I know most of the Bethesda RPGs have massive mod support, and there’s games like Minecraft that have more mods than anyone can imagine. I would consider those games pretty playable in their vanilla states. Would you say there are any games that were “saved” by modding? Or that are still kept alive by thriving modding communities? What are some of your favorite mods?
Another vote for RimWorld, though I want to point out that the game is perfectly playable without mods, too. It is not uncommon to see someone with hundreds of mods, but the vanilla game is just as fun. People have logged thousands of hours without mods.
The ~700 mods in my current playthrough (and ~700 more inactive) strongly upvote this post.
One of the best goddamn games of all time, only made continuously better by folks like Owlchemist, Oskar and the Vanilla Expanded team, jptrrs … so much amazing work went into that community.
Yeah I logged hundreds of hours before I downloaded any mods, and even then I usually only do QoL ones to keep it as close to vanilla as possible