Well, that didn't take long, but it never does, does it? Mods for Far Cry 4 have begun to appear, and one called NaMODste brings a few small but welcome changes, some aimed at making things easier and some adding a bit of difficulty.

First, a few nice changes to the controls. Even after hours of play, I find the conjoined nature of the weapon and syringe wheels a bit awkward, always having to open the first to get to the second. NaMODste nicely allows you to access them separately. Tapping your reload key (R, I'm assuming) reloads your weapon, and holding down R opens the weapon wheel. Meanwhile, tapping your heal key injects you with a healing syringe, while holding down the heal key brings up the syringe crafting wheel. It's nice to have the two wheels apart from one another, and bound to keys (reload and heal) you already use regularly.

Switching from normal arrows to explosive or flaming arrows can now be done by tapping the Y key, which will cycle through them, while the repair tool (rarely ever used) comes out only when you hold down the Y key. This feels a lot better than holding down Q and selecting E or R to change arrows which for me never became a routine mechanical movement (though you still can use the original method if you prefer).

In terms of making the game a bit more challenging, there are a few considerable tweaks. The first thing you'll notice when taking over outposts is that you can no longer see the outline of enemies, even tagged ones, through the walls. If you have tagging enabled, you'll still be able to see the tags, but the outlines of the enemies themselves are gone. I suspect hardcore players already disable weapon tagging and the minimap, so this'll help bring even more of a challenge to outposts. The mod also removes objective markers from the HUD.

Things get a bit tougher when it comes to weapons as well. If you're playing on Easy, weapon prices won't change, but playing on normal doubles weapon prices and playing on hard triples them, meaning some signature weapons are priced at over a million Kyrat bux. It's a common complaint that our wallets are always full and money is basically meaningless, so this definitely addresses that a bit. Not only that, but conquering Kyrat's many radio towers no longer means you get free guns out of the deal. You'll now either have to buy them, or find them on a dead baddie.

Finally, the mod cleans some clutter from your map. Undiscovered places are marked with question marks, but once you officially discover a location, its icon no longer displays on your map. This prevents the map from looking over-stuffed with locations once you've done a fair amount of exploring. The locations are still technically on your map, but the pins are hidden -- slowly mousing over the map will still pop-up the descriptions. Outposts, mission locations, forts, and major towns are still shown as before.

More changes are planned -- an image from the mod's page shows what looks to be a change to the weapon attachment options, possibly allowing you to choose more attachments than just the standard ones. That will definitely be welcome.

The mod isn't up on Nexus Mods yet (and may never be: apparently, the modder has had some issues with them in the past). The modder does have a Facebook page for this mod and some Far Cry 3 mods where you can find the download link. Just a warning: the current download link is on an adfly page, so be careful as it always presents a bunch of download buttons prior to providing a link to the actual download in the top right corner of the screen.