>>11927381
>The games being put out aren't worth making mod communities for
Also true, and not even BECAUSE of the derivative part, hell, Doom was strongly derivative itself, one of the key concepts for Doom was to combine the themes of the two favorite movies of the iD Software guys, Aliens and Evil Dead 2.
And you can see those themes if you look at Doom, but they also didn't just rip those movies off bit for bit, hell, before starting development they even considered to outright do it as an Aliens license game for a short bit, seeing that they could seek the license, but they decided that they'd rather do their own thing instead without having Fox dictating them.

The way that Doom is derivative is that it does its own things inspired by the themes of cool movies. The way many modern games are derivative is that they are poor/mediocre licensed adaptions of series which are now old as fuck, a continual corporate milking of existing properties (compare to Aliens and Evil Dead 2 not being that old yet in 1993).
Doom and Doom 2 are also games with solid gameplay and design at their core, which is generally the most important ingredient to a lively modding scene, if the game isn't any fun to play, then people aren't even gonna bother modding it much, they'll play and mod a better game instead. Its why Doom had strong modding even before there were good tools or sourceports, people loved the game that much.

The other way modern games tend to be derivative is that they are assembled according to economically calculated formulas, which is why in spite of all the technological possibilities we have today for making games, these titles end up feeling and playing so very similarly. Pic related.