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[Hawk The Slayer]

epiesically

The nexus mods page with the games with the most mods.
Mind you it's not the only mod site, but it's s good indicator.

Yep and if we include other modding scenes than Elder Scroll games also have more like Loverslab and Morrowind used to have a whole site called Planetelder scrolls for it.

And even though games like Cyberpunk 2077, Stardewvalley, and BG3 are high up there in mod count, their mods are still nowhere as advance or complex as any of the Fallout or Elder Scroll games.

 

[Sethbacca]

Quake 2 was god tier back in the day. Rocket Arena, AQ2 (which the creator later went on to create Counterstrike), Team Fortress, etc etc. Granted it may just be nostalgia goggles on my part but it's a hill I'm willing to die on.

 

[Guilty_AI]

I'm not getting passive aggressive. I'm asking you to clarify.

I already did. You simply choose to not agree, though you did it by acting all passive agressive over it instead of simply stating it clearly.

The vast majority of people would classify these as Doom mods.

The vast majority of people can't even figure out what a visual novel is or isn't. It means nothing. Either way, you clearly have no interest in seeing eye to eye, so this conversation is over.

 

[MrAlwaysRight]

Balatro

 

[Labadal]

Shoutout to the Thief series.

 

[Pimpollo818]

Thief - not just for The Dark Mod but for fan created levels AND campaigns. I'm looking forward to setting some time aside to dig into The Black Parade.

 

[uncreativename]

I didn't realize just how many mods there were for Half Life, that's awesome.

Skyrim's the other obvious choice because the quantity is so massive, and people have done really impressive stuff with adding in new mechanics and even some total overhauls. But if I were to post 1 video for every interesting total overhaul mod for Medieval II I could probably fill 10 pages by myself. It's on another level when it comes to those.

Another honourable mention is Neverwinter Nights. Even though I don't think the game plays or performs very well, and it always looked ugly, the amount of mods, especially recreations of D&D modules, was huge and really impressive.

 

[HRK69]

The nexus mods page with the games with the most mods.
Mind you it's not the only mod site, but it's s good indicator.

Mount & Blade 2 has this many mods? Now I gotta check it out again

They even have ship-battles now, I haven't played it in years

 

[uncreativename]

The Total War scene's never been on Nexus for whatever reason . Moddb for the older games and Steam Workshop for the newer games, and that's it.

It's on this list, though https://www.moddb.com/groups/2025-mod-of-the-year-awards/top100 althougfh Half Life and Command & Conquer totally dominate at least in terms of quantity. That's awesome to see that they're still so active, I should really reinstall Half Life 1 and try some more of these .

 

[Gojiira]

Sorry but all answers that arent Doom are wrong. Objectively. Dooms modding scene produced some absolutely insane total conversions, creating full fledged RPG's, Roguelikes, Platformers and even Racing games.

My personal favourite that Im heavily biased towards is the Fallout New Vegas modders, turned a 10/10 game into a 11/10 game with some incredible quest mods that to this day are still the benchmark among the Bethesda games and total overhauls and QOL.

 

[Jack Package]

My only argument against doom is that it got to a level where its questionable if its even modding.

We have had full access to the engine's source code for a long time, full usage rights under GPL, people went on to modify and improve the engine in various ways, then others took that improved engine and made games from scratch like any other third party engine. Is that even a Doom mod anymore?

Even setting aside the engine changes, look at the sheer number of things that people have modded DOOM into over the years. There's even a bloody Sonic game that's better than most of SEGA's output!

 

[TheKratos]

The nexus mods page with the games with the most mods.
Mind you it's not the only mod site, but it's s good indicator.

I'm surprised to see Monster Hunter since you need that shitty REframework, which kills FPS, for mods to work.

 

[Drew1440]

Left 4 Dead 2, many of the custom campaigns have a lot of effort put into and are often my goto modes for replaying the game.
Unreal Tournament (Original and 2004) So much custom maps and game modes, which even spawned total conversion games that were based off the Unreal Tournament game itself like Killing Floor.
Half Life and Counter Strike for the same reasons as Unreal Tournament.

 

[Bradamante3D]

For nostalgic and historic reasons I would like to nominate the Marathon scene of the 90s and 2000s. With the third installment, Bungie gave us the official editor, but even before that the community cobbled together janky editors for the maps and the sprites. Since Marathon was a Macintosh thing, the share of people within the community who could create 2D art was quite high. The result was a sprawling scene that gave us total conversions like Marathon Evil, Tempus Irae or Marathon Rubicon. The open source release then brought all of this to a whole new level.

 

[Kacho]

Doom, hands down. Endless variety.

 

[onQ123]

I'm pretty sure it's Roblox nowadays but I used to love the mods in Unreal Tournament back in the day

 

[MiguelItUp]

DOOM 1/2.

 

[Gp1]

Skyrim, and that's not even a discussion.

Skyrim + Skyrim ED has 13bi downloads on nexus. 5x more downloads than Fallout 4, the second place, and 6x more than Cyberpunk (the first non-Bethesda game).

Plus the ecosystem is evolving for almost 25 years (Morrowind). If you entered 3 years ago on Nexus, and enters today. You will see an entirely different new set of state of the art mods that didn't even exist at the time. E.g. it changed even the renders, it went from ENBs to Community shaders with PBR etc.

 

[Durin]

Doom was the one that started it all, still gets mods to this day which is insane, and created more new game devs using those tools that then went on to make other full games.

 

[StereoVsn]

Skyrim, and that's not even a discussion.

Skyrim + Skyrim ED has 13bi downloads on nexus. 5x more downloads than Fallout 4, the second place, and 6x more than Cyberpunk (the first non-Bethesda game).

Plus the ecosystem is evolving for almost 25 years (Morrowind). If you entered 3 years ago on Nexus, and enters today. You will see an entirely different new set of state of the art mods that didn't even exist at the time. E.g. it changed even the renders, it went from ENBs to Community shaders with PBR etc.

Yeah, the amount of mods that exist for Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout series and their complexity is absolutely crazy.

Total War series has a ton of great mods and so do Paradox's strategy titles, but for sheer breadth and depth as well, ES and Fallout are unmatched.

 

[Cakeboxer]

Doom I + II. There are even other full games in that engine.

 

[falconhoof]

DOOM is such a good platform for modding.

I remember teaching my mates how to use DEU (DOOM Editing Utilities) so we could do The One Hour Challenge, where we'd build a level in one hour and challenge the rest of the group to try and beat it.

Sure it was mostly giant box rooms full of Cyberdemons, but we had a lot of fun. Kind like a proto-Mario Maker.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Mount and Blade got a lot of love from it's community, and I'm happy to see that Bannerlord keeps getting stuff.

Same with Rimworld, that game has tons of free content in the form of mods, some of them even reaching "total conversion" territory like the medieval mod.

ps: not saying those have the greatest mod communities, those are probably DOOM and Skyrim, but I wanted to give those a mention since they have a ton of stuff that really helps in making the games longer and more replayable.

 

[Gp1]

Yeah, the amount of mods that exist for Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout series and their complexity is absolutely crazy.

Total War series has a ton of great mods and so do Paradox's strategy titles, but for sheer breadth and depth as well, ES and Fallout are unmatched.

And another thing, Skyrim's source code was not released like countless other games like Doom.

 

[StereoVsn]

And another thing, Skyrim's source code was not released like countless other games like Doom.

Well, yes, but I don't think Open Source was the premise of the OP. That said Doom mods and clones were absolutely crazy for a long time.

 

[falconhoof]

DOOM also gave me a false sense of reality as it was basically the game that pushed me on to the internet, usenet and FTP mainly in search of WAD files. I got the impression that the internet was going to be a resource to find mods for every game out there.

This assumption was validated as I managed hunted down mods for some other games I was playing at the time, I forget which now. So I started to believe that every game was going to be rich with mods and extra fan made content. Sadly that didn't turn out to be true, but once the news of Quake started to build up I was good.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Thief - not just for The Dark Mod but for fan created levels AND campaigns. I'm looking forward to setting some time aside to dig into The Black Parade.

Same here! Although I'll play some other custom missions first. Heard TBP is so good that it could make other stuff look bad in comparison.

 

[Zannegan]

Mount and Blade has a lot of mods, including quite a few fundamentally change how the game plays.

 

[Ishma3L]

"and it's not even close." should be on a bingo card, somewhere, for some reason.

 

[Codes 208]

Skyrim > L4D2 > Halo MCC

 

[I Love Rock 'n' Roll]

If ROM hacks are mods, Sonic is definitely a great contender for one of the most modded games ever.

 

[Signalis]

Doom most likely.