And now we will sing the praises of mods and modders

Let me tell you... I will never again be content with playing a game out of the box. There's just so much user content out there, made by people who care about the games and the subject material (instead of money) that blows the corporate content away. I just downloaded the Grey Wolves Expansion for Silent Hunter III (more on that in a minute) and I'm shocked, shocked I tell you about how much I was missing playing the game the way the developer expected me to play it. Now, the phonograph actually works, and I can listen to German and English period music. Instead of the boring-ass theme music I played some bagpipe tunes over the radio as I sailed out of port at midnight. Sound overall is way better, richer and more realistic. There are also scads of new ship designs and dozens of new navies to encounter, ranging from Albania to Uruguay. Put *that* in your pipe and smoke it, Ubisoft! Now, I know that developers sink a lot of money into these games, and the modders work for free because they think it's fun, but still... devs, the mods are putting you to shame. Think about that.

I found the mod (after two years) because I was reading some forums about certain graphics issues with the upcoming (released in the next few days) Silent Hunter 4. Apparently, the new member of the franchise may or may not suck depending on who you believe from among those who have already procured copies. If their naysayers are correct, the game I've been waiting for may turn out to be a total bust. That's where everybody came in saying "look at what the modders did with SH3. I would never go back to the vanilla game". Well, folks, I looked up their mod, and it's just fantastic. I'd hate to have to wait a year to properly enjoy SH4, but if it comes to that, I have confidence in the modding community to fix whatever POS game the developers might throw at us.

That said...

If you're a fan of Rome:Total War and you haven't downloaded the Rome: Total Realism mod, you're missing out. The map is 1/3 bigger, there are more civilizations and they are more historically accurate. Everything about it is better, and like they say, I'd never play vanilla RTW again. Maybe the game designers should take a cue from the modders... we play these games because we value lots of content, realism and accuracy. We're not here for edu-tainment.

Thank you, modders, for making games great where designers have made them, well, moderate.

I can't wait to see what they cook up for Medieval Total War II. Personally, I am hoping there's a mod that makes the Mongol's slightly more reasonable.

I agree completely that they make games so much better than they are out of the box.These days any company that doesn't give out the source codes is really hurting themselves I think.There's still mods for Quake 1 coming out fer chrissakes!

Haven't played Silent Hunter since the second one (It didn't grab me like Aces of the Deep did back in the day) but after reading this thread I may have to load it back up and see how much tonnage I can sink before the shit hits the fan and you're spending all your time just trying to evade Destroyers.