Is the act of modding an older game necessary to be able to enjoy it ?

Is the act of modding an older game necessary to be able to enjoy it ?

No

Only if you're one of those MUH GRAPHICKZ fags

Sometimes it is.
I don't have a joystick anymore so playing Freespace with mouse instead is great.
Also being able to play in higher resolution than 800x640 and updated models is nice.

For a first-time through, you should always get mods that help to alleviate pain for running the game in question on your hardware, unless you have the hardware prepared in question for such a game anyway, which is highly improbable.

It's not necessary to enjoy it; it's necessary to play upkeep on it. The models and other such don't need any sense of upkeep as this was the original intent by the developers. For a second-time through, retextures and other such shit is perfectly fine, but if you can only stomach a game your first time through by playing through it modded, then you're not exactly playing the game as intended and it's really questionable why you'd go to such lengths to do that in the first place when you couldn't enjoy the game as is.

I doubt the "new model" would scare me as much as the original did back then.

Also some games flat out won't work properly on new hardware, so mods become literally a requirement for enjoyment.

Good taste!
I finished Arx Fatalis with Arx Libertatis a couple of months ago. Worked great!

>Original model
A former female twisted into a nightmarish thing

>"Superior" model
OMG, I'm so inconvenienced right now :/

That's not even accurate anymore. The makers of that model redid it and made it look closer to the original

Just depends on the game. Elder Scrolls tend to be unplayable garbage without mods

Rebirth is shit 2bh, original ss2 models are better. Follow the newbie modding guide from systemshock.org but always skip rebirth.
SHTUP however is great.

My framerate gets cut in half every time I look at a torch, I can't play that game. I'm mad.

I think the question is why not? Do whatever it takes to have fun.

I refuse to use any graphics mod that doesn't fit the games art-style though, that's why I tend to go for total conversion packs/mods, more consistent.

With the mod?
Works flawless for me.

Most of the time I would say no unless its just to get it working. However mods are nice to make an older game better since often the ones that the community agrees are good and improve the game enough to justify it

The Rebirth models are shit and completely miss the point of the design aesthetic of the original.

Yep. Without Libertatis I can't even launch the damn thing.

I believe you can switch between directx and opelgl render, maybe that helps.

On a first playthrough, I only use mods that allow the game to run on modern hardware and fix game breaking bugs. Anything else would give me a distorted impression of the game if I ever wanted to discuss it later. Later playthrough however, I'll look into overhauls and things. The mod you posted I'd never touch with a stick because that new midwife model is awful.

People who say shit like this are graphicsfags who spend 6 hours downloading and installing mods only to play the game for 15 minutes and get bored.

I played vanilla Oblivion all day today and it was totally fine.