There are so many mods I can’t even begin to touch on all the things you can do.
Some of them are minor but helpful - for example, I obsessively pick out all of the flowers and roots and alchemy ingredients from an area, but in the default game nothing happens when you actually pick the ingredients, so you have to wade through the bushes a few times to make sure you got everything. There’s a little mod that makes each picked plant dissapear as you pick it, which makes picking all of the ingredients massively easier.
Some of them are major, like levelling systems that change the way the levelling mechanics work entirely. Stock oblivion is stupid in that in order to get +5 stats in in categories before levelling up, you actually want your primary skills to be the ones you used the least, or at least the ones you can control. It’s a counter-intuitive, stupid system. There are probably 10 or 20 alternatives out there for how your character levels.
One of the other big flaws is that everything scales to your level in oblivion - you’re never fighting anything too easy or too tough - if you just start the game, you fight sewer rats… if you’re 15 levels in, you’ll fight sewer… wolves. or something. You’ll start facing bandits with crappy weapons, and eventually all the bandits will be millionaires with their own custom daedric armor. There are mods that put a level to every creature in the game based on the area and how difficult it’s supposed to be - so you can be in the more conventional RPG situations of having areas that are very difficult to get around in because everything is tougher for you, but also the satisfaction of being able to go back to a low level area that gave you trouble earlier and just go on a rampage and wreck everything.
There are graphics mods that make the environment more realistic, more lush, more detailed. Mods that make people look more lifelike and beautiful. Added quests, armors, spells. Entirely new interfaces.
There are also compilation mods where someone picked and chose a bunch of different mods to easily overhaul your entire game in one go.
It’s really amazing what the community does for those games.
Of most interest; the game takes a cue from Fable - you can get married and live with your spouse. Whether this is quest related or just something you can do any time is unclear.
More details on the revamped skills of Enchantment and Smithing (which presumably replaces Oblivion’s armourer).
Beast races have their own animations, at last! Hopefully no more Argonians and Khajiit strolling around like Imperials, but rather Morrowind style movement.
The Dragon Shouts encompass all play styles.
You can carry on after the main quest, unlike Fallout 3 (without DLC) or New Vegas.
Very interesting. I always liked the Ahnassi questline in Morrowing, where you more or less shack up with a cute Khajiti girl.
I also like that you do get to have some kind of relationship with somebody in the world. I always felt in Oblivion like I was a roaming mercenary. I only hope they expand the game enough so that acheiving some legendary status and becoming the super-hero grandmaster of everything results in people treating you differently.
Same issue here. I don’t mind much about games being dumbed down for consoles because I never own an up to date computer (currently, my last computer, largely outclassed anyway has died, and I’m using a laptop, recent, but obviously I can’t expect the same performances than on a PC). I often buy games that have been released several years ago.
Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul mod is a good start - it makes a variety of fairly big changes and works as good base. You can add whatever flavor mods on top of that.
In theory, if it just means you become more familiar with the game before making choices, that could work. Reading between the lines, I suspect it means in general there will be less customizations, less actual decisions made. They want to keep you from getting frustrated by making the “wrong” decisions by limiting the amount of choice you have so you can’t make a wrong decision. Every character will be able to do everything fairly well.
Which is boring. Choice like that is at the very heart of an RPG - the more you get rid of that, the more you might as well have a regular old shooter. You can’t attack the game with radically different builds to increase replay value, you can’t feel as if you were really in control of your character and hence made someone unique, etc.
So in theory maybe they didn’t totally fuck up here. But they probably did. Dragon Age 1 to Dragon Age 2 is exactly the sort of thing you tend to see in RPGs when they switch target audience focus to consoles and mass appeal.
Yeah, they’ve officially confirmed mod tools. Claim is that they’re even better, but I dunno, when do they ever say anything is worse? I’m a little concerned because it’s a new engine. If they have proper mod support (where mods are easy to create, install, and can affect everything) then the community will fix this game no matter what they do to it. Oblivion was a pretty mediocre game in a lot of ways until the community massively fixed it.
So many people worried about how TES-5 will look. Complaints about the engine, the voice acting…etc. I personally don’t care if it looks like Morrowind, plays like LoZ: Ocarina, and sounds like an old Mario game…It’s about the story my friends. Sure, it will be very hard to improve beyond Oblivion, but don’t blame it all on the consoles. The old hardware may be holding back the devs a little, but even if they did push the limit on the PC’s, it wouldn’t be that much better, plus everyone would have to fork out hundreds to play it, instead of the awesome price of just $60.
One more thing…nothing beats the ability to simply press start and be playing right away, some of us don’t have all day, and I’d rather play the game instead of figuring out how I want the controls layed out on my keyboard and Logitech gamepad. Computers are for work, consoles are for gaming:smack:…I’ll now step off my soapbox.
We’d settle if you console cowboys didn’t screw things up with ridiculously small active memory sizes. This has been a cruel problem for years, and forced games which did not need the things to stick in painful loading screens and speedbumps.. Can you imagine trying to do Morrowind in today’s development environment? They’d have to set all the cities off with walls and stick loading screens in, whereas in the actual game they were able to add “indoor” areas to the outdoor world and even skip some of those loading screens.
I tend to regard the Elder Scrolls games as basically developer/modder collaborations at this point. I’ve played far less of the “regular” games than I have of modded versions.
@smiling Bandit…Ummm…Morrowind’s ‘cities’ (if you can call them that) were small:dubious:, thus they didn’t need a separate enviroment to load in. I’ve ran around Oblivion and been perfectly happy, there’s even settlements outside city walls with as much or even more detail than most of Morrowind’s ‘cities’. Vivec was the largest place in TES-3, and hardly required much processing power or memory to load those repetitive walkways. I played Morrowind on the PC, and didn’t find much improvement in anything, it was a bit of a disappointment (maybe 'cause they were making it suitable for the console, but that’s beside the point). When I installed Oblivion on that same PC (that barely met the requirements), it basically wouldn’t play, and when I found out what I needed to fix the problem, I took a couple steps back when I saw the $$$ it would take. Mostly 'cause I knew I’d constantly be buying parts, even motherboards and processors, every time I wanted to play something that pushed the limit. Computers keep changing, I know 'cause right now I’ve got an I7, multiple video cards (GTX 470’s), and 1200 gigs of ram in a machine I built myself , but I refuse to use all that mad power for one second of gaming, instead I work with it, and wow does it render videos and 3D models fast! :eek:
Having been burned by Oblivion, I won’t get Skyrim til I know a lot about its mechanics and I’ve seen what people say a few months after the initial fake reviews.
But with that aside, I am just really really taken, not by the detail of the visuals per se, but rather by the look itself. I think they’ve really crafted something worthwhile here.
, but I refuse to use all that mad power for one second of gaming, instead I work with it, and wow does it render videos and 3D models fast! :eek:
