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Game Mod / Role-Playing Games

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Game Mods of Role-Playing Games

  • Baldur's Gate II has what is arguably the longest standing modding community of all games, still very active after over twenty years past its initial release. The Enhanced Edition release in 2012 injected new life into the franchise with a corresponding invigoration in modding interest. Most common additions allow the player to complete new quests, recruit new NPCs, and add new dialogue and romance options. More technically, there are mods for new items, shops, character class kits, and adjusted combat and alignment mechanics. Some of the most popular and long-lasting mods include:
    • Ascension: Created by Bioware design director David Gaider in his spare time after the game's release, Ascension completely revamps Throne of Bhaal. The mod includes bugfixes, upgraded difficulty and AI for almost all of the bosses in the expansion, additional dialogue for Imoen and Sarevok (including a new conversation if you carried over his Sword of Chaos from II's opening dungeon), an upgradable Slayer experience tree, the ability to convince Balthazar or Bodhi to assist you during the final battle, and extended epilogues. Additional submods tied into Ascension include Turnabout, which allows the player the option of summoning additional NPC's (up to and including plot-mandated dead squadmates, Gorion or the Player Character's mother), and Redemption, which allows you to recruit (and redeem) Jon Irenicus as a party member.
    • Unfinished Business: Comprised of side missions, extra dialogue and gameplay encounters that were cut and not properly implemented into the game. The fanbase used script remnants, interviews with Gaider detailing the cut material and voice files to reconstruct the missing elements, which include a Minsc side mission, dialogue between Valygar and Suna Seni, restored character creation kits, missing items and NPC portraits, and more. A similar mod of restored content also exists for the first game.
    • Kelsey NPC: Far and away one of the best and most popular NPC additions, Kelsey is a sorcerer from a family background of successful merchants. He is fully voiced, with banter options with all the standard NPCs, a romance option for female PCs, a fair number of sidequests, and is fully playable through the end of Throne of Bhaal.
    • Baldur's Gate Trilogy: One of the few so-called megamods, BGT is designed to take all of BG1's content and convert it into the BG2 engine. This, along with some added dialogue options, allow both games, along with their expansions, to be played as a single massive game. This has also opened up many modders to add content to BG1, whereas it was originally neglected as being difficult to modify. But with BGT installed, both games run on the same engine and thus modifications based on the sequel's engine can be introduced into the original game. In the same way, NPCs can be introduced in the first game and be made to run seamlessly through the entire series.
    • Big World Project: An insanely ambitious mod still in production, the BWP is less a mod and more of a toolset with a number of utilities designed to do no less than let the player download and install any combination of hundreds of available mods, resolve all conflicts between them, patch some mods with others, and debug the entire package. The BWP installs them for you, debugs and deconflicts them for you according to preestablished rulesets for priority, and despite still being in development, can install several gigs worth of WeiDU-based mods with minimum difficulty. Though if you're installing any appreciable number, the entire process can take several hours to complete. It is, quite simply, the ultimate in ease-of-use, hands free mod installation for the Baldur's Gate series.
    • Infinity Animations: Less a single mod and more a Baldur's Gate modding sub-community in of itself. Infinity Animations is group of graphics modders dedicated to improving the appearance and quality of the many paper dolls and creature animations throughout the game. They are also responsible for importing creatures from the graphically superior Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment games to take the place of their outdated Baldur's Gate counterparts. Thanks to their work, there are now paper dolls reflecting the many race, gender, and equipment combinations available, allowing for a truly customizable character appearance. IA also serves as a central clearinghouse for mod-created creatures, ensuring that there are no duplicate creature creations in the database and designating unique file assignments so there are no overlapping file names, allowing a player to download any number of IA-approved mods without having to worry about deconfliction issues.
    • Throne of Bhaal Extender (TobEx): A popular pre-loading program designed to be loaded with the game itself. It is difficult to explain precisely what it does, per se, but it is designed to soft code fixes directly into the game's executable in order fix problems and make changes to the engine itself as the game is played. At present, it fixes the infamous "stutter bug" caused by an overabundance of global event counters collected in long-running games. It also modifies the character creation process and other screens to insert a scroll bar where none existed before, allowing for a theoretically infinite number of kits and spells to be selected where before the only ones available were those that could fit onto the static screen. Dozens of other "behind the scenes" mechanical fixes are also present for game stability. TobEx's work is so popular that its creator, Ascension64, is one of the lead fan contributors to the game's 2012 official relaunch and most of TobEx's features will be included in the revamped engine.
    • BG2 superfan Wesley Weimer famously created the WeiDU interface, which was a hybrid script/text file extender that could be used to add modular pieces of new content to the existing game. It would be easier to count the number of mods that don't use the WeiDU format in some way, as without a way to automatically modify the game's text files, making any changes to dialogue, item stats, or character actions would be impossible, or would turn the game into a garbled mess after only one or two mods installed in any other way. In addition, Weimer created several well-known mods for the game, including Solaufein (which adds the Drow from Ust Natha to the party), Item Upgrade (which allows for new items, weapons and armor to be crafted) and Tactics (which greatly increases the difficulty and variation of enemy encounters).
  • Baldurs Gate 3 is set to carry on this tradition. While a plethora of mods already existed for the PC version, Larian announced in February 2024 that official modding tools were in the works, including a plan for bringing mods to the console versions of the game.
  • Both the original Neverwinter Nights and its sequel came with all the tools needed to build new adventures. This is because they were conceived as "Dungeons & Dragons on your PC": A DM would make a campaign, use the modding tools to build a session, referee it as a hosted netgame on his computer, and the rest of his group of players would all log in and run it from their computers, sort of like a virtual tabletop. The original Neverwinter Nights is probably the king of this trope. It's been out for years, and the toolset is considered, at least was considered, to be one of the best, most complete ever created. Essentially, you can make (and some people have made) content at least as good as the original and expansion content, in terms of complexity, depth, and detail—case in point: A Dance with Rogues. Culminating in Baldur's Gate Reloaded which recreates the entirety of Baldur's Gate with the Tales of Sword Coast North expansion as a Neverwinter Nights 2 module (though with the standard 3.5 DND game mechanics, classes, and races available in NWN2). GOG.com, which sells Baldur's Gate, even featured the mod on their site.
  • Dragon Age similarly spawned an active modding community, which is somewhat fitting for the Spiritual Successor to Baldur's Gate. Dragon Age: Origins was released with an official toolset (perhaps due to the success of the BG and especially Neverwinter Nights modding community), and as such countless mods are available for Origins and its Expansion Pack Awakening. These include: major bug fixes, gameplay tweaks, hi-res texture packs, complete overhauls of NPC models, new appearance options for the character creator a la The Sims, new arms and armor, additional spells and classes, new quests and playable content such as party members and expanded Romance Sidequests. Many appearance-based mods are meant to increase visual continuity between the games, such as the various mods that change qunari and elf models to resemble their redesigns in the sequel, and Grey Wardens of Ferelden, which adds the sequel's Grey Warden armors to the first game. Dragon Age II did not come with a toolset, so fewer mods are available for it, but there still quite a few around, mostly new armors and character creation options for Hawke. And similar to the World of Warcraft example below, fan mods such as The Winter Forge, and Universal Dye Kit, both wildly popular armor customization mods, are probably why the developers were quick to tout the ability to customize armor as one of the first gameplay features revealed for Dragon Age: Inquisition.
  • The Elder Scrolls series has had tens of thousands of mods created for its various installments, starting from Morrowind onward. It has amassed so many mods that dedicated sections for each game are available on the NexusMods network, comprising new quests, weapons, armor, companions, enemies, complete visual overhauls / texture replacers and much, much more. The development of the TESCS (The Elder Scrolls Construction Set) jumpstarted the franchise's mod revolution, and the series gained a reputation for being extremely mod-friendly as a result. The PC version of Skyrim was used as the pilot title for the Steam Workshop, an addition to Steam's social network that makes uploading and installing mods a one-click process. Bethesda themselves have also released a handful of official mods for the series, most recently with the Valve Software-partnered Fall of the Space Core, Vol. 1. Some of the most notable mods include:
    • One of the most ambitious Morrowind mods of all time, the Tamriel Rebuilt mod aims to add the entirety of the titular province as a playable area. An ongoing project since 2003, the mod is still being actively updated, having seen its last major release in 2022. To date, it's roughly tripled the size of the game world, and it still has much of the province left to complete. About the only two mods that can beat it in the ambition department are the two other semi-related (partly overlapping developers, a willingness to talk and share resources) province mods: Skyrim: Home of the Nords (aims to add the province of Skyrim as a playable area) and Province: Cyrodiil (aims to add the entirety of Cyrodiil as a playable area). Having begun much later, those two have thus far only released much smaller areas (part of the hold of the Reach and an island off Cyrodiil's western coast, respectively).
    • Both Oblivion and Skyrim have several mods comprised of comprehensive patches to both the base game itself and every major expansion or piece of Downloadable Content, thereby eliminating any discovered bugs not fixed by the developers.
    • Morroblivion, an ambitious project that fully recreates Morrowind on Oblivion's game engine. The creators also intend to accomplish the same feat by recreating Morrowind on Skyrim's engine. In both cases, you have to own both Morrowind and the game the mod is running on (by design — they're not trying to be pirates).
    • Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. In addition to making the game a lot harder, it improves just about every aspect of it, including the reworking of many game mechanics. This mod was even endorsed by critics, and will likely influence the development of any further Elder Scrolls games (particularly since the modder himself ended up working on Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas).
    • Nehrim: At Fate's Edge is a total conversion for Oblivion that turns the entire game into a mix between the original story and Gothic, complete with an entirely new world map and storyline that runs upwards of forty hours. It won the ModDB Best Singleplayer Mod award in 2010.
    • Skyrim has dozens of additional followers crafted by modders, and though some of them are fairly simple with dialogue already in the game, there are a few in particular that come with their own recorded dialogue, custom skins and even quest lines that add more to the game. Vijia in Skyrim (the sequel to an Oblivion mod) introduces a female fighter / prospective bard to the game, with contributions by Sir Terry Pratchett himself, a full storyline, morality system, tons of unique gameplay options and much more. Hoth is a fully voiced bounty hunter who sports unique and custom-made armor, weapons and skin textures, and has his own storyline and side missions. Inigo is a fully voiced Khajiit mercenary who reacts to the dragonborn no matter their race or gender (along with an in-universe reason for why some of his lines repeat), several in-built options to modify his behavior, locate him on a map and to summon him to your spot, and even comes with a choose your own adventure story you can have him read to you at an inn.
    • The currently most ambitious project for Skyrim, is the massive multi-team project Beyond Skyrim, which aims for no less than the very lofty goal of recreating most of Tamriel in the Skyrim engine, including of the less explored corners of the continent. The project spans no less than 7 different installments, all with is own associated development team (though with some membership overlap).
    • Some dedicated fans managed to reverse-engineer Daggerfall into the Unity engine, so while the original Daggerfall couldn't support mods due to Bethesda losing the game's source code, various graphics/sound overhauls, terrain mods, and user-made quests have popped up once the newer Unity version made an alpha release.
  • One of the most famous cases is Bethesda and their SDK — both the aforementioned The Elder Scrolls Construction Set and the aptly named GECK for Fallout 3. In each case, the SDKs released are the same tools used by Bethesda to develop the game. This is a big, big part of the reason why Bethesda games are known as modder-friendly.
    • Many Fallout mods are also dedicated to fixing some of the inaccuracies and retcons compared to the old games, such as Advanced Enclave Power armor from Fallout 2, and many weapons from the earlier games.
    • A particularly impressive mod that's been made for Fallout 3 and New Vegas is RTS - Real Time Settler, where you can take virtually any NPC or object and move them to a town that you build yourself. Essentially making it into an incredibly violent post-apocalyptic The Sims-style game.
      • Along with other Fallout 3 and New Vegas mods, this mod is now an Ascended Fan Fic after being added as a gameplay mechanic in Fallout 4.
  • Like its predecessor, Fallout: New Vegas has a thriving modding community that has been running strong for many years since its 2010 release. Ranging from full-scale gameplay modifications and visual overhauls to bring it in line with more modern titles, its modding community has been so prolific that other titles have attempted to emulate its dedication (chief among them its follow-up, Fallout 4, which featured a planned mod that seeks to replicate the entirety of the game into 4's engine). Some of the more popular mods include:
    • Tale of Two Wastelands, a project that functionally adds the entirety of Fallout 3 (and its DLC expansions) into New Vegas' engine, replicating gameplay mechanics and attributes into the former that weren't there at release (such as crafting). This full-scale mod, played solely in Vegas, has cultivated its own subcommunity that is making content intended to be compatible with ToTW.
    • The Someguy Series, a collection of linked mods by creator Someguy2000 that adds numerous hours of gameplay on top of the base experience, ranging from bounty-hunter contracts (as seen in New Vegas Bounties, a three part quest mod series lauded for its excellent story and challenging combat), Russell (a Ranger companion) and the quest mod The Inheritance. Even years after its release, the series still stands out for creating an interlinked story (such that it confers an Old Save Bonus depending on whether you've completed specific missions in two different mods) and crafts a very different picture of The Courier through its overarching plotline.
    • One mod that received significant attention was the "JSawyer" mod, named after lead game director Josh Sawyer (and created by the man himself) — which functionally acts as a "Director's Cut" of the game, reintegrating some minor cut content, redistributing the Pre-Order Bonus items throughout the gameworld instead of dumping them on the player in the intro, and a host of other changes designed at improving the experience of the basegame. Since the original version of JSawyer is very unfriendly to other game mods, an improved version with less compatibility issues called JSawyer Ultimate Edition was created by a modder named PushTheWinButton.
    • The game has also received several restored content mods, including Moburma's "New Vegas Uncut" series (which restored minor character interactions and an unused companion, Betsy the Brahmin), Simply Uncut (a wide-ranging assortment of restored and semi-reused content that fleshes out many aspects of the gameworld, including unused Legion content) and multiple projects aimed at reworking both The Strip and Freeside into their own respective single worldspaces without loading screens (along with reverting changes made in patches that took out elements of both locations in an attempt to run better on consoles).
    • Project Nevada is one of the oldest and longest-running mod projects, creating a complete overhaul of New Vegas's gameplay.
    • New Vegas Enhanced Content (NVEC) is a "supermod" that takes many of the community's most popular bugfixes and enhancement mods and brings them together under a single mod.
  • Fallout 4 had a strong PC modding scene early, owing to it sharing the engine and assets of Skyrim. Unusually, Fallout 4 received official mod support on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (though Executive Meddling on Sony's part restricted mods from using any assets not part of the game or its DLC). Additionally, the Creation Club added mod-like content for real money, but the limitations imposed meant these paid mods were usually limited to custom skinned items.
  • Killap's Fallout 2 Restoration Project adds tons of material, mostly stuff that was cut because it couldn't be completed on time (such as rescuing Sulik's sister, the EPA, a secret Hubologist compound with loot, and several ending messages including a positive end for the deathclaws), but also multiple bug fixes and various minor improvements. The only problem with the Megamod and the Restoration Project is that Fallout and 2 were not designed with mods in mind, so the mods are somewhat unstable... but at any rate still better than unpatched Fallout 2.
    • Another notable type of mod for Fallout 2 is one that makes Miria a legitimate companion, allowing her to level up and gain combat skills, even giving her a romance arc with the main character. Somewhat amusingly, no such mods exist for Davin.
    • An unusual quirk of the Fallout 1/2 modding community is that it is largest in eastern Europe, with the result that there are multiple massive, intricate mods that are, or at least for years were, only available in Russian.
  • Freedom Force has much more fan-created content than official add-ons, most famous is The Strangers which is about the size of the original game and features much more technically advanced missions and powers. One mission features a four way battle between The Strangers, a pod of atlantains, a berserk shape-shifting robot, antarctican demon hunters and the Legions of Hell.
  • Using Grim Dawn's mod editor, someone has created a Diablo II remake named Reign of Terror. It's not 1 for 1 remake however, it's more of a mashing between the two. It uses Grim Dawn's dual-class system, its devotion mechanic while using the look and feel of Diablo II. It also borrows some assets from Titan Quest.
  • Romancing SaGa 3. So many hacks were made to that game to include characters from various anime, video games and manga — even other SaGa characters, and even adding bosses from the previous Romancing SaGa games and Apollo from Final Fantasy Legend II. On top of that, the hacks even change the music and add new spells and scenarios. Hacks also include a new boss from the Romancing SaGa Ultimania: The Mother of Death, Saruin, Schirach, and Elore; Saiva the Goddess of Destruction.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Final Fantasy's Game Boy Advance remake, while well-lauded for its various quality-of-life improvements (such as no Save-Game Limits, less tedious bulk purchasing of items, spells working as intended) and new content such as four Bonus Dungeons, was criticized for watering down the difficulty too much without adding any sort of "hard mode" to compensate. Thus, the Mod of Balance was created, offering the challenge of the NES/Famicon version but with all the modern touches of the remakes. At least that was the original intention of the mod up to version 2.2; version 3.0 onwards is an overhaul of the game with no class change system, instead offering twelve unique classes instead of six.
    • Fedorajoe's Final Fantasy hacks Final Fantasy III General Leo Edition and Final Fantasy II Playable Golbez Edition have General Leo surviving Kefka's attack on Thamasa and Golbez joining the team after the Giant of Babil, respectively. Both rename certain enemies to match later installments, balance the gameplay, fix the "Blind Idiot" Translation, and remove their game's respective ninjas.
    • Final Fantasy IV Unprecedented Crisis is an extensive ROM hack of Final Fantasy IV that at first, seems to only modify the gameplay (such as making Edward useful and giving Cecil access to Black Magic), but when a certain event doesn't happen, a whole new chain of story events happen, like there being 8 elemental lords (the original four and a new set of four).
    • The Final Fantasy VI mod called Final Fantasy VI Brave New World is a very popular one that overhauls the game to be a more balanced experience. Most of the broken tricks and bugs are removed or toned down, the Esper system is heavily reworked to allow different builds, and a fair amount of Cast Speciation has occurred to make all the characters more unique, while the difficulty has been raised somewhat.
    • The PC version of Final Fantasy VII has a very active modding scene; the port is notoriously bad, being hindered by a staggered development cycle and numerous incompatibility problems. As such, the modding community has come up with a variety of patches and tools solely for fixing the game; there's even a custom-made graphics driver. There's also a huge volume of superficial mods, offering replacement character models (for both field and battle areas), high-definition textures, total menu overhauls, a complete retranslation effort and a tool to replace the in-game MIDI files with custom music.
      • There is also the New Threat mod which retranslates the game, rebalances the enemies and bosses as well as the stats, the Materia and the equipment, and adds a few more scenes and features.
    • A mod for the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy VIII called International GF Job System (the title reminding you of anything?) not only fixes some of the gameplay issues, but even manages to flesh out the Junction system through modifying the magic spells and, most importantly, the Guardian Forces by making them act more like the Job System found in most other Final Fantasy games like V.
    • Final Fantasy X is perhaps the most player friendly of the installments; barring the Superbosses in the Monster Arena and the difficult bosses, the game shouldn't give you any trouble if you know what you're doing. The PAL version rebalanced the difficultly somewhat, but for some real scares, try firing up the Punishment mod. Even former pushovers (the ones who croaked if you so much as lobbed an Aeon at them) now require a truckload of buffs.
    • While most mods to the game are discouraged as cheating and violate the Terms of Service, Final Fantasy XI PC versions are a frequent subject of mods. The least invasive and generally considered most benign (and easiest) involves modifying the game's data files to change the music for various areas or the visual appearance of monsters, NPCs, or player characters. There is a fairly significant mod community dedicated to this. On the somewhat more invasive level, a third-party application exists to provide one of the most heavily player-demanded features, the ability to run the game windowed instead of full-screen, and supports a plugin interface to load additional mods into the game. This program is both highly popular and highly controversial, with many players in stark disagreement as to whether the bundled plugins count as cheats (though there are other plugins and third-party apps that are more generally accepted as obvious cheats) or simply features that should have been included in the first place. Square Enix has a policy of banning players who openly admit to using it, and occasionally breaks it with updates, but has not made a concerted effort to address it, and has recently caved on the player demand for Windowed mode, and released it... without all the mods they say violates the ToS, leading to the usual reaction.
    • Final Fantasy XIV is just as equally gray in handling mods like its older brother Final Fantasy XI, but sees a flourishing community regardless, with the responsible players following a strict "don't ask, don't show, don't tell" code. The mostly benign mods such as cosmetic and animation alterations are often turned a blind eye, but those that skirt gameplay such as parsers are liable to get you in trouble, with cases including harassing players for low damage output (and subsequently outing yourself to using a parser). There have been a few cases where such flagrant usage of mods have caused the team to step in and chastise the players for doing so, with one particularly outrageous scenario caused a raiding team to forfeit their rewards or get banned for not complying.
    • The original Final Fantasy Tactics was practically tailored for modders, and not just for customizing sprites. You can find many of them here.
      • For starters, the AI was terrible, the difficulty was broken, and — most bizarrely — enemy units never upgraded beyond knights and archers. The "1.3" mod ramped up the difficulty (well, it is hosted by insanedifficulty.com), strengthened the enemy units, and tweaked mages to be a little less, well.. useless. This mod definitely qualifies as Nintendo Hard; the days of finishing off Altima with two Climhazzards are over.
      • Don't forget balancing out overpowered equipment (such as making Excalibur's Haste effect temporary instead of permanent), giving previously useless equipment like most daggers a reason to be used via stat boosts or special effects, balancing out overpowered classes (I'm looking at you, Orlandu), and giving story battles more varied units to fight against.
  • The Knights of the Old Republic games don't have any official tools, despite using basically the same engine as Neverwinter Nights; this, however, didn't stop fans from developing third-party modding tools and making a cornucopia of mods of varying quality, some even altering/"enhancing" the game, as well as the addition/alteration of some rather epic side/main quests. That's not even counting the additional items, restored content, models, skins, and bug fixes, etc. for a game that didn't even have an official toolset...
    • A couple of famous mods are a dialogue pack that restores much of Juhani's dialogue and adds about 20 pages worth of purely fan-made dialogue. The top of the line, however, is Silveredge9's Brotherhood of Shadow which includes three new recruitable characters, fully voiced dialogue, at least a dozen all-new locations, flashbacks to your hunt for the Star Forge as Darth Revan, the fateful battle where you got captured, and single-combat against Mandalore at Malachor V! The only drawback is that, due to its magnitude, it will not play nicely with other mods.
    • Similar to the Baldur's Gate example is "The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod", a fan made mod that consists of a wide array of material that was cut from Knights of the Old Republic II when it was rushed for a Christmas release, along with over a thousand bugfixes. The mod was years in the making, and was finally completed in July 2012.
    • There's also Knights of the Old Republic III: The Jedi Masters, a Fan Game that takes the form of a full-conversion mod for KOTORII.
  • Visual Mods are very popular among World of Warcraft players. So popular that Blizzard has worked some of the mods into the main game, such as Raid Assist (which helps with said Raids by designating targets and tanks) or an option to speed up quest descriptions. Other mods provide additional information on items or change the UI (User Interface) to the players likings.
    • World of Warcraft is entirely supportive of addons that function entirely within provided scripting commands. On the other hand, data mods — even seemingly innocuous client-only mods like model changes or (sigh) nude patches are forbidden. If one were to alter models they could set it so the flag in PVP Battleground was a mile high, making it easy to find the enemy flag carrier at any time.
    • Many of those popular mods that were made into the main game (enemy stats, talent previews, quest tracking, raid warnings) have been in the game for so long most players probably won't remember what playing the game was like when those were only available with mods. (When, after patch, every single mod had to be updated...and these weren't just content patches that'd render the mods useless...There are numerous bug-fixing patches)
  • The classic BBS door game Legend Of The Red Dragon was infamous for its ability to use plug-in style mods, which were referred to as IGMs (In Game Modules). A great many of these simply heaped treasure and items on players for free.
  • Mega Man Star Force DX is a mod that greatly improves upon the original experience by restoring cut content, adding quality of life enhancements, and introducing new postgame content. It's even been compared to Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix in terms of re-release quality. Can be found on the Rockman EXE Zone.
  • The first three generations of Pokémon can be modded with some ease thanks to the proliferation of ROMs and hacking tools.
    • A fairly famous (at least in the Nuzlocke) community) is Edge's Alt Evos, which adds Gen (I)V Pokemon and Alt Evos.
    • Like Moemon: A mod which simply replaced all the Pokémon sprites with moe gjinka.
    • And then there's Touhoumon, a hack of FireRed that replaces each Pokémon with Touhou characters, complete with all-new types, stats, and attacks for flavor.
    • Similarly, someone on /m/ has started a FireRed hack that replaces Pokémon with various Humongous Mecha, changing the names of types (for instance "FIRE" become "Hot-Blooded") and moves.
    • A lot of Pokémon hacks also edit game mechanics to change how some of the Pokémon evolve. This is largely done to eliminate the version splitting and trade evolutions.
    • There's also the infamous hack Pokémon Quartz, full of bizarre new Pokemon and some really weird dialogue. Despite its flaws, it has fully edited areas and new scenarios, which was actually impressive for the time since Pokémon hacks then were mostly just graphic or text edits.
    • Nowadays, most Pokémon hacks are a lot more than graphical or text edits, containg completely new maps, scripts and, in some rare cases, new mechanics and completely rewriting the game. Pokémon Brown and the other hacks of Coolboyman are famous for doing the latter. Rarely is a Pokémon hack completed, however, with most "hackers" getting bored very quickly.
    • There's several "Anime" hacks of FireRed / LeafGreen that try to re-tell Ash's Indigo League journey. You can take your own liberties, or you can take a Self-Imposed Challenge by only catching the Pokémon that Ash caught in the anime and only evolving them when he did.
    • Pokémon Adventures — Red Chapter is a hack of Fire Red that serves as an interactive re-telling of Red's adventure in the the Pokémon Adventures manga series.
    • There are two hacks that allow you to catch every single Pokémon in it, by giving any Pokémon species some place to be found in. Said hacks are namely Pokémon Emerald 386 for Pokemon Emerald and Pokémon Platinum: Enhanced Edition for Pokémon Platinum. While 386 adds nothing (aside from the aforementioned possibility to catch every pogey in-game) to its source material, Enhanced Edition is the original game turned up a notchnote : more challenging, with several trainers other than you taking a level in badass as well, thus requiring players to be at least strategically skilled and with a good enough knowledge of the good ol' Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. This includes being able to catch wild Mewtwo(s) even before getting to Victory Road, Route 201 entirely devoted to catch HM slaves, and the rematch against Cynthia revealing a party entirely made of Olympus Mons.
    "Champion Cynthia sent out HO-OH!"
    • A group from /x/ has set out to mod Pokémon Fire Red into nightmare fuel for everyone's enjoyment.
    • Pokemon Blue Kaizo and Pokemon Crystal Kaizo are both complete hacks that allow you to catch 151 Pokémon and 251 Pokémon, respectively. However, as indicated by the name Kaizo, they are super hard mode versions of the original, as opposed to mere hard modes.
    • The Pokémon Black creepypasta has been recreated in playable form through a mod of Pokémon Red.
    • There are also randomizers for the Pokémon games that can randomize what Pokemon you can catch, to what Pokémon your opponents have, all the way to randomizing what Pokémon evolve into.
    • Pokémon FireRed: Rocket Edition has you play as a member of Team Rocket, experiencing the main story of the original Fire Red exploring a side of Kanto from a much darker perspective.
  • Even fan remakes of the Pokémon are not safe. Someone will come along and hack into it, because of course the game needs Metroids in it
  • Freelancer has some rather good mod communities, notably Crossfire, which actually makes the economy dynamic like it was supposed to be when the game was announced, Discovery Freelancer, which adds more content and optimizes certain elements for multiplayer roleplay, and Freeworlds, a total conversion of Freelancer into the Star Wars universe.
  • Swords of Xeen is an interesting case. A mod of Darkside of Xeen, it received official support from New World Computing and was included in some compilations of the saga, even if it's not considered canon.
  • A fan mod of Chrono Trigger called Crimson Echoes (TV Tropes page here) was set to be released May 31, 2009, after almost five years in development, which basically turned it into a whole new game. A cease and desist letter was issued May 9, 2009.
  • Torchlight has support for mods out of the box, as well as an editor, and achievements for playing the game with one, five, or ten mods installed.
  • Mount & Blade and its expansion Warband have a very large, very active modding community. Hundreds of minor mods and dozens of total conversions have been made, and more are released all the time. There's even a Star Wars mod in the works.
  • Angband has been repeatedly modded into an entire family of Roguelikes: Steamband, Animeband, ZAngband, Hellband, Tales of Maj'Eyal and so on.
  • Titan Quest has its own modding community, although one mod gets recommended even to first-time players in lieu of the baseline. Consistently. That would be Underlord, which started out by, like Baldur's Gate's Unfinished Business mod, reinstating content that couldn't be implemented in time for Immortal Throne's release, and wound up tweaking and expanding all the masteries (and completely remaking at least half the Thief mastery, now Occult) so all the mastery dyads possible were actually viable. There's even been a mod, Lilith, that's essentially a completely new game that just happens to use TQ's engines.
    • Be warned, however, that Underlord also severely amps up the difficulty, to the point that the starting zone monsters can kill you. Easily.
  • Marvel Ultimate Alliance and X-Men Legends II have a community found here dedicated to making all sorts of mods from fixing balances, adding new abilities and even custom characters that were not in the games initially for various reasons.
  • Unlimited Adventures is a somewhat meta example; the program is a Game Maker, so making mods is the whole point, but some people have figured out ways to create "hacks" which give the designer possibilities far beyond these offered in the program (editing items, for example.)
  • Despite the Mass Effect franchise never getting a set of mod tools released, fans took it upon themselves to create their own homebuilt tool, ME3Explorer, and start building their own mods. These include remastered visuals and assets, mods that added or changed the outfits of characters, brought in new weapons and armor, full-scale gameplay overhauls and even new levels:
    • One of the first mods released for the game, Mass Effect 3 Happy Ending Mod (Extended Cut required) rewrites the ending to have Shepard survive the firing of the Crucible, via him/her never meeting the Catalyst and getting rescued by a shuttle from the Normandy. The most recent version of the mod has the ability for Shepard and their love interest to hug at the Normandy's memorial wall, along with new slides of other characters not mentioned in the epilogue.
    • The Ark Mod is functionally the game's "fifth DLC" — a set of linked missions that form a Sidequest Sidestory, and follow Shepard and their crew as they helm a mission on Palaven's moon, Menae, before attempting to stop the Reapers from discovering the whereabouts of the Andromeda Initiative. The mod includes a boatload of armor and weapons brought over from Andromeda, new gameplay encounters, and also restores unused environmental content for the N7 missions that were cut from the vanilla game.
    • Both the Immersive Thessia Mod and the Ambient Audio Overhaul Mod, both by modder Orikon25, restore a large chunk of content that was removed from Priority: Thessia (one of the game's major plotline missions) and restore various audio cues and sounds found throughout the game. The two mods, along with Priority Earth Overhaul Mod (listed below), the Prologue Overhaul Mod (which restores content to the game's opening mission) and various level streaming / bugfixes were released as "The Orikon Collection", an unofficial "remaster" for the game.
    • The Expanded Galaxy Mod is an ambitious project that introduces a wide range of content that dramatically overhauls the game. Not only do you gain the ability to take any of your squadmates from Mass Effect 2 on N7 missions, but they have new armors to wear. You now receive an Old Save Bonus of all your weapons from the previous game in a secure chest aboard the Normandy, and can purchase and unlock additional weapons and armors throughout the game. The requirements for the Golden Ending are now harder to achieve, and the galaxy dynamically changes as you progress through the story — some War Assets are permanently lowered by fighting and skirmishes, and other, new assets have been placed throughout the planets. The Normandy is completely redesigned — not only does it now have a shooting range and additional upgrade capabilities, but you can actually recruit additional crew members, including more medics, a barman, a sushi chef and more engineers. There are also new sidequests and missions, including a Harder Than Hard "Evacuation of Thessia" mission where you're tasked with flying the Normandy around the planet to rescue fleeing refugees and key assets before the Reapers catch you. Crew members can be invited up to the captain's cabin at any time, and there's additional romance content for certain characters like Liara. There are even special achievements and shuttle bay items depending on the player's decisions during the story and what they've done in the previous games.
    • The Priority Earth Overhaul Mod is Exactly What It Says on the Tin — a full-scale restoration/reworking of the final mission. Along with restoring a host of cut content (including unused Joker dialogue, new goodbye scenes with James and Garrus and an appearance by the Quarians and Geth if you brokered peace), the mod dramatically overhauls the London hub to feature more soldiers and ambient dialogue, along with rebalancing enemy spawns, showing the consequences of the battle on the forces you've gathered throughout the game (notably, if you saved the Destiny Ascension in ME1, you'll see it dramatically explode in the sky as you progress through the mission) and adds new encounters and expanded level areas. Not to mention there's an entirely new cutscene that takes place if you choose the "Refuse" ending, showing the Reapers leaving Earth after wiping out Earth's fleets and razing the planet.
    • The "Citadel Epilogue Mod" is a complete restructure of the Citadel DLC, which change the setting from prior to assaulting the Cerberus Headquarters into after the conclusion of the Reaper War, allowing it to be experienced as a proper epilogue to both the game and the trilogy as a whole. Additional emails are included to reflect this restructuring of events, with key dialogue and text changes removing any mention of the Reaper War to maintain immersion. The mod also provides the "Ultimate Party" option, allowing the player to experience all calm/rowdy party phases & their accompanying interactions in a single playthrough. Best experienced with AHEM, which includes a patch allowing an immersive transition between the modified ending and epilogue.
  • Dark Souls had its fair share of mods after being ported to PC. It's mostly new textures for weapons, armors and characters (including the obligatory nude mod), some HUD changes and fixes for better connectivity. The rest of the mods are focused on making the game even harder than it already is, such as the obligatory item location randomizer, and "Estus Quest", which is the normal game except your primary healing item is locked behind the Superboss of the DLC, and on top of that you are also afflicted with a permanent take-double-damage debuff until you beat him.
  • The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has the Full Combat Rebalance mod, which alters just about everything, from the skill trees to animations, to make the combat feel more responsive. What makes this notable is that it was made by a developer of the third game in his spare time.
  • The Mother series has a small but steadily growing modding community, with EarthBound (1994) being the most popular one. Hacks tend to go anywhere from adding new enemies to the game, retranslating the game to be more faithful to original, along with uncensoring certain sprites, reusing base aspects from the original game to make a new story, or completely reconstructing the game by adding in new enemies, areas, abilities, and storylines to become games in their own right. For some of the more famous examples, see EquestriaBound, The Halloween Hack and Hallow's End.
    • And of course, that's not even counting Mother 3's famous Fan Translation.
    • Special mention goes to Mother: 25th Anniversary Edition, a hack of the original version of EarthBound Beginnings, which attempts to make the game more enjoyable and less frustrating for new players. Along with tweaking the game's Random Encounters and adding more items, the graphics were greatly enhanced (surprisingly still within NES limitations), the music was tweaked slightly (you won't always hear the same music in every battle) and it applies the dialogue changes from the MOTHER 1+2 Fan Translation.
    • There's also MaternalBound, which attempts to make EarthBound more like its original Japanese version. The author of this hack also has an edit of the above hack, Mother: 25th Faithful Edition.
    • There's also the Holiday Hex, a short but fun ROM hack with heavy Christmas and Easter themes in it.
  • Nexus Clash players have cooked up a wide range of extensions that substantially improve the interface of the game. One player combined them into a single conglomerated extension that draws on the benefits of all the rest, which most veteran players now use. In recent years, the development team has been eagerly mining the game-mod community for ideas to improve the base game.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has two "must add" mods that the community recommends for people playing the game a second time, or even for first timers.
    • The Unofficial Patch, still ongoing to this day, restores cut content, like a quest in the downtown library, and adds other minor details to the game, such as depicting Copper's remains should the player give him a stake and point him in LaCroix's direction.
    • The Clan Quest Mod, which initially began by giving each of the playable clans a unique quest, also threw in some extra "Evil Quests", questlines available to all players that would guarantee a loss of humanity if completed, and a date with a Kuei-Jin girl that gives players insight on Kindred of the East lore. By version four, the mod adds a campaign that allows the player to join the Sabbat when they first meet Andrei, which completely throws the original story off its track, and potentially ends with the Camarilla, Anarchs, and Kuei-Jin decimated and the Sabbat ruling Los Angeles. For players who don't want that ending, the mod still allows the player the option to infiltrate the Sabbat and do their questlines in place of the invasion of the Hallowbrook Hotel.
  • DevilutionX allows you to play Diablo and Hellfire in multiplayer, something the latter was never been capable off. All sidequests can be undertaken in solo or multiplayer, with randoms items replacing the usual fixed rewards. Also added in the mod are many QoL like a shared stash, visible icons at shops, XP progession bar, mouse scrolling, controller support and much more. Found on Github.

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