It’s great that many games today are available on both consoles and PC, giving more people the ability to enjoy them. But what if you have both? Frankly, there are many games that you may as well exclusively play on PC if you have the choice. On PC, these games have far more content and value.
Bethesda titles have always been known for a certain amount of jank. Their bugs and glitches are legendary. They are usually pretty impressive in terms of content, but players fall so in love with these worlds that it never seems like enough. Skyrim may have native mod support for consoles, but the older titles, like Oblivion and Morrowind, do not. If you play those titles on consoles, you are limited to the original offerings of those games.
But why limit yourself? Why let Skyrim have all the fun, what with turning dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine and adding lightsabers to the game? The older Elder Scrolls titles have a huge plethora of amazing mods on PC, from minor visual improvements to the addition of entire continents and gameplay elements. Moreover, Oblivion and Morrowind are old enough now to run well even on potato computers, so the barrier to entry is super low.
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9
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Halo was once a console titan, the flagship series of Xbox, so it may sound heretical to recommend playing it on PC instead. On its own, The Master Chief Collection is already an incredible value. Regardless of the platform you buy it on, you are getting seven of the best sci-fi shooters in gaming history at a great price, including some side games you may not have played before. But if you buy it on PC, you get all of that, plus a whole slew of extra content through mods.
The Halo fanbase has been divided in recent years, with many diehard fans sticking to the older titles and modding their dreams into them. Some mods add entirely new campaigns. Others overhaul the graphics just like the Anniversary entries. Some even allow you to strap magnums to Chief’s feet and do flying kung-fu kicks. Needless to say, MCC with mods offers hundreds of hours of extra content compared to the console version.
8
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
Mount & Blade II is an ambitious game, blending RTS strategy, third-person hack-and-slash, and 4X strategy into one big package. While it offers all of these things to some extent in the base game, it falls short in many areas due to shortcomings with the mechanics, particularly in the 4X strategy part of things. I first played Bannerlord on Xbox, but it’s a whole different game on PC—a much better one, with far more replayability.
Once again, it’s all about mods. There are hundreds of mods for Bannerlord, with many of them fixing major issues in the base game. There are improvements to in-game diplomacy and trade, unit types, armor sets, and much more. Heck, there are total conversion mods that change the entire setting to historically accurate Europe with muskets and cannons, and one that adds dragons Game of Thrones style.
Vanilla Bannerlord is on the cusp of greatness, but if you play it on PC, that missed potential isn’t a problem at all.
7
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II
Space Marine II is a great game on its own. In fact, it’s a perfectly reasonable buy on consoles, with plenty of content, which is constantly expanding with each update. There’s just one problem—it doesn’t have the right aesthetic options to make my favorite Space Marine chapter! Let’s be real, Warhammer 40,000 is a huge universe, with tons of characters, factions, sub-factions, and the like. That can’t all fit into the vanilla game.
If you are a fan of an incredibly obscure Space Marine chapter, getting the game on PC is the way to go. Most mods for the game are aesthetic, allowing you to look like your preferred niche super soldier of destruction in any game mode. Just be wary of modding the game on a Steam Deck, where it already struggles. You need a pretty good computer for this one!
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6
Fallout: New Vegas
Just like with The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda eventually got wise and added native mod support to their latest Fallout entries. That’s great and all, but you won’t have any such luck with Fallout: New Vegas, which is often regarded as one of the best entries in the series. Now, I’d recommend playing this amazing game vanilla first, but once that’s done, there are just too many amazing mods to pass up this title on PC.
Player running in Fallout: New Vegas after installing the Just Vanlla Sprint Mod.
Bounties add new gameplay elements. New companions are available. There are lots of quality-of-life mods, like sprinting and fast travel markers. Whatever mods you choose, the game is better with them than without them.
5
Star Wars: Battlefront II
I’m specifically talking about the 2017 version, but honestly, all of the Battlefront games, OG titles included, are better with mods. But for the 2017 version, even after its epic comeback after a terrible launch, one of the biggest letdowns on consoles is the very limited selection of skins for your troops and heroes. There is some variety, but even for the clone troopers, who by far have the most skins, they are still missing some iconic designs, like the Galactic Marines.
A lot of fans also found that their favorite heroes didn’t make it into the game before it stopped receiving content updates. With mods on PC, you can fix all of this, getting the skins you want for any faction. And while these mods might just reskin existing heroes, they still give you a way to at least look like iconic series heroes like Mace Windu or Padme. There are plenty of visual and sound mods out there as well.
4
The Sims 4
EA is taking a very long time to put out their next major Sims title. In the meantime, they are constantly cranking out DLC content for The Sims 4, which, admittedly, is accessible to players both on consoles and PC. But if there is one thing that’s true about this game, it’s that it’s always missing something that the fans want. The modding scene for The Sims 4 is absolutely enormous.
Dedicated asset creators are constantly adding aesthetic options like clothes and accessories for character creation, as well as home decor, food items, texture packs, and more. Some mods add new jobs, behaviors, skills, realism, and gameplay elements to the game as well. Moreover, if there’s a bug in the base game (which there always is), there will often be a mod to patch it before EA gets to it.
Simply put, buying this game on PC guarantees you get access to a phenomenal amount of extra content, which goes a long way for a simulation game’s immersion and replayability.
3
Stellaris
Stellaris is one of my favorite 4x strategy games of the Civilization variety, and I actually ended up playing it on Xbox before I got it on PC. Make no mistake, the game is very good even on consoles, with one of the best-ported control schemes I’ve seen in the genre and tons of content. If a console is all you have and you love these types of games, it’s definitely worth a buy and can deliver hundreds to thousands of hours of fun.
That said, if you can get the game on PC instead, it’s the better route by far, and not just because of mods, even though it’s amazing fun to mod Halo or Star Wars ships into the game. The unfortunate reality is that Stellaris on consoles is several versions behind its PC counterpart, and there are no plans to achieve parity between the two. While all updates come to the console version of the game eventually, even the vanilla PC version has more content to offer.
2
Rimworld
Rimworld is one of those games that already has a ton of content even in its vanilla state. You could definitely end up with thousands of hours in it with nothing else added in. Yet, despite the immense replayability of Rimworld, it’s still missing a lot of things that only get added in by mods. In fact, you can find almost anything you want in the Steam mod workshop for this game.
That includes quality of life improvements, aesthetic reskins for popular IPs like Star Wars, Halo, and Warhammer, added mechanics, and much more. My favorite is a mod that allows you to play the game with your friends in multiplayer, which completely changes the experience of the game and adds entirely new layers of enjoyment. This is to say nothing about mods that make the colonists more tolerable and wise than their base game allows.
The point of a game like Rimworld is designed to provide a huge amount of variety and replayability, so there’s really no reason to buy it on anything other than PC if you can help it. A world of ten thousand mods awaits all PC players, offering way more content for your money than the console version.
1
Subnautica
I loved Subnautica and its sequel, finding myself immersed in alien oceans and fighting for survival. It reminded me a lot of a more watery Ark: Survival Evolved. But you know what Ark has that Subnautica doesn’t, at least on consoles? Multiplayer! I would have loved to explore those daunting waters with friends, especially my scaredy-cat wife, but I was playing on Xbox, unfortunately.
Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of other mods available for Subnautica on PC, even some that completely change the game experience (you can drain the ocean so it’s actually a big desert with flying fish instead), but the most valuable mod for me was a multiplayer mod that allowed me to play the game with others. It’s not what the developers envisioned for the game, but it made it ten times more fun for me.
Subnautica is a worthy buy even for its vanilla version alone, but if you want to get the most bang for your buck, you need the mods that PC gives you access to.
All of the games on this list have been specifically mentioned because of their modding scenes, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone. Admittedly, it is possible to mod games on consoles like Xbox and PlayStation, but it’s very complicated, requires third-party tools and software, and could void any warranty guarantees if you accidentally mess something up. Needless to say, it’s easier to get the great value of mods on PC if you can.
