10 Video Game Mods That Restored Essential Features
Sometimes it's up to the modding community to make things right.
Video games have a long history of being released in broken or incomplete states. The legacy of modders leaping to attention to fix the mistakes of rushed developers stretches back nearly as long. These mods do not always just address the occasional bug or glitch - some go as far as restoring cut content and features left out of the game completely!
Content like this is left out for a variety of different reasons. Sometimes it is due to time constraints, complexity or tricky code, and other times it is simply due to the general editorial process of art.
Modders love to trawl through and restore cut content, and in doing so can often massively improve a game. These remixes of games can be so impressive that some modders even go on to get industry jobs. Other modders just make nigh-on impossible changes that wildly alter an otherwise serious game.
In this article we will break down 10 video game mods that restored essential content: ranging from expanded story options to features that entirely fix previously unplayable ports of games. Read on as we cover a wide range of mods: from ones fixing the driving in Cyberpunk 2077 to reworkings of entire PC ports.
10. Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition - DSFix
Arguably one of the more famous mods on this list, DSFix restores the essential feature of the game actually working on PC. Long before Dark Souls: Remastered came to PC and provided a smooth, officially sourced update to the game, it was nearly unplayable on PC.
The frame rate was notoriously low, plummeting even further when introduced to the infamous Blighttown area of the game. That is only the simplest of the issues with the Dark Souls PC port, and DSFix goes a long way to address all of them.
It works by intercepting the game as it sends information into the DirectX 9 API, and alters the information before it gets there to enable a higher resolution, alongside ambient occlusion, bug fixes and proper antialiasing. It is generally regarded as the comprehensive mod for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition players, and its comprehensiveness has even gotten the original modder work in the games industry!
You can get DSFix here.