Hi there, so there are two MODS that I really like for two reasons. 1St they objectively improve the game and 2nd they work without DRM.

Quake: Epsilon http://www.xpfree.org/epsilon/

Hexen II: Hammer of Thyrion http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/

Quake 2/Return to Return to Castle Wolfenstein http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/

So both modes improve Hexen 2 and Quake and require files from the original game which you can get from Steam, but once you have those files and the mod files you will also have DRM free versions of those games.

These are the only too mods I know of that do this but if you know of any others please let me know and I will add them to the list.
I think this is really cool because it's a perfectly clean and legal way of getting your game of which you paid good money for even better.

Is not Quake Hexen II DOSBox games to start with, and thereby DRM free by default?

I'm fairly sure the mod manager for Fallout 3 goes around GFWL. That's what I was thinking, yeah.

I'd also call them ports, not mods.
But that's just me.

HeXen II isn't a DOSBox game.

Nope, Quake and Hexen 2 on Steam need the client to work. I'd call them unofficial patches myself, but the exact definition doesn't really matter since they still modify the game content.

I found a lot of those over the years, generally every official stand alone mod is like that. Last example I remember is This Half Life 1 mod that requires 1 of the source SDK containing games (hence is kind of official) but it doesn't need the original game installed (hence is stand alone).

such a mod is called crack or

Return to Castle Wolfenstein, This unofficial patch removes any ties to Steam, played and finished the whole game with it zero issues.

read, the, post, properly. Thank you. really, I'll have to check it out. Is there an IMDB link though?

Well, a crack objectively improves a game by removing the DRM :-P

Don't you still need Steam to run Black Mesa?
lol okay

If they are unofficial and not in line with the license because they circumvent drm, then I'm pretty certain that these aren't actually "technically" legal. Can anyone with a better understanding of fair use and copyright law weigh in?

Well Quake up to 3 is open source so you can re-build the executables if you want. You still need the assets though so they aren't freeware.

id Software has a long history of releasing the source code of their games under the GPL(version 2 prior to the ZeniMax acquisition, version 3 after that) once the engine isn't commercially viable anymore: https://github.com/id-Software?tab=repositories