have very much not been taken to maximise the difference in aesthetic from changing an option the game opens for players to pick between. But that's just making things look nicer: we know the "best" setting is the most shadows. That's the design intent and scaling back is just moving further away from the art director's intent because we don't have the GPU perf to reach it and be playable.

It gets more complicated. Ambient Occlusions (more examples) doesn't just offer the "worst" option of disabling the effect and completely changing the scene's lighting composition. It offers two completely differently calculated (but reasonably comparable tech wise, HBAO+ is a bit more capableof picking up fine detail but the BTAO is not exactly miles behind the curve) ways of doing it. Do you want Option A or Option B? Check out some other comparison shots if that one made you lean hard in one direction and see if you feel the same way for all of them. But the point stands that someone had to direct the asset creation to make them all look reasonably close to their intent. But clearly they couldn't do that because any change (as this is just an effect that keys off the normals and geometry of each frame as rendered) to one would change another and anything baked in for the worst option compromises both others. How do we think about a game as having a "true" aesthetic when it comes out of the box with many different visual effects that can offer different choices for how the game looks?

Of course I do use and love mods, but that answer with "I like to play games as the developer intended" could very well mean using mods as well. Just look at all of the PC games these days with built-in mod support where the developers very much encourage mods to be used with their games.

I use mods whenever, but mostly graphics mods and sometimes quality of life mods. I put inventory mods on both witcher and fallout because it just annoyed me rather then feeling challenging to run out of space.

@mike: You are correct, although I've seen that phrase used more as an argument against modifying a game versus for it, as that statement is usually followed by a few paragraphs involving artistic intent and whether or not the development process allows for auteurism in the same way that movies can.

Again, it's probably just my poor shorthand causing confusion. I'd blow those options out to be paragraph sized, but that's a bit silly, so "I like to play exactly what the developer is handing to us as I feel that experience should be given a fair chance before modifying it in any way unless the game's original intent is to use mods as a part of that base experience" rounds down to what I wound up with; even if I didn't make myself clear, I made the poll multiple choice so go nuts. :D

Depends

• if it's a visual performance improvement (framerate, texture) say like Dsfix for DarkSouls, sure
• If it's something i need to get the game running at all llike the controller issues I had with Binary Domain, absolutely
• If it's stuff for a sandbox style game or a game that is meant to have custom campaigns that I feel is meant to be tinkered with anyway like Skyrim, Shadowrun Returns or Goat Simulator, sure
• If it's a multiplayer game that has fan mode sub-games like Warcraft or Starcraft (i.e the original DotA), sure
• If it's minor cosmetic stuff for a game (like changing a character model to look somebody else), rarely but if I saw one I liked I'd probably do it
• If it's something that I feel changes the actual story driven campaign itself away from authorial intent, like tinkering with companion romantic orientations in Dragon Age, very rarely and would only would even consider it on a second playthrough

After a first playthrough I'll dabble, sure.

I tend to like vanilla though, unless it's HL1 style mods that are more standalone (as opposed to Elder Scrolls style mods that add more monsters/spells/items/mechanics to the regular game).

I do use mods a lot, often in a second run, once I got a general feeling of the game and what I want or need changed. However, in Elder Scrolls games, since I like to take screenshots and pose my characters, I do use mods which change characters and visuals, along clothes, armor and pose mods and I even created my own companion mods.

For other games, I mostly like will use some graphic and cosmetic mods first, followed by ones which adjust gameplay.

As for changes to the gameplay and stuff I always go vanilla on my first playthrough no matter what the game, I might install some mainly eyecandy stuff though.

Increasingly I play sans mods at least initially. I kind of want to see what the game was going for and a lot of times I find I don't necessarily get that until I've sunk in quite a bit of time. Like if a difficulty mod came out for Dark Souls on PC right away that made the game easier I think that would have ruined the experience for me personally. I do make exceptions for mods that enhance a technical feature like mods that unlock better resolutions or framerates as well as mods that clean up glitches or errors.

Totally cool with others doing it though as long as it doesn't negatively affect my experience.

Really depends on the game. The first time I played Cities: Skylines, by the end I had about 750 things from the workshop installed, this time it's only 150. Most games I only go with visual tweaks and things to make them work nicer, but occasionally I'll go for content mods or just ridiculous shit like in L4D2.

Yes for some games, no for others. I had something like 40GB of mods for Skyrim, most of them visual. For Oblivion I did a similar thing. For Fallout 4, I am going to get the full dialog mod but that's about it for now. I get why that dialog mod exists now since I've been playing it more. A lot of the shortened options badly misconstrue what they are actually saying. I'm not really into the settlement building stuff.

I do also use console commands in Bethesda games a lot, mostly disabling and enabling collision and unlocking terminals since that terminal mini game is garbage and super frustrating. I don't unlock doors though because that minigame is easy. In Fallout 3, I didn't really care for the combat, so I ended up playing most of it in god mode because I just liked exploring and seeing the quests more. The combat felt entirely dull to me so I just basically removed it.

I used to really like mods for Battlefield games as well.

I'm into using fixes, ease-of-use tweaks, and technical improvements, especially for old games. Mods that significantly change the game or game balance are things left for a second playthrough.

In general I prefer to play without mods, the only exception I can think of was WoW, and it was pretty obvious that game was intended to be played with mods.

Does me waiting 3 months or so to download mods count as the first playthrough or second? In fallout 4, I haven't beat it. But I downloaded mods a couple weeks ago and started a new character (I had like 3 days worth of time on the first) the only reason why I waited was because the support wasn't there. I feel like you're missing an option.

As much as I'm a Fallout 4 sympathizer, I can't go completely vanilla.

it depends, i guess. i generally like vanilla for a first playthrough. or at least the first few hours until I get a solid feel for everything. recently while playing dragons dogma i spent the first few hours playing normally and then quickly changed some graphical and gameplay things through mods. it's a case by case basis, though. if i ever get back to fallout 4 i'll probably mod a BUNCH of stuff

I rarely play anything on PC that even if it has mod support. Around the release of Half Life 2 I was all about whatever mod I could find but I started growing away from PC games at that point thanks to a aging PC I couldn't replace. Now that I have a more beefier PC I just haven't had any interest in searching out any mods.

You're missing option: Yes, only if it's necessary or at the 10th playthrough or so.

Fallout 4 is a bad game without mods. You have to use them to make the game up par to previous installments. XCOM is a great game. I have no interest in playing XCOM 2 with mods for at least the first 10 playthroughs. After that, I'll check them out for some more interestingness.

@zevvion: gotta have that nude mod, am I right?

I tend to play through once vanilla before I go mod crazy, but I'll install mods in older games first time I play them. Always stuff like big fixes or mods to make the game work well with my monitor though, maybe cut content restoration patches.

Very rarely. I'll often say I'll use them on a second playthrough but I almost never play a game twice. And while I love the idea of mods I really have no desire to keep up on which ones are the good ones and what I have to do to install them.

I think the multiplayer mod for Just Cause 2 was the last one I messed with and before that I have no idea.

I am overly careful with mods, because I have had them mess up some of my games. For Sims 4 and one or more of them crashed my system and make the game not work. It took me a while to untangle the mess w/ Sims 4.

I like the idea of mods, but you do have to be careful. It always best to check message boards and let other people test drive mods you might want, unless you are an on the razor's edge nerd.

I added a mod in Fallout 4 that changed the radio station to play select tracks from Postmodern Jukebox and it was the highlight of that game, just exploring to these familiar songs that still sounded as if they could be lore accurate.

I mean, I also modded the hell out of the game with other stuff too but what I'm saying is that I will mod the shit out of games like that. Nothing gamebreaking or god mode or anything.

I barely use mods, but I do from time to time. Back in my WarCraft III days, I got really into the custom games, which had some modded content in there, in addition to the traditional new game types. After playing about 5-ish games of Civ V, I started to mess around with the mods, including adding a bunch of random civilizations (ever want to see Hatsune Miku go up against Big Boss and the penguins of Antarctica? Or play a Mass Effect themed game?) and adding stuff to change the game itself (more starting settlers and scouts, giving me all of the science and research unlocks, starting with a Giant Death Robot, etc.)

I installed mods for Skyrim, but after playing 150+ hours on PS3, I only ran around for like 20 minutes with them on. I would have loved to play The Longest War, but I didn't want to create an account on the site that was hosting them. But judging by how much they are pushing mods for XCOM 2, hopefully I won't miss much, or end up having something better.

So for your question, occasionally, only to mess around with the game though, and not for stuff like giving me unlimited health so I can plow through this single player campaign.

Absolutely. Whatever make the game more enjoyable. Whether it's fixing stuff like Fallout 4 conversations or encumbrance, or just prettying things up like I did with Witcher 3 on my first playthough. Sometimes I spice up an otherwise unenjoyable game in order to get through it. I made my own Day of Defeat levels for my old clan. Mods are great. I'll normally start a game and play it vanilla for a bit while taking note of what I want to mod. More often than not it's just graphical stuff or making the game more challenging.

I generally wait for my second play through, and even then I'm iffy. I always feel like I'm about to break something, creating folders within folders, overwriting dotDAT files, adding arguments to config files about not respecting particle collisions.

I'll regularly add a few community patches and graphical update mods to older games, and SteamWorks has made modding Skyrim a lot more palatable after moving from Xbox 360.

With Bethesda games so far I have played through 1st on console then gone onto PC and played through (messed about) in ultra modded mode.

With Stalker games I modded them all before playing, Atmosfear and a few others greatly improve those games.

That's all I've modded, I generally prefer vanilla experiences.

Nope, mods are for scumbags.

Why you wanna know that? You a cop or somethin?

As someone who's fortunate enough to have a gaming PC, yes, I use mods all the time. It largely depends on the game and what's desirable. I also elect for hardware/console mods when possible, since the consoles I have are out of the running for "current-gen" these days. It's easy enough to use GameSave Manager to back up saves beforehand on PC and as far as consoles and portables are concerned I generally beat the game first before I attempt to mod it since it's a lot trickier to back up saves in general.

Except for WoW I generally don't use mods. I might install a few just to check them out for a few minutes (literally) after I'm done with a game, but that's about it.

No, if i can't install them with in game or steam I don't bother. I just want to play.

Yes, if I can make a game better or add different things then I'll do it. Hell I'll us cheat engine on first playthroughs if I feel like something is unnessecarily holding me back

I use texture mods that improve graphics as well as UI mods. Any other major gameplay changing mods I only use in second playthroughs.

I just use FOV mods and texture packs. I wouldn't hesitate to use a mod that fixed something that was broken, but I generally play games vanilla.

I'm a bit of a purist. The only thing I've modded is Dark Souls. And even then, DsFix is hardly a mod and more a necessity if you really want to get the most out of that game on PC.