Unlocking Video Games Through the Use of Mods
Once upon a time, video games were single, finished, finite experiences. No Patches. No Changes. No DLC. You played the creator’s vision, bugs and all. Thankfully, times have changed and we as players are no longer bound by a singular experience.
Mod noun
Additional content that has been created by either individual players or small teams to prolong, change or ‘modify’ their gaming experience.
More and more players are experimenting with adding mods to their games. The dedication and hard work of mod creators can breathe new life into games, change the look and feel of the environments and characters, add additional levels or even change the entirety of the game. The possibilities are endless.
What is a Mod?
Gamers will undoubtedly know that most games these days will come with certain options. They know that they can change the volume settings, tailor the difficulty to their preference and maybe even change certain aspects of the UI. But what happens if you want to change the FOV in a game that doesn’t have that option, or carry more in-game weight than is allowed? Well, that’s where mods come in.
To understand what Mods are, we first need to differentiate them from games that are specifically focused around User Generated Content. Games such as Media Molecule’s Dreams, or the Super Mario Maker series are ‘creation’ games, purpose-built to give the player the ability to create their own levels, games and experiences. Mods, on the other hand, are created from outside the game environment either utilising the game engine or through a bit of reverse engineering to ‘Modify’ the game in a way that the original developers had not included. Creating mods often requires varying levels of technical know-how.
To give some examples of how mods have had a huge impact on gaming, you need only look at a few of these highly influential titles:
- Playerunknown’s BattleGrounds (PUBG). PUBG took the internet by storm in 2017, and although it was eventually overshadowed by Fortnite there is no denying it was the biggest game of the year. PUBG actually began as a battle royale mod for Day-Z, which in itself was a mod for ARMA III.
- DOTA 2, which consistently has the highest number of concurrent players of any game on Steam, is a game that was created off the back of a mod for Warcraft III, Defence Of The Ancients (DOTA).
- Counter-Strike was a mod for Half-Life back in 1999 and got the coders who created it full-time jobs with one of the most prolific developers of today’s generation — Valve.
The point is, From as far back as the 90s, mods are a huge part of gaming history, going so far as to inspire and even become games. Folks were plugging in mods to the original DOOM at LAN parties back when PC gaming was just starting to find its legs, and they continue to be a way for modders to share their creativity with the people who love games just as much as they do.
Like many labours of love, creating mods is often a monumental and thankless task. There is no monetary reward for the hours that the creators put in every week, and quite frankly whatever they produce usually gets nitpicked and critiqued more intensely than the game it’s for. Nevertheless, these stalwart creators do what they do to bring new experiences to the world.
Mods Are Easier than Ever to Use
The concept of modding can be daunting to those who are new to the scene. The idea of changing files in a game with strings of code, having to manually sort out files and the game crashing constantly are probably things that come to mind when contemplating attempting it. Contrary to what you might believe, the process has become so streamlined now that modding is even available, albeit in a limited way, on consoles.
The largest collection of mods for PC, however, is at Nexus Mods, and after their overhaul a few years ago the site is quick and easy to navigate. Of course, if something isn’t on Nexus, Google is your friend.
The new interface will feel more intuitive for newcomers, but moving on from the old Nexus Mod Manager was a challenge for me.
If you do utilize Nexus Mods, it’s as simple as downloading Nexus Vortex (their proprietary program) to your computer and letting Vortex do the heavy lifting. After some setup, you should be in a great position to discover a new mod on the website, click on it, and let it install into your game without worrying about load orders or scripts extenders. This is especially true for Bethesda games, which are famous for their co-dependent relationship with the modding scene. Neither can exist without the other!
Some games will require you to use a mod organizer specific to that game, but after getting the organizer installed it shouldn’t be too much more work to get it going. If you have trouble, there are friendly modding communities over on Reddit (such as r/falloutmods and r/skyrimmods), the Nexus forums, and various other places. There’s a bit of a learning curve right at the get-go, but once you understand the basics downloading more mods becomes easy.
Indefinitely Extend the Life of a Game
Bethesda, the creator of games such as Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, is a developer that thrives off the creativity of their players. Their “Creation Kit” is available for download to anyone who wants to try their hands at modding their games. This level of freedom has allowed players to create works of art, fix thousands of bugs and create entirely new experiences within these game worlds.
Although I certainly wouldn’t qualify it as one of the greats, Fallout 4 is very possibly my favourite game of all time. I’ve spent close to 800 hours in the Commonwealth, and it’s not because of the story. Fallout 4 lent itself to mods at its conception due to the focus on settlement building, but just about everything in the game was made by Bethesda to be malleable. After Skyrim’s impossibly long life as a mainstay of pop culture, they’d be insane not to; people are still making (terrible) jokes about taking an arrow to the knee because Skyrim became an infinite playground for modders to test the absolute limit of their creativity.
I have played Fallout 4 through an incredible number of configurations. A Breaking Bad run where I played as Walt, fedora and all, and had an Aaron Paul lookalike companion assist me in selling chems. A Silent Hill run featuring absolute darkness, 1-foot visibility fog and scarce ammo. A Resident Evil playthrough where I crossed an ever-dark wasteland full of zombie hordes and creatures too gruesome to describe, all the while trying to prevent my companions from contracting the G-Virus. I’ve built perfect utopia cities and filled them entirely with synths, I’ve emptied the map of humans in a Frost survival simulation, I’ve done a playthrough as a vampire and attempted to infect the entire commonwealth and even added dragons straight from Skyrim into the game. I’ve turned Mirelurks into anime girls and anime girls into Deathclaws. I have lived two dozen different lives, played two dozen entirely different games all through one singular medium: Fallout 4. All of which has been made possible through the hard-work and dedication of individuals and small teams who work for a singular purpose: our entertainment.
If you’re looking to try out the game, check out my personal list of essential mods for your first playthrough. Fallout 4 is certainly not a perfect RPG, but it’s a wonderful sandbox to build the post-apocalyptic world of your dreams.
Make an Entirely New Game Inside a Game
Mods are sometimes as simple as changing the colour of an item within a game, or giving someone a new name. But others are known as ‘total conversions’ and can be the same size, if not bigger than the game they were originally based on.
There are many examples of this level of commitment and dedication in mods, games such as Enderal for Skyrim, Black Mesa for Half-Life 2 and Day Z for ARMA 2.
One of the most recent is the total conversion mod for Minecraft — “Witchcraft and Wizardry”. Created over four years by the (again, unpain) modders over at The Floo Network.
Witchcraft and Wizardry is, after just a week of release, being touted by many as one of the best Harry Potter games ever (this is Quidditch World Cup (2003) erasure and I won’t stand for it). This game, this full, functioning Harry Potter MMO where you can really attend Hogwarts, is all happening within Minecraft. The scope of this project is enormous — you create a character, attend real classes with real students, practice magic, play Quidditch and just mess around like you would at any school. This is the first and only Harry Potter game where you can just go to school and learn magic, which is the most basic of the conceits of that franchise. Why would a group of determined nerds pour their blood, sweat and tears into every ounce of this project for little or no financial gain? Because they care. Mod developers work for nothing but the love of the game, and that is why they can successfully create entirely new, passion-driven and inspired worlds with the tools that “real” game developers have given us. That especially holds true for beloved franchises like Harry Potter that many fans feel deserve better.
Explore Your Favorite Characters
Speaking of franchises, it’s no secret that licensing has always been tricky in games. Anyone who was born in the 90s remembers that every movie from around 1999–2007 absolutely had to have a tie-in video game that was almost guaranteed to be awful. In this time period, we received a lot of games featuring beloved characters like Shrek, Jack Sparrow and Ratatouille — but none of these licensed products allowed gamers to have the fun that they knew they could be having. Enter mods.
Games are ultimately about having fun. It is true that Dreamworks does own the Shrek IP, and as such, they are the only ones licensed to make money off of the IP. But what about those people who are in it just for the love of Shrek? The grey area modders work in is carefully monitored by large corporations with a mutual agreement that IPs can be freely used as long as the mod developers aren’t receiving monetary rewards (including gifts/donations). If Shrek is going to truly create an entertaining experience in Breath of the Wild, why not? If shooting Thomas the Tank Engine out of a Fat Man in Fallout 4 is fun, why not? Everyone loves a good crossover, and there’s nothing that’ll give you that good crossover buzz like having the Animal Crossing Villager fly a Tie-Fighter across the plains of Skyrim.
Using Mods to Make Games More Accessible
Perhaps I’m digging a grave for myself here, but FromSoftware’s games are too hard for me to enjoy. I just don’t have the time or the patience to “git gud” at them, and frankly spending three hours on one boss fight isn’t appealing to me — I’ve got to do my taxes and clean my kitchen. Do you know what is appealing to me, though? Exploring a beautifully built, expansive map of a mythological feudal Japan that never was, meeting the monsters that inhabit it and striking them down. When I began FromSoft’s seminal work Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, I quickly conceded that as it was, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. Not that it was bad, but that it wasn’t tailored to me. I gave up on Bloodborne after eight hours of self-inflicted torture five years ago and dropped Dark Souls III after spending four hours on the tutorial boss. Don’t get me wrong, I like an ultra-hard challenge when I’m in a high-octane nonstop Platinum game like Astral Chain or Bayonetta, but something about the methodical and planned combat of the Soulsborne games doesn’t resonate with me. It’s aggravating, frustrating and depressing to watch myself die over and over again. Still, I was happy to pay $40 for Sekiro because I knew I could mod it to be a game I would enjoy.
There is certainly a point to be made about playing a game as the developer intended it, but while you may personally be excited to play certain kinds of very hard games, be aware that others want that same experience but may be physically incapable of obtaining it the way the developer wanted. In Sekiro, I ran a mod that essentially gave me a lot more health to begin with. The difficulty of the game remained the same, but now I had a slight advantage. That small change in the game made a world of difference — I suddenly felt that victory was possible. My parrying, dodging, and striking skills still had to be honed slowly through practice, but the crutch of having a larger health bar kept me sane throughout. With this I was able to explore one of the most beautifully crafted action-adventure games ever, and without mods I’d have never gotten past the tutorial.
The way that you play and enjoy a game is not the same for every gamer out there, and you should feel no pressure to enjoy a game the way everyone else has. The way a game was intended to be played isn’t going to yield the most fun for everyone. Let yourself enjoy a game to its fullest; you’ve earned it. Mods can bring new life to a game you’ve spent hundreds of hours on. You can use them to tailor the experience to make it right for you, all the way down to the small stuff like FOV sliders and altering the HUD. You could mix up characters, settings, plots and items from your favourite other games and live in what is essentially your own fan fiction. Whatever the reason, hit up NexusMods or any similar site to find the best way for you to play. Treat yo’ self.
WeThePlayers.com is a friendly and social website dedicated to the players of video games.
