I played Oblivion in the months following its release, but got frustrated with the number of mods that were necessary for an enjoyable game. This was back when the community was still trying to figure out how it all worked. OBMM was new enough to be a huge hassle to use then, requiring constant updates and leet tech knowledge.
Recently I’m enjoying Fallout 3 and kind of want to try *Oblivion *again, maybe actually get to play Shivering Isles for the first time.
Now that so much time has gone by, is there some consensus about essential mods? I can find sites with thousands of mods, but I want the essential ones that take care of the annoyances and problems that made it almost unplayable at the beginning (UI, bugs, freakin’ too many spells without a way to organize or delete them, barter hassles,etc.).
I’m in the reverse situation. I’m trying Oblivion for the first time and it’s made me want to play FO3 again (third time actually), but this time with the extension packs.
For Oblivion I use 3 mods. And only two of them are really any use to me. (because I aquired a skeleton key which renders my third mod useless)
I have the heroes retreat (a free castle to store your stuff and more)
And francesco’s levelled creatures/items mod, which restructures the way levelling works, to make it more ‘realistic’ or ‘balanced’ (or more like FO3). I’m not sure of the specifics, but the game is certainly playable. I’m up to level 14 and still enjoying it a lot.
Not essential per se, but certainly worth a look and one of the best quality mods out there (on the level with official stuff) is Kvatch Rebuilt. Which does pretty much what you’d expect and gives you the chance to become the Count of the rebuilt city.
Midas Magic is also very fun and adds a load of new spell effects.
As I recall, Oblivion suffers from way too many spells with confusing names, in varying levels. How do you handle additional spells? I think I used a spell renaming mod back then so I could tell which spells were the same, except of differing power.
Each effect has one new spell (and still fits into the ranged/on touch/on self categories), so it’s not too hard to keep track of which effect you want to use.
I also had a lot of fun with the archeology guild mod. It’s a full set of (difficult) quests centered around a new archeology guild. A lot of fun and features new art assets as well as the characters and storyline.
I can’t recall them, but there are a few really great graphics enhancing mods as well. Some of them really make Oblivion look 10 times better.
The big one is Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul. It aggregates dozens of mods together in a single patch, including a reworking of the auto-scaling of difficulty that Oblivion uses (the worst feature IMO).
Here’s a nice list (if not 100% up to date), however the links are broken : they point to TESSource, which has become TES Nexus since. No biggie, since you can search the TES Nexus database by mod name.
I’m aware of OOO, but just now read the details for the first time. Holy, moly, what a lot of work was done to create that one! I can see how playing with that would be like a whole different game.
The list was good, but overwhelming, which brings me back to the predicament that made me quit before. I guess I’d be better off with one of the overhaul mods than try to piecemeal mod it. I guess an overhaul mod would come closest to the “consensus” I’ve been hoping for.
I started playing with that one, and it makes the game bizarrely easy. I’ve spent the last two hours walking around one-shotting everything. I’m stuck on level one since I can’t skill up anything as everything I try to fight dies on the first hit.
Where do you have the in-game difficulty setting set? Tweaking that could give you the difficulty you’re looking for. Maybe you’re just a much better player than I am. I found the game somewhat difficult, even with OOO.
Pretty sure its not a skill thing, I literally just sneak up on people with a bow and they die in one shot, but I didn’t even think to look at the difficulty settings, so maybe it defaults to easy with the OOO mod. Thanks for the hint.