I know I remember seeing some people talk about how nice some of the environments in Hitman were, and that they’d just walk around as a tourist from time to time, treating it like a walking simulator/virtual tourism thing instead of the stealth assassination game it is. Curious about other things like that, where you play a game totally differently than it was meant to be played.
I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.
My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)
Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”
The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.
lolwtf
The prison mod is great for running the “re education” camps in the Handmaid’s Tale scenarios. I usually rezone all of the lots in Downtown to residential, and then explode a series of bombs across them (+ enhance with some assets ripped from the Fallout games). Occasionally I add in a zombie apocalypse to shake it up.
My Utah Mormons I play out the generation after they moved from Nauvoo. Clothing is period accurate, as much as possible. The goal is to populate an empty map, and find something to do with all of the extra men (wars, Indian raids…)
When I was ten and playing the original Sims, it was Roman families with historically accurate slavery (minus the sex stuff.)
Have not played The Sims in a hot minute, is this a mod? I don’t remember being able to do this.
I thought that was the Sims intended playstyle? You mean to tell me the developer didn’t intend for me to make a family of 8 of my friends, then trap them in a house until each of them dies one-by-one Hunger Games style? Then build a glorious mansion for the final one?
Will Wright after seeing everything he owned in ashes after a series of major wildfires in the Palisades: “what if I made a virtual dollhouse for people to explore sexual and violent fantasies that would make Freud say, ‘no, that’s too much.’”
I get the tone is jokey but I wasn’t sure if that was a hypothetical alternate universe proposition with a different Will Wright, or something that happened in real life, so I looked up the wildfire thing.
—https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/will-wright-says-the-original-sims-ai-was-actually-too-good-almost-anything-the-player-did-was-worse-than-the-sims-running-on-autopilot/ar-AA1yqxwx
Yep, real life and not just hypothetical, ouch.
I always like to see people who go all in on the roleplaying in RPGs.
I do wish people would leave mods that aren’t for them alone. There are a bunch of mods extremely not to my taste that I just scroll past instead of intentionally clicking to tell the mod author just how much it is not to my taste and that they should not have made it because I am uninterested in the content.
Modding is a really under appreciated art form.
Downloading unhinged Morrowind mods in the mid naughts exposed me to new franchises, music, ideas… Like this banger, which plays at some point in the Underground 2 along with this one. (btw, Dawnguard is Emil or whoever wrote it ripping off story beats from a 20 year old Morrowind mod based on the Underworld series lol - play both and don’t tell me that the Soul Cairn sequence isn’t inspired…)
I’m not into mods but if I remember right, isn’t Lady Rae the one who left the modding community and started making music?
Did she make music? Holy shit - if you have a link I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her for years. She’s genuinely a major inspiration for my painting and art.
Took some digging and I was incorrect. I was thinking of another modder.
Kukielle went from Skyrim mods to music: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqwchfbSVSfmpLMGe1fhE0w
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-elder-scrolls/it-makes-me-sick-popular-skyrim-modder-with-500-000-downloads-abandons-modding-after-thousands-of-hours-of-work-on-what-they-call-the-most-advanced-follower-to-ever-exist/