Impulse/GameStop was selling Oblivion (Game of the Year Edition) last weekend for $10. The last Elder Scrolls game I’d played as Daggerfall, and I’d liked it despite the bugs, so I picked it up.
I spent some time yesterday getting it installed and downloading the ‘Unofficial Patches’ sets of mods, and then played around a bit.
As a complete neophyte to the game, I was wondering - what’s important for me to know? Are there any kickass mods I just have to have? Should I have just skipped it and gone with Skyrim?
I don’t know about mods, being a console player, but there are some amazing things in Oblivion that Skyrim doesn’t have. One big thing being that Cyrodil (the land you’re in) is very civilized, which I liked a lot.
The Assassin’s Guild and Knights of the Nine quests were my favorite.
Can you provide a link to the patches you got? Because I just bought it last week from Steam for $5, and right now at home I’ve got a leveling guide that requires me to put a checkmark in the appropriate box every single time I have a skill go up, to prevent leveling up too fast from killing me.
That, to me, is the most important thing to know about Oblivion. The deadliest threat in the game is improper leveling. I played it through back in 2007, and eventually had to stop because I’d leveled too quickly, and every Tom Dick and Harry was equipped with Daedrian Uberglass Vorpal Swords or whatever.
Hopefully you’ve found a good mod or two that makes leveling not quite so painful.
I really like Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, OOO for short. It fixes the leveling problem with the game and introduces new creatures. I also like the mod that adds animation so that you can tell when you have harvested an alchemy ingredient (can’t remember the name)
Other than that, you can browse the Oblivion Nexus for highly rated mods that interest you.
Monk : There’s just an overwhelming number of them, though.
What I have downloaded thus far are mod manager extensions (Wrye Bash, BOSS, and OBMM?) and the ‘Unofficial Patches’ I mentioned - I don’t think any of them address the leveling issues, but I saw this list :
Which mentions several different ones to address those problems. Not all of which play nice with each other.
Yeah, there are a lot, but most of them are crap. IIRC, you can sort by category and by number of endorsements, so you can be picky as to which ones you get. I think File Planet over at gamespy.com has had a series of articles on the best Oblivion mods overtime.
Personally I think you’re going about things the right way, (although I think you should play Morrowind first!). I loved Oblivion, still have it installed and may just do another go through over Christmas.
I never installed Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul and enjoyed the game just fine, despite the ‘levelling problem’. The Official and Unoffical patches are worthwhile though. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages Wiki is a great resource, handy for all sorts of things including mods. I never got to heavily into the mod thing though, I found enough to keep me occupied already in the game.
I’m pretty sure the game of the year edition includes the Shivering Isle and Knights of the Nine expansions, which are both excellent. It doesn’t really matter which order you do things in, although the further through the Main quest you are the more oblivion gates will pop up, which can be a bit tiresome.
Stuff you should know:
You should try and work your Armorer skill up to Journeyman pretty quickly as this lets you repair magic items and saves you a lot of cash.
If you’re not using a levelling mod you need to be a little careful when picking your major skills. Personally I avoid tagging things that increase automatically (Athletics in particular) or are used a lot (especially Restoration and Alchemy) to avoid the “levelling too quickly” problem.
The ‘undetected hit bonus when sneaking’ thing is great and should be (ab)used mercilessly in dungeons.
When levelling up you get a bonus to spend towards attributes whose skills you have increased the most in. So you should try and make sure you get as many maximum bonuses as you can (but don’t let this get in the way of playing the way you want to).
While we’re talking about attributes, your Strength determines how much you can carry, and Endurance sets how much more health you gain each level up. So you’ll want to get these up quite early.
The other thing that throws me about the mods is that some of them have prerequisites, which leads to a whole chain of thing you need. I seriously love that there’s this vibrant a mod community for the game, but I wish the modding system was a little more consistent so I could proceed with more confidence.
Also, apparently, since I bought through Impulse/Gamestop, I can’t use OBSE (requires an unencrypted Oblivion.exe), is my understanding, which takes some of them off the table.
Just a nitpick, but restoration increases so slowly even if you use it a lot that putting it as a major should never be a problem. In fact, doing so makes it easier to increase when you really want to do so.
Honestly, if you want to be a stealthy backstabber, put things like Restoration, Alteration, Armorer, Heavy Armor. Yes, things you’d never use. If you pick ones you do use, you level way too fast and don’t get good stat bonuses.
Agree, never ever tag Alchemy in vanilla. I was able to get it to 100 while my next highest skill was probably around 50-60.
Race pretty much doesn’t matter. For racial abilities, I prefer ones that are more passive or you don’t have to think about, as the 1/day ones I always forget about. Starsign, same thing, I would never use ones like The Shadow. Ones that just add stats are pointless as well (The Steed?), as it just means you can level less. Atronach is a fun one, but it can also be crippling so it depends on your style.
Maybe, I guess my compulsive need to fully heal after every minor combat means I’m hitting the 17,030 restore spells required to reach 100 Restoration before any other magic skill (other than Alchemy) surprisingly quickly.
More than you’ll ever need to know about this can be found on the UESP wiki’s pages about levelling. Here’s how do level the most effectively, but I’ve never felt the need to take things to such extremes.
The Steed’s not so bad, it acts as a constant fortify Speed effect, so you can go up to 120 speed if you want to. And Speed’s an attribute anyway so doesn’t effect how quickly you level. It also means you can run away more effectively at low levels and makes walking through Cyrodiil more bearable.
Another thing, and from the looks of it it hasn’t improved in Skyrim, is that all spells of the same type is equal as far as leveling is concerned. Sure you can buy a 150 Magicka, heal 100 hp in an area spell, but you will level much faster if you create a “heal 1 hp for 1 sec” spell (replace hp with fire damage on self, etc. as needed) and constantly cast it as you run around.
Oops, maybe I’m confusing it with Morrowind or something. As long as it’s an actual spell effect, and not a stat gain. And by level less, I didn’t mean the speed but that you’re already closer to the ceiling of stat points and are left with, say having 100 in all stats but 57 in luck or endurance or something.
And per that link, I am a big fan of the 5/5/1. Take luck early and often.
I remember playing Daggerfall, and leaving the game up overnight with a weight on the “jump” key. The poor sap would stand there bouncing until he passed out from exhaustion, sleep for an hour, then get back up and start bouncing again. I usually parked him in one of the guild barracks so he could nap without getting attacked or arrested. It was fun to taunt the Halts–I mean, “guards”–by casually leaping around the rooftops.
I downloaded OOO and made a halfassed attempt to install it, and I created a custom class with one major skill from each attribute and none that level two easily–but with that, I think I’m done fiddling with the system. Either I’ll end up with a playable character, or I won’t: the level of tedium people engage in as part of their leveling of this game is mystifying to me, and I’m not gonna do it.
I never got that either. I did install OOO (never played vanilla at all) and a couple other minor mods and just made characters conventionally. I never had any issues with character build feasibility.