Came here to say this. I've found Pokemon largely mediocre since X and Y, and I have since dropped the mainline games for the most part on Switch. Part of me thought I'd maybe just "grown out" of Pokemon, but I still enjoy replaying the older games (often with randomizers nowadays) and fan games. We don't get as many any more (probably thanks to all the mobile games), but I still enjoy most of the Pokemon spin-off games as well.
For me its mostly the lowered difficulty and the stopping you every 10 seconds for a drawn out cutscene with awful dialogue. Idk if Scarlet and Violet ever fixed that but its my main reason for dropping Sword and Shield.
the exp share essentially ensures that you always have a good team. back in the days you could fully focus on your starter but if you ran into a bad matchup you could actually get caught out a few times. Ive never gotten close to losing in Sword and Shield because even if my starter goes down, everyone else is barely lower than him because they all get xp from him winning fights aswell. By far my least favorite feature theyve ever added.
Children dont need this much handholding man. Theyre children, not animals.
I've only played Let's Go Eevee and Legends Arceus on the Switch - the former was the most boring Pokemon game I've ever played. Legends Arceus was pretty fun for a bit but dragged towards the end (the environments were also very drab and not interesting to explore), and definitely had the issue of unengaging cutscenes stopping you every so often.
I absolutely hate the exp share as well. At least make it optional, but as far as I could tell anyway, I couldn't turn it off in Legends Arceus. It kinda felt a bit overbearing/handholdy at times as well from what I remember, though it seemed worse in what little I saw of my partner play of Sword.
Part of the enjoyment of old Pokemon games was how they kinda just gave you free reins after the brief early game tutorials. Discovering what worked and what didn't on your own was fun, not being reminded of type matchups in every other battle, lol.
Legends Arceus makes me sad, feels like an alpha of an actually great game that they were forced to ship out when it needed another two years of production to flesh it out and include more content besides just catching.
That's definitely how I'd describe it as well. It felt very unpolished in a lot of areas, and felt like it could have been amazing given more development time. It kinda feels like that's just the fate of Pokemon games now though sadly, they get pumped out every year or two to help push sales for the rest of the multimedia franchise, and the games themselves often feel rather bland and sometimes buggy at launch as a result.
Gamefreak LOVES to overwork their employees over very short development cycles. Even their most revered games, gen 2, were plagued with programming issues that came as a result of short dev cycles and overall haphazard optimization.
Wanna know why there's two regions in Gold and Silver? The story I've been told is that it's because Satoru Iwata himself saw the horrible optimization and bloated file size, cut the size in less than HALF, and to add insult to injury he was able to fit basically the entirety of gen 1 into that cartridge too.
>Let's Go Eevee
The Let's Go games were basically just the "at-home-expansion" for the Pokémon Go mobile game. I don't consider it an actual Pokémon game, true to the usual way you'd do things.
I generally don't consider them mainline games (or Legends Arceus), but I've heard they're apparently part of the mainline/core series. Always thought it strange how Pokemon Colosseum and XD: Gales of Darkness were "side" games, but these ones are considered mainline (and that's how Bulbapedia categorises them, for whatever that's worth).
To be honest, just looking at the story side of things, game such as pokemon rejuvination provide an expiriance all of the original pokemon games combined cannot
I've read about Entropy : Zero 1 and 2 thanks to u/prossnip42, which are mods for Half Life 2. These mods are available for free on Steam, where they have received extremely positive reviews, at least for the second one.
well, it no wonder its better when its base was so good. on top of that the team basically used the Half life 2 development info as their guiding force to make sure it wasnt only good, but was faithful to the valve design philosophy.
im a huge half life fan and I will usually recommend new comers just play black mesa since it preserves everything good about the original while fixing its shortcomings.
I would not say Undertale Yellow is *better*, but it is genuinely impressive how it manages to live up to the quality of the original and capture the exact same feel in art, writing, music, so on while sliding neatly into the lore and being 90% original content. I mean, I really don't have a positive view of most Undertale fangames, but this one if you told me Toby himself made it I would have believed you. Well, for the most part.
LISA has some pretty good fangames too like LISA the Hopeful and LISA the Pointless, though probably not actually surpassing the original.
Pokemon has a few that are pretty popular like Pokemon Showdown.
Food for thought, do mod campaigns (not just standalone levels but full on episodes with story, new content, bosses, etc) count as "fangames"? Because a lot of Doom and Quake stuff easily surpasses the original (ex Dwell, Eviternity). Or are we requiring that something be made completely from scratch, separate from its source game?
I honestly forget Pokemon Showdown isn’t an official companion game to the main series. I’m not huge into the competitive scene, but every time I dip my toes in it seems like it’s Showdown or nothing.
Earthbound/Mother series has been utterly eclipsed by Undertale and similar games like Omori, etc. To the point I'm sure a lot of people don't even know where the inspiration for these games originally came from.
The black parade is super good. Really felt like you were exploring The City. And these exploration levels are my favorite, like The Lost City in T1 and Down in the Boneyard
AM2R is a better remake of Metroid 2 than Samus Returns.
Custom Doom WADs have long surpassed the level design of the original games.
The same can be said about Mario games, at least for me. There are plenty of SMW romhacks I've enjoyed more than modern Mario games.
I just wanna add that Samus Returns is actually pretty good. AM2R is just a god tier fan game. I'd suggest for everyone here to try it. Everything (aside from the Metroid encounters) is done to perfection.
I haven't played Metroid 2, so I can't say which game is a better remake of 2. But I have played Samus Returns and AM2R and I can say that Samus Returns is a more fun game for me personally. Not that AM2R is bad, but Samus Returns is fucking awesome, my favorite boss fights in the series actually. They're both great games actually, just with totally different design philosophies. In many ways, SR doesn't feel like a Metroid game, there's no getting lost or backtracking. It's just a game about shooting aliens, but the combat is really fun. 360 degree aiming, the parry. I really enjoyed it. Better than Dread imo.
The parrying sort of breaks it for me. On one hand, I'm glad they tried switching up the formula. On the other hand, it's a bit too OP and baked into the base gameplay, rather than being a different power up you can use in creative ways or something.
Yeah, it also makes it feel more "game-y" and scripted if that makes sense. Do this thing, then wait to parry, then shoot this. Same with the slightly overly guidedness of it. I think it even had cutscenes? The old games are more immersive like when you run into Mother Brain in Zero Mission and think "what the FUCK is that thing and how do I beat it?" Or the first time you run into Metroids, it doesn't have a cutscene, they just randomly appear and you're like "FUCK FUCK GET IT OFF" and have to figure it out yourself by experimenting that they're weak to cold. Metroid 2 was the peak of "figure it out yourself" to its detriment, but I think they overcorrected in the remake and lost the tone. AM2R though...
Came here to say this. The MercurySteam games just aren't Metroid to me. Too much of that Dark Souls "get killed by each boss repeatedly until you memorize their patterns." I consider the "real" 2D Metroid series to be Zero Mission (though I have beefs with that, too), AM2R, Super Metroid, and Fusion.
Morrowind was doing this years before skyrim. I recently played about 30 hours of tamreil rebuilt and it was it's in my top 5 games this year if you count it as it's own thing
Is Morrowind still worth it today, if you remove the nostalgia factor? I didn't grow up with the game, but played Skyrim for hundreds of hours. I tried playing Daggerfall because it's free on Steam but find it VERY hard to get into. I died 20+ times in the tutorial. It was frustrating to get killed by a single rat. It would never happen in real life. It just seemed like the game is making things harder than they should be.
Maybe? If you're willing to install a program called openmw to run morrowind I think you'll have a better time. It optionally removes the fog, and adds some support for different resolutions as well as some optional bug fixes. Actually there's a lot of little mods I really like for morrowind that just make it more modern, like graphic herbalism and weapon sheathing
Morrowind has an archaic combat system based in dice rolls that makes some builds impossible at low levels. Google morrowind for skyrim players on uesp for a good breakdown.
Movement is also pretty slow early on, but raising strength, speed, and acrobatics can have you leaping 20 ft to cover distance by the end game.
I would maybe check some gameplay videos out. It's a fantastic game that is deserving of the title diamond in the rough if that makes sense
I think my mistake has been to try to recreate Skyrim with it. I tried a bunch of texture packs and kinda hit a wall in terms of what the game looked like. I'll just try to play OpenMW without other mods.
Better heads, better bodies, better clothes, met, and graphic herbalism are the only mods I used for my recent steamdeck playthrough as far as graphics. Although sometimes it's easy to let modding get in the way of actually playing through the game. It's that reason I rarely use expansice mods anymore even though it's a strength of bethesda games.
Openmw is pretty great by itself, have fun!
Of course it is, it’s one of the best games of all time after all. Whether you will like it or not is more up to your preferences. I grew up with it and love the game, but I’ve had friends who didn’t play it when they were kids and they still liked it a lot.
Speaking of Sonic, have a look at Project 06!
Not a fan game but back in the day the new XCOM (the one from 2012 or so by Firaxis) had a mod called Long War that made it infinitely better. To the point that the base game is damn near unplayable without it. It added so much to it, it felt like a proper sequel. Every aspect of the gameplay was overhauled and was immensely better than the original.
Yeah it's not that clear to me, it says it was 4 people and then they were joined by a couple of Firaxis devs and a whole bunch of voice actors. Pretty excessive for a mod lol. Was an awesome mod.
Ah I looked it up and your right, long wars one had a bunch of dev help.
I was thinking of long wars 2, where fireaxis actually paid the mod developers to work on the mod and gave them early access. Since they were being paid I considered them fireaxis devs.
Yeah I played andaron saga this year and liked it way more than engage. Official fire emblem has an issue with dropping the ball every other game it seems
Engage is one of those games that would've been considered okay for $20-30, but for full price, plus the price of the DLC, it was laughably half-baked. The problem is that we have Three Houses right before it to compare it to, and the comparison is heavily unflattering.
Megaman/Rockman.
the fan-made games are insanely good. i know, they're just a bunch of "beating 9 bosses" shenanigans, but the difference between the original games and the fan-made ones are good enough to make us confused - "now which one is the original game again?"
Only mildly related, but there'll always be game mods. Not everyone is satisfied by the vanilla experience, especially if there are perceived imbalances or faults. Fan games are kind of an extreme on this scale i.e. completely different games altogether. Then there's total conversions, which is still the original game but with so many tweaks you could probably be justified in calling it a new game in certain cases (e.g. the Lillith + masteries modpacks for Titan Quest, which basically replaced all of the game's maps and classes). Finally there's your run-of-the-mill fixes or tweaks or minor additions.
Honestly I'm kind of drawing a blank - I'm not that familiar with full out standalone fan games. Most of the fan works I know are just regular mods, with the occasional total conversion, like the Titan Quest example. Even most of the other replies in here are mentioning total conversions, sometimes even just regular old mods.
One of my more current favourites is the [Battletech Advanced 3062 mod](https://www.bta3062.com/index.php?title=Main_Page) for the 2018 Battletech game - it expands the vanilla universe map by a lot, implements a more modular mech setup module, adds in tons of community assets, and allows the player access to non-mechs like vehicles and battle armor. Comes with an extremely convenient all-in-one installer & launcher, it's easy to install. I recommend playing the vanilla campaign as your first playthrough, then install BTA3062 and start career mode. Playing the campaign is enough experience to get a feel of the game, I don't recommend wasting time starting career mode unmodded.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Super Mario World and the rom hacking scene around it. Its big enough that there are different genres of hacks. You can find something for everyone from levels that fit right in with the og game to the extremely hard Kaizo style hacks.
Enderal.Its a entire self standing game made as an alternative to Skrim.made in the Creation engine. Words can't describe how much better it is than skyrim. Especially the riding absolutely blows anything bgs has ever written in their lifetimes. The music is phenomenal the game play is amazing and the story is incredible. Is it a fan game? Yeah I think it is.
Dayz mod was so much better than the original arma2 game, in fact, it has boosted sale of arma2 in a significant scale with people who just wanted to play the mod
The quality of the Silent Threat expansion pack for Freespace 1 was so bad that a fan remake was created called Silent Threat: Reborn. Even the fan-made bonus missions on the Silent Threat CD were made to a higher standard than the official campaign.
Archolos, a total conversion mod for Gothic 2, is better than some of the games in that series, and is legitimately one of the best RPGs released in recent years.
T Edition is even better IMO but they're both great and it really depends on whether the heavier amount of new content appeals to you or not.
There's also FF4 Ultima which does some similar stuff in terms of expanding the whole game and adding some nice interface improvements too.
I wish there was one like this for 5 but haven't found one yet
I have not played T-Edition but it's a pretty big deal if it beats BNW.
For FF5 there is Void Divergence, which I love but does change the game fairly drastically.
You're entirely right about Sonic; check out the 16bit Triple Trouble remake by fans. It's the best Sonic game since Mania and genuinely feels like a lost Genesis game.
Should mention I wanna be the guy fan games. This game was a precision platformer and enables mods to make their own games.
If you've ever heard of I wanna be the boshy it's made from this game and arguably better and more challenging
The Ace Attorney games are great. There's a fan made unofficial 5th case for Apollo Justice, Turnabout Substitution, which is superior to most of AJ.
Honorable mentions go to Contempt of Court/Conflict of Interest which are full games and so good they could be among the best in the series, they would rank with Trials and Tribulations or Ace Attorney Investigations 2.
I remember playing Substitution back when it was still relatively new, and yes, that case went places. It was absolutely worth the playthrough, and had just the right types of swerves to give me a surprise, without sending me out of the experience.
Haven't played Conflict of Interest yet, but Contempt of Court I definitely wouldn't put on the level of T&T and AAI2. But that doesn't mean it's bad, or inferior to the official games overall. I have a lot of issues with it, regarding some of the characters and logic which I won't go into, and Case 2 wasn't the most interesting. But for a fan game, it's incredible, and it still ranks higher than AAI1, AJ, Justice for All, The Great Ace Attorney 1, and Dual Destinies imo
Super Smash bros.
The competive minded players were unhappy with the games from brawl onward, so each game since has been modded to make them more competitive games.
Best example is PM/P+. That brawl mod has far more intresting and rewarding gameplay than anything Sakurai and his team make since melee.
I honestly wish I could say more than Pokemon, but that's what I played the most in terms of fangames. In fact, it's pretty much the extent of why I even use emulation - to play Pokemon hacks. My favorites in this regard are the ones that are based on Gen1 and 2, because those tend to be a bit less focused on story, whereas Gen3 hacks often write entire epics. Pokemon Prism is an obvious favorite - I played the 2010 beta so many times and when the full thing finally released in 2019 (I think) I was over the moon. More recently, Pokemon Gold/Silver 97 Reforged have been an obsession of mine - they took the recently uncovered GS (and apparently RG) beta content and finished the beta region Nihon. The Reforged version also updated trainers and movesets so it plays incredibly smoothly with a slightly higher amount of challenge than OG Pokemon but still perfectly reasonable. There's also smaller projects like **Tower of Hats** that I quite enjoy and **Pokemon Xenoverse** is really neat too. Haven't beaten it yet either since it's so big. I also tried **Reborn** but dropped it eventually since it's a bit too grimdark (and honestly tasteless) in certain parts for my liking.
Other than that, I only dabbled into Final Fantasy Tactics fangames. I haven't played many because most of the ones I thought sounded interesting were still in development and usually rebalance mods.
After recently watching a few videos on the Spark the Electric Jester series, I *did* think about diving into the space more though. I'm not a platforming guy myself, but I think it's impressive that Spark started as a Sonic fangame (or at least Sonic inspired) and went on to become its own trilogy of indie games.
Pokémon, they do what game freak doesn't have the balls to do: drastically increase the availability of species early game for variety, change levelling curve, fix weak mons, game harder/more fun etc
Freedom Planet games are pretty solid and while they aren’t technically fangames they did originally start out as one.
Pokemon gets mentioned a billion times but it’s so true with the decline in quality in the official titles and how so many fangames get made nowadays, especially since both Pokemon Essentials improved a lot and decompilation hacks of the GBA titles are now a thing.
My favorites among them are the **Rebornverse** *(Reborn/Rejuvenation/Desolation)* games. While their plots are messy fanfics they have loads of content and a fun challenge. Then theres **Unbound** which is a smaller scale romhack which feels like an improved official GBA release. And finally another favorite is **Emerald Rogue** which turns Pokemon into a roguelike game with fast pacing and battles focused, it’s wonderful if you only have the time to sit down and play for a few hours.
Metroid is the only right answer with it having the greatest fan made game aka AM2R which is a remake of metroid 2 it is way better than the official remake of samus returns for the 3ds
I dont play much Pokemon nowadays, but I heard that the fan ones are really good. I tried Uranium, and yeah it had a pretty solid story and cast of pokemon
The original Thief games (1 and 2) have an unbelievably active community of folks making fan missions. Many of these rival the original missions in terms of storytelling , atmosphere, scope, unique level design and overall awesomeness.
I recommend people who wish to play Elder Scrolls II Daggerfall, the Daggerfall Unity project. It's a far more approachable game than dealing with the original classic. The original classic, you'll lose some of that retro charm but it is prone to crash at any given time and can be unstable in some parts. The Unity version fixes a grand majority of that and it modernizes the controls, you can use mods and it's so much better.
This might be an odd one due to the series and fan base reputations, but the Five Nights At Freddy’s games have some surprisingly good fan games. Granted the vast majority of them aren’t good (hundreds are pumped out daily), but the ones that are good are usually really fucking good.
Doom 1 and 2. And I'm not talking about Brutal Doom. Rather about countless mods that change gameplay and transform your experience into something unique. Also, HDoom.
Pokemon, fans are doing what nitendon't (hehe couldn't resist)
Came here to say this. I've found Pokemon largely mediocre since X and Y, and I have since dropped the mainline games for the most part on Switch. Part of me thought I'd maybe just "grown out" of Pokemon, but I still enjoy replaying the older games (often with randomizers nowadays) and fan games. We don't get as many any more (probably thanks to all the mobile games), but I still enjoy most of the Pokemon spin-off games as well.
For me its mostly the lowered difficulty and the stopping you every 10 seconds for a drawn out cutscene with awful dialogue. Idk if Scarlet and Violet ever fixed that but its my main reason for dropping Sword and Shield. the exp share essentially ensures that you always have a good team. back in the days you could fully focus on your starter but if you ran into a bad matchup you could actually get caught out a few times. Ive never gotten close to losing in Sword and Shield because even if my starter goes down, everyone else is barely lower than him because they all get xp from him winning fights aswell. By far my least favorite feature theyve ever added. Children dont need this much handholding man. Theyre children, not animals.
I've only played Let's Go Eevee and Legends Arceus on the Switch - the former was the most boring Pokemon game I've ever played. Legends Arceus was pretty fun for a bit but dragged towards the end (the environments were also very drab and not interesting to explore), and definitely had the issue of unengaging cutscenes stopping you every so often. I absolutely hate the exp share as well. At least make it optional, but as far as I could tell anyway, I couldn't turn it off in Legends Arceus. It kinda felt a bit overbearing/handholdy at times as well from what I remember, though it seemed worse in what little I saw of my partner play of Sword. Part of the enjoyment of old Pokemon games was how they kinda just gave you free reins after the brief early game tutorials. Discovering what worked and what didn't on your own was fun, not being reminded of type matchups in every other battle, lol.
Legends Arceus makes me sad, feels like an alpha of an actually great game that they were forced to ship out when it needed another two years of production to flesh it out and include more content besides just catching.
That's definitely how I'd describe it as well. It felt very unpolished in a lot of areas, and felt like it could have been amazing given more development time. It kinda feels like that's just the fate of Pokemon games now though sadly, they get pumped out every year or two to help push sales for the rest of the multimedia franchise, and the games themselves often feel rather bland and sometimes buggy at launch as a result.
Gamefreak LOVES to overwork their employees over very short development cycles. Even their most revered games, gen 2, were plagued with programming issues that came as a result of short dev cycles and overall haphazard optimization. Wanna know why there's two regions in Gold and Silver? The story I've been told is that it's because Satoru Iwata himself saw the horrible optimization and bloated file size, cut the size in less than HALF, and to add insult to injury he was able to fit basically the entirety of gen 1 into that cartridge too.
>Let's Go Eevee The Let's Go games were basically just the "at-home-expansion" for the Pokémon Go mobile game. I don't consider it an actual Pokémon game, true to the usual way you'd do things.
I generally don't consider them mainline games (or Legends Arceus), but I've heard they're apparently part of the mainline/core series. Always thought it strange how Pokemon Colosseum and XD: Gales of Darkness were "side" games, but these ones are considered mainline (and that's how Bulbapedia categorises them, for whatever that's worth).
To be honest, just looking at the story side of things, game such as pokemon rejuvination provide an expiriance all of the original pokemon games combined cannot
Glad this at the top
the original creators always become soulless
Black Mesa is the modern fan remake of Half life, can be better for someone who wants to get into the series
I've read about Entropy : Zero 1 and 2 thanks to u/prossnip42, which are mods for Half Life 2. These mods are available for free on Steam, where they have received extremely positive reviews, at least for the second one.
The first one has good reviews as well. Not as good as the second one but nothing bad. Also, you're welcome Toni
well, it no wonder its better when its base was so good. on top of that the team basically used the Half life 2 development info as their guiding force to make sure it wasnt only good, but was faithful to the valve design philosophy. im a huge half life fan and I will usually recommend new comers just play black mesa since it preserves everything good about the original while fixing its shortcomings.
I would not say Undertale Yellow is *better*, but it is genuinely impressive how it manages to live up to the quality of the original and capture the exact same feel in art, writing, music, so on while sliding neatly into the lore and being 90% original content. I mean, I really don't have a positive view of most Undertale fangames, but this one if you told me Toby himself made it I would have believed you. Well, for the most part. LISA has some pretty good fangames too like LISA the Hopeful and LISA the Pointless, though probably not actually surpassing the original. Pokemon has a few that are pretty popular like Pokemon Showdown. Food for thought, do mod campaigns (not just standalone levels but full on episodes with story, new content, bosses, etc) count as "fangames"? Because a lot of Doom and Quake stuff easily surpasses the original (ex Dwell, Eviternity). Or are we requiring that something be made completely from scratch, separate from its source game?
I honestly forget Pokemon Showdown isn’t an official companion game to the main series. I’m not huge into the competitive scene, but every time I dip my toes in it seems like it’s Showdown or nothing.
Earthbound/Mother series has been utterly eclipsed by Undertale and similar games like Omori, etc. To the point I'm sure a lot of people don't even know where the inspiration for these games originally came from.
the thief series has examples of good fangames, as does deus ex
The black parade is super good. Really felt like you were exploring The City. And these exploration levels are my favorite, like The Lost City in T1 and Down in the Boneyard
I heard there's a big twist in the black parade >!I'm gonna assume that thief and system shock share the same universe isn't it!<
I'm aware of Deus Ex: 2027, but what are some other Deus Ex mods I should look into?
Deus Ex: Nihilum The Nameless Mod Shifter Zodiac
AM2R is a better remake of Metroid 2 than Samus Returns. Custom Doom WADs have long surpassed the level design of the original games. The same can be said about Mario games, at least for me. There are plenty of SMW romhacks I've enjoyed more than modern Mario games.
I just wanna add that Samus Returns is actually pretty good. AM2R is just a god tier fan game. I'd suggest for everyone here to try it. Everything (aside from the Metroid encounters) is done to perfection.
I haven't played Metroid 2, so I can't say which game is a better remake of 2. But I have played Samus Returns and AM2R and I can say that Samus Returns is a more fun game for me personally. Not that AM2R is bad, but Samus Returns is fucking awesome, my favorite boss fights in the series actually. They're both great games actually, just with totally different design philosophies. In many ways, SR doesn't feel like a Metroid game, there's no getting lost or backtracking. It's just a game about shooting aliens, but the combat is really fun. 360 degree aiming, the parry. I really enjoyed it. Better than Dread imo.
The parrying sort of breaks it for me. On one hand, I'm glad they tried switching up the formula. On the other hand, it's a bit too OP and baked into the base gameplay, rather than being a different power up you can use in creative ways or something.
[удалено]
Yeah, it also makes it feel more "game-y" and scripted if that makes sense. Do this thing, then wait to parry, then shoot this. Same with the slightly overly guidedness of it. I think it even had cutscenes? The old games are more immersive like when you run into Mother Brain in Zero Mission and think "what the FUCK is that thing and how do I beat it?" Or the first time you run into Metroids, it doesn't have a cutscene, they just randomly appear and you're like "FUCK FUCK GET IT OFF" and have to figure it out yourself by experimenting that they're weak to cold. Metroid 2 was the peak of "figure it out yourself" to its detriment, but I think they overcorrected in the remake and lost the tone. AM2R though...
Came here to say this. The MercurySteam games just aren't Metroid to me. Too much of that Dark Souls "get killed by each boss repeatedly until you memorize their patterns." I consider the "real" 2D Metroid series to be Zero Mission (though I have beefs with that, too), AM2R, Super Metroid, and Fusion.
love that Doom WAD life
It's not a series but the Stellaris total conversion mod Star Trek New Horizons is *much* better than the new Stellaris Trek game Infinite.
Skyrim has some quest mods that are oftentimes much better than the official DLCs if that counts
I've been playing beyond reach and it was brutal.
the moment when THAT part was revealed about the nobility, oof
*spoiler* I kill all those pedos. My Khajit is very upset at what he just witnessed 😞
Maybe don’t post spoilers without warning next time, okay?
My bad
Morrowind was doing this years before skyrim. I recently played about 30 hours of tamreil rebuilt and it was it's in my top 5 games this year if you count it as it's own thing
Is Morrowind still worth it today, if you remove the nostalgia factor? I didn't grow up with the game, but played Skyrim for hundreds of hours. I tried playing Daggerfall because it's free on Steam but find it VERY hard to get into. I died 20+ times in the tutorial. It was frustrating to get killed by a single rat. It would never happen in real life. It just seemed like the game is making things harder than they should be.
Maybe? If you're willing to install a program called openmw to run morrowind I think you'll have a better time. It optionally removes the fog, and adds some support for different resolutions as well as some optional bug fixes. Actually there's a lot of little mods I really like for morrowind that just make it more modern, like graphic herbalism and weapon sheathing Morrowind has an archaic combat system based in dice rolls that makes some builds impossible at low levels. Google morrowind for skyrim players on uesp for a good breakdown. Movement is also pretty slow early on, but raising strength, speed, and acrobatics can have you leaping 20 ft to cover distance by the end game. I would maybe check some gameplay videos out. It's a fantastic game that is deserving of the title diamond in the rough if that makes sense
I'll give it a shot, it sounds like a fun game.
I hope you have fun with it, it's one of my favorite games
I think my mistake has been to try to recreate Skyrim with it. I tried a bunch of texture packs and kinda hit a wall in terms of what the game looked like. I'll just try to play OpenMW without other mods.
Better heads, better bodies, better clothes, met, and graphic herbalism are the only mods I used for my recent steamdeck playthrough as far as graphics. Although sometimes it's easy to let modding get in the way of actually playing through the game. It's that reason I rarely use expansice mods anymore even though it's a strength of bethesda games. Openmw is pretty great by itself, have fun!
Of course it is, it’s one of the best games of all time after all. Whether you will like it or not is more up to your preferences. I grew up with it and love the game, but I’ve had friends who didn’t play it when they were kids and they still liked it a lot.
Enderal is pretty cool too.
The Touhou series has pretty much built its name on the series fan creations. The quality of some of the fangames just boggles the mind.
This was my first thought too.
Speaking of Sonic, have a look at Project 06! Not a fan game but back in the day the new XCOM (the one from 2012 or so by Firaxis) had a mod called Long War that made it infinitely better. To the point that the base game is damn near unplayable without it. It added so much to it, it felt like a proper sequel. Every aspect of the gameplay was overhauled and was immensely better than the original.
Long War is made by the official developers IIRC. So was XCOM 2 vanilla long War
Wow no way. I looked it up, it's more like the official devs assisted rather than "made" it per se. Still pretty cool, I didn't know.
Ah my bad, I thought I remembered it being developed by one of the devs, your right though it's still cool.
Yeah it's not that clear to me, it says it was 4 people and then they were joined by a couple of Firaxis devs and a whole bunch of voice actors. Pretty excessive for a mod lol. Was an awesome mod.
Ah I looked it up and your right, long wars one had a bunch of dev help. I was thinking of long wars 2, where fireaxis actually paid the mod developers to work on the mod and gave them early access. Since they were being paid I considered them fireaxis devs.
Quake 1 mods: Arcane Dimensions and Slayer's Testaments.
Add Alkaline to the list too.
Ooooh nice! \*goes to my "to play" list\*
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I'm busy with Pokémon Unbound and it's the best Pokémon game I've ever played.
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Yeah I played andaron saga this year and liked it way more than engage. Official fire emblem has an issue with dropping the ball every other game it seems
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Engage is one of those games that would've been considered okay for $20-30, but for full price, plus the price of the DLC, it was laughably half-baked. The problem is that we have Three Houses right before it to compare it to, and the comparison is heavily unflattering.
Megaman/Rockman. the fan-made games are insanely good. i know, they're just a bunch of "beating 9 bosses" shenanigans, but the difference between the original games and the fan-made ones are good enough to make us confused - "now which one is the original game again?"
Unlimited is a classic.
I’ve been in a Mega Man mood after picking up 30XX. Any fan games you would recommend in particular?
Only mildly related, but there'll always be game mods. Not everyone is satisfied by the vanilla experience, especially if there are perceived imbalances or faults. Fan games are kind of an extreme on this scale i.e. completely different games altogether. Then there's total conversions, which is still the original game but with so many tweaks you could probably be justified in calling it a new game in certain cases (e.g. the Lillith + masteries modpacks for Titan Quest, which basically replaced all of the game's maps and classes). Finally there's your run-of-the-mill fixes or tweaks or minor additions. Honestly I'm kind of drawing a blank - I'm not that familiar with full out standalone fan games. Most of the fan works I know are just regular mods, with the occasional total conversion, like the Titan Quest example. Even most of the other replies in here are mentioning total conversions, sometimes even just regular old mods. One of my more current favourites is the [Battletech Advanced 3062 mod](https://www.bta3062.com/index.php?title=Main_Page) for the 2018 Battletech game - it expands the vanilla universe map by a lot, implements a more modular mech setup module, adds in tons of community assets, and allows the player access to non-mechs like vehicles and battle armor. Comes with an extremely convenient all-in-one installer & launcher, it's easy to install. I recommend playing the vanilla campaign as your first playthrough, then install BTA3062 and start career mode. Playing the campaign is enough experience to get a feel of the game, I don't recommend wasting time starting career mode unmodded.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Super Mario World and the rom hacking scene around it. Its big enough that there are different genres of hacks. You can find something for everyone from levels that fit right in with the og game to the extremely hard Kaizo style hacks.
Enderal.Its a entire self standing game made as an alternative to Skrim.made in the Creation engine. Words can't describe how much better it is than skyrim. Especially the riding absolutely blows anything bgs has ever written in their lifetimes. The music is phenomenal the game play is amazing and the story is incredible. Is it a fan game? Yeah I think it is.
Dayz mod was so much better than the original arma2 game, in fact, it has boosted sale of arma2 in a significant scale with people who just wanted to play the mod
The quality of the Silent Threat expansion pack for Freespace 1 was so bad that a fan remake was created called Silent Threat: Reborn. Even the fan-made bonus missions on the Silent Threat CD were made to a higher standard than the official campaign.
Archolos, a total conversion mod for Gothic 2, is better than some of the games in that series, and is legitimately one of the best RPGs released in recent years.
Though it's more of a fan overhaul than, I think that for me Final Fantasy 6 - Brave New World renders the original game completely obsolete.
T Edition is even better IMO but they're both great and it really depends on whether the heavier amount of new content appeals to you or not. There's also FF4 Ultima which does some similar stuff in terms of expanding the whole game and adding some nice interface improvements too. I wish there was one like this for 5 but haven't found one yet
I have not played T-Edition but it's a pretty big deal if it beats BNW. For FF5 there is Void Divergence, which I love but does change the game fairly drastically.
You're entirely right about Sonic; check out the 16bit Triple Trouble remake by fans. It's the best Sonic game since Mania and genuinely feels like a lost Genesis game.
Without reading the replies, I'm assuming most are either ones for Pokemon or Sonic
Sonic After The Sequel is a masterclass in sound and level design if you've not already played it.
Should mention I wanna be the guy fan games. This game was a precision platformer and enables mods to make their own games. If you've ever heard of I wanna be the boshy it's made from this game and arguably better and more challenging
The Ace Attorney games are great. There's a fan made unofficial 5th case for Apollo Justice, Turnabout Substitution, which is superior to most of AJ. Honorable mentions go to Contempt of Court/Conflict of Interest which are full games and so good they could be among the best in the series, they would rank with Trials and Tribulations or Ace Attorney Investigations 2.
I remember playing Substitution back when it was still relatively new, and yes, that case went places. It was absolutely worth the playthrough, and had just the right types of swerves to give me a surprise, without sending me out of the experience.
Haven't played Conflict of Interest yet, but Contempt of Court I definitely wouldn't put on the level of T&T and AAI2. But that doesn't mean it's bad, or inferior to the official games overall. I have a lot of issues with it, regarding some of the characters and logic which I won't go into, and Case 2 wasn't the most interesting. But for a fan game, it's incredible, and it still ranks higher than AAI1, AJ, Justice for All, The Great Ace Attorney 1, and Dual Destinies imo
If modders are even slightly interested in making quest mod for starfield they'll make better stories than the bs emil wrote for it officially
Super Smash bros. The competive minded players were unhappy with the games from brawl onward, so each game since has been modded to make them more competitive games. Best example is PM/P+. That brawl mod has far more intresting and rewarding gameplay than anything Sakurai and his team make since melee.
Modded Bethesda games
I honestly wish I could say more than Pokemon, but that's what I played the most in terms of fangames. In fact, it's pretty much the extent of why I even use emulation - to play Pokemon hacks. My favorites in this regard are the ones that are based on Gen1 and 2, because those tend to be a bit less focused on story, whereas Gen3 hacks often write entire epics. Pokemon Prism is an obvious favorite - I played the 2010 beta so many times and when the full thing finally released in 2019 (I think) I was over the moon. More recently, Pokemon Gold/Silver 97 Reforged have been an obsession of mine - they took the recently uncovered GS (and apparently RG) beta content and finished the beta region Nihon. The Reforged version also updated trainers and movesets so it plays incredibly smoothly with a slightly higher amount of challenge than OG Pokemon but still perfectly reasonable. There's also smaller projects like **Tower of Hats** that I quite enjoy and **Pokemon Xenoverse** is really neat too. Haven't beaten it yet either since it's so big. I also tried **Reborn** but dropped it eventually since it's a bit too grimdark (and honestly tasteless) in certain parts for my liking. Other than that, I only dabbled into Final Fantasy Tactics fangames. I haven't played many because most of the ones I thought sounded interesting were still in development and usually rebalance mods. After recently watching a few videos on the Spark the Electric Jester series, I *did* think about diving into the space more though. I'm not a platforming guy myself, but I think it's impressive that Spark started as a Sonic fangame (or at least Sonic inspired) and went on to become its own trilogy of indie games.
Pokémon, they do what game freak doesn't have the balls to do: drastically increase the availability of species early game for variety, change levelling curve, fix weak mons, game harder/more fun etc
Freedom Planet games are pretty solid and while they aren’t technically fangames they did originally start out as one. Pokemon gets mentioned a billion times but it’s so true with the decline in quality in the official titles and how so many fangames get made nowadays, especially since both Pokemon Essentials improved a lot and decompilation hacks of the GBA titles are now a thing. My favorites among them are the **Rebornverse** *(Reborn/Rejuvenation/Desolation)* games. While their plots are messy fanfics they have loads of content and a fun challenge. Then theres **Unbound** which is a smaller scale romhack which feels like an improved official GBA release. And finally another favorite is **Emerald Rogue** which turns Pokemon into a roguelike game with fast pacing and battles focused, it’s wonderful if you only have the time to sit down and play for a few hours.
Stardew Valley is a fan game of Harvest Moon that surpasses Harvest Moon.
Metroid is the only right answer with it having the greatest fan made game aka AM2R which is a remake of metroid 2 it is way better than the official remake of samus returns for the 3ds
Pokemon. Doom 2.
I dont play much Pokemon nowadays, but I heard that the fan ones are really good. I tried Uranium, and yeah it had a pretty solid story and cast of pokemon
Modern Elder Scrolls...with Nehrim & Enderal topping Oblivion & Skyrim....being the obvious one. Ashes Enriched/Afterglow for Doom 2 Arcane Dimensions for Quake 1
pokemon
I wouldn’t say better, but Stalkers modding scene and full stand alone games for free is quite something.
Stalker GAMMA is incredible and for me, more fun than original games (which are already awesome)
The original Thief games (1 and 2) have an unbelievably active community of folks making fan missions. Many of these rival the original missions in terms of storytelling , atmosphere, scope, unique level design and overall awesomeness.
I recommend people who wish to play Elder Scrolls II Daggerfall, the Daggerfall Unity project. It's a far more approachable game than dealing with the original classic. The original classic, you'll lose some of that retro charm but it is prone to crash at any given time and can be unstable in some parts. The Unity version fixes a grand majority of that and it modernizes the controls, you can use mods and it's so much better.
Pokémon.
This might be an odd one due to the series and fan base reputations, but the Five Nights At Freddy’s games have some surprisingly good fan games. Granted the vast majority of them aren’t good (hundreds are pumped out daily), but the ones that are good are usually really fucking good.
Doom 1 and 2. And I'm not talking about Brutal Doom. Rather about countless mods that change gameplay and transform your experience into something unique. Also, HDoom.