“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.
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.
I was always astounded by hl2 mods.
There was one in particular that I really liked but it always crashed on me when I got even a little far in it. You spawn in a hotel and have to get away from the combine or something. I don’t remember what it was called. But I really liked the idea of it.
Dragon Genitals for Monster Hunter World. Gave each monster either a realistic cloaca or an incredibly well-crafted dong, tailored to the individual style of each monster. The details were amazing, like a monster called Bagel Goose has a rock dick, but when he transforms into B-52 bomber mode he glows red hot with lava… and his cock does, too.
The Vanilla Expanded mod set for Rimworld
Does the flight sim in Excel count? If yes, then that.
Otherwise, Day of Defeat (Steam mod). Still dinere peeved that it never got the same recognition as CS.
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.
Doom 3 OpenCoop. There’s a few mods that convert the single player campaign into online co-op. At the time the competition was Last Man Standing, but I liked how vanilla OpenCoop was. There’s better mods now, and OpenCoop never left Alpha versions. Although the only game breaking bug is with the first teleporter sequence which kicked all clients from the server. Easy enough to skip that segment.
It’s a bit of a scripting nightmare since the game uses so many floor triggers for events never intended for multiple players. That’s what impresses me about the mods.
That or The Dark Mod which is now a Standalone freeware title using idTech 4 engine to make a fan sequel to the classic Looking Glass Thief games. There’s a TON of fan made high effort maps to play on.
Doom: Infinite is pretty cool. It turns it into a roguelike. It’s amazing as is, and is still in beta.
Entropy: Zero 2 For HL2 was awesome
That one that made chun li naked at that pro gamer thing awhile back.
Carball for Unreal Tournament 2004.
They completely changed the game to be a proto rocket league game many years before rocket league was a thing.
I forgot the names but there are a few amazing X-COM / UFO / Terror from the deep mods!
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.
Black mesa. Half life and half life 2 modder community is amazing.
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%.
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!
To be fair, Garry’s Mod is up there too.
The amount of customisation that one “small project” opened up in general, is astonishing.
Speaking of Half-Life mods, Entropy Zero 2 is a solid game.
There’s also some great Portal 2 mods out there as well.
