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I knew you could hang dong uncensored in BG3, and I even remember seeing a Reddit post of someone rapidly shaking their guy around in the character creator just to watch it flop around. But I never stopped to think about the fact that jiggle physics of the penis don't just happen as a side effect of including a dingledang on the 3D model. Someone had to devote time and effort to making it happen.
I feel like, personally, I'd have a moment like the Rick and Morty meme of the Butter Robot asking what it's purpose is if I was told my job was to make a Tiefling's weeny flop around. So glad to hear they apparently had fun with it. 💀
For the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Editions I always recommend restoring the original cutscenes and a fix for the Journal UI. To me those mods restore the original intent rather than override it. Then again modding those games isn't the easiest so it's not for everyone..
Withers is the original god of death that hangs out at your camp to res people and respec them. He looks like classic dead guy but the big naturals mod gives him big fat tits, the way the gods of DnD intended.
Look, we need an explanation for the unusually low average cupsize of the clearly European population, gods and hags draining titty fat and hiding it on the undead is just classic folklore.
I didn't know this game had mods my first run. After I found out, I immediately installed bag mods so I could loot things and keep them without having to send them to Lae'zel
New games also come out with big performance issues, and there are mods to supposedly help/fix them. Although I'm not sure how much those community patches actually help vs. placebo for new releases.
And the reason Civ V is the peak of the series. Civ IV had been built deliberately to be incredibly mod-friendly, the developers going out of their way to build a modular scripting system into the game specifically for modders to be able to access more.
Then, once IV had grown a mature modding community, mine it for talent to hire as devs for V. I don't know if that was actually a long-term plan or it just panned out that way, but damn it worked out well.
7 days is an entire shit show and the only reason they went out of Early Access was so people would stop complaining about it, they were tired of being the punching bag. Going out of Early Access didn't change much though and they still make massive sweeping changes to the gameplay on a whim.
Yeah, when you have a post release roadmap that includes adding features that were promised for during early access, I dont think you can call that full release.
I will push back against the idea that older games just came out perfect with no issues.
PC games needing a some major patches after launch has been a thing for like 2 decades now.
MH Wilds on release was a stutterfest for my brother until I suggested installing reframework. It somehow managed to fix the DRM conflict between Denuvo and Capcom's own DRM and the stutters were mostly gone
Every UE5 game that comes out gets the exact same Ultimate Engine Tweaks mod and the guy who created it legit just copy and pastes the same Engine.ini for every single game lol. Digital foundry even had a whole segment on one of their podcasts breaking down how the mod doesn't actually effect anything at all, yet this mod still somehow has millions of downloads across dozens of games. It's hilarious how gullible people are.
It took years for modders to get fallout new Vegas into a stable state. For new releases there's near zero chance that these community patch mods would be a net benefit unless they are fixing a game breaking issue the devs haven't addressed.
Oh, I remember very quickly installing a map mod for Cyberpunk because it was virtually unusable with fast vehicles (I also quickly added a car handling mod)
Or just games that weren't originally made for PC. When Dark Souls 1 got ported through Games for Windows, the mod DSFix was all but recommended by the publisher itself as without it the game would be virtually unplayable.
GOG even offered this automatically for some games, like Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines. For the longest time, the community patches were available straight from GoG. Now that it's part of the GoG Preservation Program, though, it's being upkept by GoG themselves.
A few years ago, I got Skyrim on the Switch and the game would constantly freeze and brick saves when taking frost damage. I forgot how buggy the game could be without the unofficial patch.
First one I thought of was Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The fan patch is so essential that GOG includes it in the download. I also had issues playing KOTOR without some modernizing patches.
'Fuck it, the community will fix it in post. And then, once we've gone a decade doing that, then let's try to ask them to pay to do so!'
Modders are the heroes of many communities, but they shouldn't be the ones to shoulder the burden of fixing a game. See: the horribly taken-advantage-of errata writers for the Shadowrun 5E TTRPG.
Now, those for games with mod support that approved by the creators like Larian with BG3, that's the example to strive for!
Yeah their approach to Starfield made me write them off completely, releasing an overhyped, mid, bug-riddled experience that they were counting on modders to fix. Why do the work yourself when your community will do it for free? (Or even pay for it)
For performance fixes you should definitely play a bit first. You need to know the performance without the mod so you can figure out if the performance mod actually works.
Remember the monster hunter wild performance fix? The one that fixed the issue that only appeared while you were by the quest board? People swore up and down that fixed all the games performance issues.
I've seen a lot of "performance" fix mods that do nothing.
it was ported to ios the year after it was released... because smartphones totally already existed during its release, they just werent ubiquitous enough yet
Something I have learned in the gaming community is there is a strange occurrence where some folks seem to stress about how others experience games.
I am a firm believer in playing any game on any difficulty at any graphical setting and modified any way that you like. A good game is a game you are playing, literally nothing else matters. Lol.
yeah IMO the real critieria here is what mods. the problems come up when someone just starts picking a la carte from nexus mods on their own and doesn't understand that this "realism" mod basically makes the game tedious with mechanics that barely interact at all with the rest of the game or that the "QoL" mod removes an important point of friction that gives you a reason to do the actually fun parts of the game.
if there's someone knowledgeable making a modpack, you're getting a curated experience with actual intent behind it, often a superior one due to the benefit of hindsight and not being beholden to release dates. literally most of the binding of isaac expansions, the version of the game most people play for the first time, is just pre-modded isaac, it's all content from mods. what makes it good is that it's curated mod content that's been reasonably balanced.
OP is also vague. What does "try" mean? Should I be completing the game first in its intended design, or is it okay if I start modding the fuck out of it to make it not insufferable whenever I meet an obstacle?
Certain mod packages for some games change the core loop so much that you’re almost playing an entirely different game just running proprietarily in engine.
STALKER is where I see this debate most frequently and I don’t think either perspective is incorrect I just think it comes down to user preference. Does the user want to play stalker to experience the narrative or does the user want to play stalker to experience surviving in the world.
I love that on PC we get to actually wrestle with this idea rather than being limited like gamers are on consoles.
I never played the original trilogy and i have put in a decent chunk of time into gamma. If I tried years ago I would probably enjoy it, but in 2026 I think gamma is just a better experience. Stalker for me is the setting, world, atmosphere more than anything and gamma is such a immersive experience
+Without hurting the experience of other people,
we dont want people to ruin other people's game by cheating on online games just because "they can play however they want"
Reminded me when I joined a random lobby with a stealth mandatory mission and they just killed every guard and nothing happened, confused me for bit and I left the second time the mission loaded in
While these do include things like resource skins make something like stone invisible, there's also things like minimaps, world maps, chest/invetory trackers, armor values mob hp values, easier village traders, and so much more.
Video games are designed to give the player things to *want*. You start out broke, so you want money. You start out weak, so you want to become strong.
But the trouble is, if you give the player what they want in a naive way, it's a dissatisfying experience. Have you ever discovered an infinite money glitch, and teetered on the precipice of becoming infinitely rich? And part of you thought "I should ignore this, it feels wrong somehow," while another part thought "this is what I wanted, wasn't it? To become rich?"
That tension isn't usually inherently the desired experience - either for the gamer or the game designer. Because now you've asked the player to fight against themselves - to realize that what they wanted was the *struggle* to get the money, not just the money itself. In a moment like that, you've peeled away the veil and asked the player not to play "however they want," but instead to become a miniature game designer, and enforce the rules of the world so they can keep playing the game - and keep striving.
Which isn't to say finding an infinite money glitch isn't fun, or even the point of how some people play their games. But that the fundamental experience of a naive player is, they want to be *told* what to want. That is, they what to be told what the point of the game is, so they can play it. I'm not using naive pejoratively. It's the phenomenon people refer to when they say " I wish I could play this game for the first time again." It's arguably the most fun way to play games, most of the time.
Ultimately I guess I agree with OP. Particularly with manually constructing one's own modlist. (There are other kinds of modding, which could arguably just be playing a different game than the original one. Look at Enderal for example). But modding the game manually means temporarily discarding what the *player* wants, and becoming a game designer instead. Choosing to do that before playing the game in the first place should be approached with caution.
I like your point. It's definitely a subtle subject, and I kind of did some sleight-of-hand regarding the definition of the word "want" in my argument.
But it's worth mentioning that the player will find it difficult to know what the game supplies or does not supply without having played the game for a while first!
Meh, that's what you are into. Some people just want to see the story or experience the art without pushing through the actual games systems. Sometime I want to play the first 2 games of a series but not dwell in them so I can get to the 3rd.
Exactly. If you're just going to mod all the difficulty out of the game, you might as well open YouTube and watch someone else play it. Then you don't even have to waste money paying for the game, or waste time setting up mods.
Just because you can't stop someone from doing something doesn't mean you have to like or respect it. I absolutely will think less of the Booktok people who say they only read the dialogue parts of books and skip the rest, or those grindset influencers who say they read a thousand novels a year but it's exclusively by skimming summaries. At the very least I'm not going to include them in a conversation about the specifics of any of those books because they've not actually read them and have no insight to contribute.
If you never play the game as intended before you start modifying it you don't have a good sense for what to change, what you don't like, what should be added or removed. It also complicates the process of deciding what to change because you don't know if something is vanilla unless it's plainly obvious (like the speed of a certain weapon vs a large cutscene).
Three examples from games I played A LOT, and would recommend even for new players:
XCOM 2 - Stop Wasting My Time: Speeds up animations and reduces the amount of random lock-ups between turns. Self explanatory, the devs didn't intend them, pretty sure.
Slay the Spire: Permanent Neow: Allows the player to always start with 4 choices of buffs at the start, instead of only having two if the player didn't reach the boss in the previous run. The developers themselves said this was bad design, and in slay the spire 2, they removed this restriction.
Darkest Dungeon: Speed mods. Faster walking, Faster combat, etc: The game is INSANELY slow. My first time through took me 150 hours of playtime to beat.
Maybe the game is just old and needs mods to work properly at current resolutions etc? Just run it and get a bad experience, or use the mods recommended by people who spent years making it a good one.
Mate, I'm a grown up with a job. Some game mechanics are just ass and don't respect my time. Durability in survival games for instance, I don't want to spend all my time fixing my gear, just let me change that man.
Any mechanic that fricks with my ability to put the game down and pick it back up at MY prerogative gets modded out on principle. Kingdom Come Deliverance makes you collect herbs and play a potion brewing mini game to make Save your game potions. I downloaded the mod to get rid of that mechanic before I finished buying the damn game.
It's a torn subject area. I understand creating friction in the experience. Frictionless games are often devoid of anything interesting. But I also recognize that I don't need to accept any friction I choose not to. This often comes in the form of me just choosing something else to play, but sometimes a cheat is just the right thing to overcome an incompatible design. And everyone needs to chill the fuck out about arguing the "right way" to play anything.
My role model lol. But fr you’re so right. These folks are acting like video games came into existence just yesterday. You don’t need to try the fishing mini game to know if you want to mod it out in a game where it’s a part of the experience if you already know you don’t like/enjoy fishing in games. A person with severe arachnophobia doesn’t need to experience the giant spiders in a game to know if they want to turn them all into spyro for their peace of mind. You’d think such common sense would be common but here we are.
If you have been coding/modding for a while, you would know that the documentation is not always 100% accurate. Sometimes things change but the documentation doesn't.
LOL. I played hours and hours of vanilla console Beth games before going full PC in 2020 and now ALL the Beth games are getting modded. Not starfield tho, I refunded that game.
I can't play with the low FOV in FO4 without mods and that's the only game I've bothered to try, that being said, Bethesda games are known for needing community patches, so it just felt like the thing to say.
They should have an award for most persistent bugs.
You’d think when porting a game for the 2nd or 3rd time, some dev would sit down for an hour and check what the community has fixed. Some of their bugs are so damn persistent they survived the transition to UE5.
That’s impressive, since the community patched some of those more than 10 years ago.
the physics, animations, collisions etc.. all run on it too. it's msotly just the data side and some of the AI that runs on the creation engine side still.
I've played through everything since Morrowind. I've only bothered with a handful of mods when the creation store or whatever they called it came along and I've played them without first.
Unless it straight up won't run you can experience them without mods first.
The issue being that, if you haven't tried the game in its "original state" before installing mods, how can you say the modded game will give you the most fun and joy? You have nothing to compare your modded experience to. Maybe the base game would actually be more fun.
That's like saying "You should taste your meal before adding salt". Yes, maybe you'd like it better with more salt. But then again, maybe not, so why not taste it before altering it?
OP is not saying you shouldn't be allowed to "play how you want". They're not advocating against mods, just like my example is not advocating against salt.
Depends on the mod. A whole graphical overall? Probably not. A mod to make the menu work well on mouse and keyboard because the controller design makes m&k almost unusable? Fuck yes.
I usually do play vanilla first but quickly realize how dog shit it is and fix/expand it and start my 2nd run pretty fast. Not all games, but a lot of them. Mods are the coolest part of gaming for me, like legit they are the reason I play some games like RimWorld, Kenshi, Terrarria, MC, or Factorio.
I didn't know people even modded games before trying them. How do people know what they need or want to mod before trying the game to find what is missing or needs improvement?
Yep, I've always been a big advocate for experiencing the first playthrough without the mods to understand the artistic intent, even if it's a flawed one.
Okay sure but me trying my food before adding salt takes me 2 and a half seconds of scooping some food in my mouth, doing a playthrough might take me 50 hours
When cyberpunk first released, it was a let down. I decided it would be an awesome game once some more work had been put in to it. A couple years later I decided my first playthrough would be modded. No regrets at all. You can only experience a game for the first time once, and lemme tell you, playing cyberpunk with 200 mods on a first playthrough is the best thing ever.
As a working parent my gaming time is more limited than I like. I don't want to invest time in a game and then play again with mods to see what I was missing. Sometimes I just want to play through with the community best experience from the start.
Granted sometimes it will be the vanilla experience but sometimes there are games that are so moddable that it's almost like a second options screen.
Unless it's a mandatory mod for making the game playable. For example, if you play on mouse and keyboard, NAIOM is pretty much mandatory for playing Nier:Automata as the default controls suck beyond measure.
Me, mostly for QOL, especially when i am not planning on reolaying the game. I usually play vanilla for the first hour to catalogue what features i want or need for the game.
I just did with Kingdom come deliverance 2 and previously with cyberpunk. I added to both mods that increased lethality of weapons and needs for survival and I am quite satisfied of both experiences.
I'm actually doing a modded first-run of KCD2 rn lol.
But it only half-counts because I did play vanilla KCD 1 and a lot of the mechanics are similar. So I knew which mods to pick to not deviate from the original design too much (like "More Visible Herbs" or "Sorted Inventory").
Not like it would've mattered. I'm playing Evil Henry this time and sneak killing everyone lmao, I don't need no mods to be OP.
Honestly nowadays I kind of get that. There's so many mods and mod packs that change the experience completely, and the game has underwent a lot of changes to specifically make it more modding-friendly (like how basically everything in the game now exists as a file on your hard drive that you can change).
Mojang/Microsoft are very much encouraging modding as a form of play.
It's also the case that the vanilla game's progression is so convoluted that playing with mods is better/easier for some people.
It’s like when people use cheat codes for their first time playing a game, then saying it’s boring or too easy causing them to hate the game from that moment on.
Play the artwork in the original state, enjoy it how it was intended, then go nuts with cheats and mods.
I always do first plays completely vanilla, and by completion I know exactly the types of mods I want/need to fine-tune the game to my personal preferences.
Project Zomboid. I can’t grasp the fun in this game over the tedium. Like I can’t play a full run because all these nerds who no life this game say you should survive winter but it’s a chore and boring after a few hours into a run. Once you get past the initial looting of finding better stuff it’s like they still never figured out how to make a good survival game over the pursuit of a hyper realistic one.
I'm 100% in this boat. A lot of effort and design went into the vanilla experience. You should at least appreciate it before nodding as that tends to suck the life out of whatever you are playing.
CMV but there’s some studios where certain mods are almost a necessity.
Playing a Bethesda game bone stock is for console players who don’t get a choice in the matter. They always leave some bugs for the community to fix, so at least pick up a community unofficial patch to avoid the garbage they’ve left unpatched despite selling the same game multiple times through different editions.
I can't say I have any issues with using bugfix/performance mods on a first playthrough or using mods with a game that's more mod-focused like Garry's Mod.
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u/PCMRBot Bot Sep 07 '26
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
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