Mods are great if not the best way to add content to your favorite game or just to bring it to life after a long lasting coma in your Steam library.
Why we should mod games 🔗
Answer to this point is obvious. Mods are a great way to bring a new life to a game. You can experience a hole new way of playing your favorite title. If you don’t want to change the whole gameplay you may just install mods which patch the parts that annoy you, for example, remove stamina loss while you’re sprinting (I’m looking at you Lethal Company, but easy, I don’t use such mods 😊)
On the other hand mods often are just fixes or an opportunities to add missing features that I believe developer forgot or didn’t have to add. Minecraft modding is another big talking point, but just as a fun fact I’d like to pick up the topic of optimization mods which doesn’t really change anything in the game core nor functionalities, but in the Minecraft’s case makes the game run X-times more smooth than normal. This is another great reason to mod a game.
Why I dislike modding games 🔗
There are a least a few reasons why I personally have a problem with modding my games.
Mods compatibility and configuration 🔗
Not all modifications are compatible with all the other modifications. They can have conflicts and very often it’s a real thing and problem to solve. Today fortunately we have many ways of solving such conflicts, but it’s as well often done using third party software or scripts.
Some addons also require a bit of configuration to work properly or just to be as useful as it meant to be. From keybinds through balance and arbitrary damage points that will be dealt to potatoes only.
This aspect of modding is pretty always covered for you in advance while using modpacks or mod collections of any kind.
Keeping the mods synchronized between devices 🔗
As in the title. For me it’s a nightmare, especially when I’d like to have same mods, configurations and saves on my PC, Laptop and Steam Deck. You can copy the files around, use solutions such Syncthing and Steam or other gaming platform will handle the saves from the cloud, but installing external software and keeping eye on it to be sure everything is in it’s place for me is just another thing to worry about.
Great solution for this problem is Steam Workshop to be honest, but hardly any game uses it.
Tooling (as for Linux user) 🔗
The most important part for me is the fact (almost) all of the modding software, mod loaders etc. is made for Windows operating system in mind. Like sure, everybody uses Windows so tools are also for Windows, on Linux we have Wine which works perfectly fine, but messing around with Proton’s prefixes, launching random executables and setting various flags in winecfg to make our DLL-injecting software work is real pain and a huge turn off for me in the case of modding games. It’s possible, maybe it’s not that hard in the most of cases, but I just don’t like making my life harder.
Many games luckily does not require such a dedication and often it’s just about dropping some files in X directory and running your game normally. But then points 1 and 2 are still valid.
There are also dedicated mod managers such as Vortex yet it’s only for Windows, even now there’s ongoing development of a cross platform successor but it’s in really early stage.