I miss when the mod scene was huge.
I mean man, you could buy hl1 back in the day and you never needed to buy another game because there were so many damn awesome mods.
It's so sad the mod scene died out.
Yeah, unreal tournament and quake 1 - 3 also had that. Plus games like never winter nights 1 & 2 was designed for modding. Not only did they have 50+ hour campaigns (which you could play single or multiplayer) you had 100s of well made player modules and conversions. Similar to skyrim mods but different.
Also there still is a mod community for games like thief. There are 1000s of fan made missions anf even a 15 episode expansion sequel called thief2x. That's for the first two games. The 3rd has them as well. Then people took the doom3 engine and made the dark mod. Basically a platform for making thief games.
Skyrim and fallout, as well as mount and blade games also still have a crazy modding community and its still insanely strong.
Modding total conversions or new games are still being done you just have to know where to look.
Maybe not as much in the multiplayer realm anymore, but I don't know, I avoid multiplayer only mods or games. It's hard for modders or devs to get Gen z to buy games and away from the free2play gaas ju k, unfortunately. Which is why we don't see quake 5 or unreal tournament, sadly.