DbpGaming
The first minecraft modpack i know if is the original feed the beast skyblock, for minecraft versions 1.0-1.2.5, it was just a skyblock map with a few mods, nothing to note as far as complexity but it seems to have been met with a overwhelmingly positive response and is where it all started.
After their success their were other modpacks, but the only thing worth mentioning is the original tekkit. FTB continued to make modpacks, which as far as i’m aware, lead to next FTB Ultimate
FTB Ultimate is probably where modpacks started to morph into the long progression based playstyle we see today, it had mods like IndustrialCraft, Gregtech, Thermal Expansion, Forestry, Railcraft, Buildcraft, RedPower, and much more. it was also a survival mode in a normal world not a skyblock, and is generally one of the packs the most people have nostalgia for.
Post Ultimate for FTB there were many packs, unhinged, unleashed, monster, etc, etc, and to great success though with the lack of RedPower some people still stayed behind on Ultimate. and ofcourse the community outside of FTB was rising, though i don’t really feel a need to mention them in this post.
In 1.7.10 FTB Released a few packs, none of them more noteworthy than Infinity. Infinity is a "Kitchen Sink" pack with basically everything you could imagine up to that point. you have IndustrialCraft, EnderIO, Thermal Expansion, Twilight Forest, Thaumcraft, Botania, in general if there was something you wanted to do, or a popular mod you wanted to play, it was there, and everything worked, though this isn’t the reason Infinity is well known anyway
In later updates Infinity was renamed Infinity Evolved and got a new concept introduced. gamemodes. expert mode changed how the game plays and tied mods together, and ported some of the original Gregtech nerfs into script form, it brought back the long progression of Ultimate to the praise of many, except it was even better, longer, and more fun.
After 1.7.10 and the age of Infinity ended there was successors, Infinity Lite and FTB Beyond, but nothing stuck packs kept trying to scratch that itch and they did, for a lot of people, but thats how we got to the state of modded we are in now, people trying to scratch that itch, during this time a lot of people also found Gregtech 5, which is known for it’s grind, this only accelerated the downward spiral of modpacks post Infinity.
You may ask what is the problem with modern modpacks how they are, you enjoy them and don’t see the issue. if you do enjoy them, great that you do! the problem is right now that modpacks are very specialized for certain playstyles, you have sink packs that are just a ton of mods without a single recipe change making them extremely unbalanced. you have expert packs where every recipe is changed and the pack takes months to complete. with this not only is finding good packs in your style hard, it’s also hard to find packs you can play with your friends and you all agree on it, for us who don’t like singleplayer and don’t care for most of these modern packs, it makes it extremely difficult to play modpacks.
A great example of this problem is Gregtech New Horizons, and AllTheMods, both are fine packs in their own way, but have major issues for me to actually play them, AllTheMods (refering to the 1.12 version) is unbalanced and is hard for me to take seriously, not to mention can be a short pack for the same reasons, Gregtech New Horizons is the exact opposite, it’s so long it’s hard for me to personally not get bored, plus my friends will definitely get bored, so it’s hard to ever get a playthrough going, these packs are fine for their audiences, but why do they have to be the mainstream?
Generally modern packs have poor performance this comes down to a mix between incompetence and wanting to just throw every mod under the sun at a pack, it just doesn’t work. most 1.12 packs use 4-8gb of ram, to me this is unacceptable along with the low framerates and low tps,
Making packs that are balanced selectively like FTB Infinity Evolved was the normal, this way everyone can play, you can have long strings of progression without making everything grindy, hell you could even limit it to certain mods, or just OP items. that way everyone can have fun, no bullshit required.
For 1.12 just checking your mods goes a long way, most memory usage and poor performance is caused by one or two mods being silly, example of mods that are bad on 1.12 would be, EnderIO, Mekanism, NuclearCraft, TerraFirmaCraft, AdventOfAcension, Binnie’s Mods, and a few others, generally this is just quality assurance shit people fail at.
Another great pack at doing balance and it was even before infinity just less popular, is TestPackPleaseIgnore, it’s basically everything infinity is but with less nerfs and long tech trees, and more just balancing out OP items, it also has more mods like Gregtech 4, and Ars Magica, definitely a treat and a prime example of how to do things.
In modern times one pack that manages to strike this balance pretty well, that i don’t like over modlist stablity reasons, is AllOfFabric3, it has basically every popular fabric mod, performs well over optimization mods and a half decently managed modlist, OP items are tweaked, with Modern Industrialization filling the progression, it fills the itch more than any other sink or "expert" pack does at the moment.