I mentioned before in Non-Optional Optionality that I was gonna talk about mods in games being optional.
You know what’s optional? Stuff outside the game, like mods. Sure, mods are fun and all but you don’t need them to enjoy the game (in theory). But they are optional, because they don’t occupy any space. I might make a proper post about modding being optional because it is in most cases, but properly made games don’t need mods, they are optional.
Now it’s the time to talk about it.
An Unique Position
The IBM-PC clones we use nowadays, shortened to just PC, is an unique platform for games unlike any others out there. Why? Because we can essentially ‘Ship of Theseus‘ it and continue to have it working. All the parts change but it’s still a PC. We might swap OSes but it’s still a PC. And that puts PCs for games in an unique position.
The previous generation of CPUs might run the games before faster, better, whatever, making some of the things that exist in the previous games work differently. Back in the day, a CPU twice as fast as the previous one made games play twice as fast too, and broke its internal logic, as it was an unexpected behavior. And games that used to work just fine 20 years ago have to be patched externally to run properly.
Mods That Makes Games Playable
Case in point: Grand Theft Auto. It started its life on PC and moved to consoles and never looked back. While there are PC ports of many of the titles, the only one that can be called ‘good’ is Grand Theft Auto V, that runs in a variety of systems pretty well. For all of the others, you need mods to get it to work properly.
SilentPatch(despite the name, it’s a mod) fixes the game in multiple ways, turning them into playable. It’s almost a necessity to play it if you want to do a normal playthrough of all the 3D Universe games (3, Vice City and San Andreas). There’s also Widescreen Fixes for all the games, because they were made for an era that didn’t have widescreen, and the attempts to make it work for 16:9 screens look wonky, so you need that too. There’s also a bunch of more stuff you need to make it playable, such as GInput (as controller support for them is wonky), but you get the point.
In PC Ports Redemption, I mentioned GTAIV. For that game, you need FusionFix, as it has many quality of life features and with built-in DXVK, performance is actually decent now.
I also mentioned Saints Row 2 in that post and good lord, that one is a mess. Thankfully Juiced Patch got it working pretty well. They ported the DLC too, so PC owners can finally deal with Ultor’s crap and not have to get a PS3 or Xbox 360 for it.
There are more examples to the list, and most of them are older games made for the Windows XP era. So many of them need external fanmade fixes and mods to get it to work. Max Payne 1and 2 need widescreen fixes, Driver 3 and Parallel Lines as well, Soldier of Fortune, Call of Duty 1 and 2… The list goes on, just check the PC Gaming Wiki list for games that require mods to just work normally.
Mods To Enhance the Experience to be a Baseline Experience
The other type of mod that exists is the one that makes the game enjoyable by making it whole in the first place. There are many many games that are lacking in multiple ways to make it enjoyable.
Several of those being games made by Bethesda. I can not list the amount of mods made for Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that fix the game’s deficiencies. Sure they are enjoyable enough on their own without mods, but they are not what I’d call a 100% experience, so you need something. Thankfully, there’s something for everyone.
There are others where the whole point is to make the experience the way you want by offering the bare minimum. One of them is Assetto Corsa, a racing simulator with barely enough for you to get started but with tons of mods that fix a lot of the game’s problems, such as UI, controls, lack of cars, lack of tracks, so on.
Adding to the above, Garry’s Mod offers a baseline experience, which is vanilla HL2 and with mods, you can make everything you want. A zombie shooter? Co-op experience with an extraction mechanic? Horror game? Platform puzzle? Yeah, just find the right game-mode and start playing. S&box, it’s indirect sequel, is trash, don’t play it.
There are others I might be forgetting but overall, there are mods that make the experience 100%.
Why is it so complex?
You might ask why do we need to modify the games to make them work, if it’s all just on PC.
The real problem with these games is what I mentioned at the start, a PC from 20 years ago isn’t same as today. And even though it was a functional computer at the time, things weren’t made with forward-compatibility in mind. This is an advantage that PCs can have and could be utilized but seldom was. GTA3’s default to make things widescreen is to make the image less wide but not the HUD elements. Back in 2001/2002, widescreen wasn’t a thing, so you can give it a discount, but the developers never went back and updated it officially, so the community did it instead.
New releases were treated as a new and separate thing, and updating games constantly was mostly a PC thing, where you could release hotfixes and patches to game-breaking bugs and other similar issues. Now that we got it on consoles too, things are much better in a way, but older games still need some mods to be playable.
Closing Words
Mods are fun but when a mod is a requirement to make the game work, it’s arguable to call it a mod and more of a ‘fan made patch’ because the alternative is to make a PC build from the era where the game came from to run it.
But ultimately, I feel that games should at least be patched to be run on current hardware, assuming the dev is still around. And obviously not do a poor job on it because, you’d never mods to fix it and we just enter a loop, that is pretty hard to get out from.