Mods...what are they?

I know many of the hardcore gamers know what is a mod and how important it is for players. But, during my conversation with other players I realized that there are many gamers still don't know anything about mods and how mods can affect them.

Basically, mods are additions created by the players (they were called as modders.). They are made for especially role playing games, real time strategy games, turn based strategy games and rarely first person shooter games. Although as I mentioned many modders are players, many of them have programming and graphic design background and they were some cases that some mods created by the current developers and unemployed game developers.

However, downloadable contents (DLCs) and mods are a little bit different. DLCs are created by the official developer teams and that kind of addition are created for gaining another source of revenue. But, mods are created for sharing your work with the fans of the games and they are free for the players.

Some games offer toolset of the game in order the create mods. For example, games like Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout Last Vegas (although they use the same G.E.C.K toolset.) and Dragon Age Origins. These mods created by the modders usually shared with modding community websites or some social websites that created by the developer team. However, some games do not offer any mods and many modders change the code of these games and add their designs to make mods for them. Best examples are mods for Total War and Civilization series.

Why it is so important to download the mods? Actually if you like your game and satisfy with everything and do not want to change the original content of the game you do not need to (and possibly you do not want to) download mods. However, many mods adds additional varieties and more options to the games. For example, with the mods you can have more weapons, armor, items, enemies and quests in your game database. In addition, with the mods you can add more realism or more arcade overhauls to your games. They are definitely worthwhile to download especially you want to add more fun to the games and I can guarantee you that there are many good modders which offer you the mods that you do not want to miss this chance to download.

P.S I also want to thank all the modders who use a lot of times and work to create these wonderful mods.

I think Nexus websites are great for searching mods for your preference. If you search mods for your games here are the links for the nexus websites;

http://www.tesnexus.com/ (for Oblivion)
http://www.dragonagenexus.com/ (for Dragon Age: Origins)
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/ (for Fallout 3)
http://www.newvegasnexus.com/ (for Fallout New Vegas)


Screenshots:
1. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/38336-1-1304674120.jpg
2.http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/3374-1-1286773944.jpg
3.http://www.dragonagenexus.com/downloads/images/2822-1-1305486739.jpg