When I had that problem, I just started repairing all of the weapons and armor that I picked up from defeated enemies.
Just finished it. A nice little quest – well done! I didn’t find any bugs, apart from that dialogue pause that you’ve already documented.
You’re right about the voice acting. That guy is very talented – easily as good as the voice actors Bethesda hired. The sound quality is noticeably worse than the other dialogue in the game, but I shouldn’t expect miracles when he doesn’t have an entire recording studio at his disposal!
I’m guessing you intended the book to be the centrepiece of the quest. It’s very long, and I only read the first few pages (sorry!). I’ll have to read it in full next time I do the quest (shouldn’t be too far from now – I’m quite close to finishing the game and restarting with a different character). A suggestion: a few days after the quest is finished, maybe Magdinio could publish his book and make it available in bookshops. Then people like me will get a chance to read it when they’re not so eager to carry on with the game, and the bookworm players out there can buy it and add it to the bookshelf in their favourite house. Unless you’ve already done something like that and I hadn’t noticed.
The quest itself is a bit short, but it’s probably better for your first hand-made quest to be simple and robust than overly ambitious and full of bugs. If you want to do more work on it, I suggest giving the player some sort of choice. Maybe the player could choose to side with either Magdinio or Stevano. Or maybe the player has to choose between passing the book off as his/her own and making a lot more money than Magdinio is prepared to give, or giving it back to Magdinio and becoming the manager of the latest up-and-coming author and gaining more quest opportunities.
But overall, a good solid mod.
I finally decided to crack open the editor last night, so I can make my own mod.
I’m playing a Monk, you see- he uses magic and bare hands to fight. Currently, he’s relying on Light Armor for his defense, but I intend to eventually use Bound Armor.
It turns out, though, that Bound Items kinda suck- they’re basically just lightweight Daedric (although, strangely, some of them are classed as Heavy Armor). They don’t carry any sort of inherent enchantment, and since they don’t last long at all, you can’t apply anything. In other words, compared to the real thing, they’re useless- the only advantage they’ve got is that they can’t be destroyed… but since they can only last a maximum of 2 minutes or so, even that advantage is lost. Heck, even summoning every piece is insanely expensive- a full suit’d drain a ton of Magicka.
In Morrowind, every Bound item had a pretty good enchantment, so wearing a full suit did you a lot of good. Not in Oblivion- the spells might as well not even exist at the higher levels. Nobody in their right mind would use 'em.
Of course, the cherry on top is that they don’t even look magical- they look exactly like real Daedric. sigh
So here’s what I plan on doing.
I’m going to modify the textures on the existing bound items, to make them look a bit more “ghostly”. I think I can accomplish that by desaturating the base texture color, and bumping up the gloss map. I kinda want to make the armor itself transparent, but I’m afraid that’d result in everyone being able to see the wearer’s underwear through the armor, since you can’t wear clothing underneath your armor, like you could in Morrowind.
As for the Bound items themselves, I’m going to make sure that they are all “Clothing”, so that they don’t increase any of the armor skills. I’m also going to make them all weigh zero pounds. I also want to increase the duration a bit… or decrease the casting cost. This is basically mage armor- you should be able to use it in every fight at Grand Master level.
Now, as for enchantment… it turns out there’s one enchantment that you can’t apply to anything- it’s just not an option: Spell Absorption. This seems to fit very well, so my plan is for each piece of Bound armor to give you a small amount of Spell Absorption, which would encourage you to wear the whole suit. For weapons, I think they should be inherently enchanted with Silence on hit- this seems to fit as well. For both Armor and Weapons, their respective enchantments will be more powerful the higher level you are- I think at Grand Master level, a full suit should give you 50% Spell Absorption.
So… sound good to you guys?
Well I’m a warrior type but that suit still sounds interesting and if you go through with it I’ll look into it when I start my next char (he’ll delve more into spells) I’d also suggest for a Monk char some type of gauntlets that have enchantments on them (one for hitting say ghosts and such one for doing extra physical damage etc etc.) also different mage armors for different situations so you could tailor it to your needs of the moment.
I’d also suggest you make the entire suit in one cast so you don’t have to piece together your armor one cast at a time.
Thank you. And someone emailed me this morning with the fix for that problem, so I’ll be able to fix it this evening. It was really just a lot of extra blank sound that I didn’t realize was on the end.
Actually, it’s just a short story I had written and had lying around that I was never going to try to publish. I didn’t really expect anyone to really read it; I just didn’t want to cut it short by making it only 20 or so pages. I had considered having Stevano tear the book in half, so when you return with it, Magdinio asks you to find the other half.
This is a great idea!
Yeah, I have a tendency to get crazy with these kinds of things, and then I get overwhelmed and abandon the project out of frustration. So I decided to keep it simple and straightforward.
By the way, have we exceeded the maximum thread size? Should I create a new thread, or should a mod, or what?
It FINALLY came today. I was about ready to give up on it - on Wednesday, they said they didn’t think it would ship until Monday. Was very surprised to wake up this morning to a shipping notice in my inbox.
And it’s incredible so far. I haven’t had a chance to play much, but am going to start as soon as I’m done eating dinner. Oblivion looks incredible - I have all the video settings maxed, and it’s smooth as silk.
Any must-have mods? I skimmed through this thread and there didn’t seem to be a consensus yet.
The one absolute must-have mod is BTmod. This vastly improves the user interface. Among other things, it makes lists in the game display many more items, and it puts numbers next to many of those those hard-to-read gauges (e.g. spell effects on the main display now show the number of seconds remaining in the spell’s duration).
I also recommend the harvest mod. This removes plant graphics from the game world after they have been harvested, instead of leaving the plants there but making them unharvestable. This is a great help if you obsessively harvest every plant you find (a surprisingly common trait among Oblivion players).
There are many other mods that you may find useful. I suggest playing the game a bit longer, deciding which aspects you find annoying, and browsing the mod wiki to see if there’s a fix.
Yay Athena! Now I can be happy for you. Your travails were niggling at me.
Definitely the three distant landscape replacement mods highly recommended in the Oblivion Tweak Guide .
I second Harvest and BTmod.
If you don’t like being encumbered, Bag of Holding and Ring of Feather 1000 are great, as is Light Ingredients of you like to harvest.
I highly recommend the Bethesda Official Wizard’s Tower mod too. Even if you don’t want to join the Mages Guild, all the benefits are in the tower, and can be useful to other classes. Storage and other cool stuff too, like the alchemy garden and the +15 Alchemy boost or the +5 boost to all the magic skills!
If you get bothered by the blotchy faces, here are some ideas. I’m waiting for Natural Faces to include final improvements to dark elf, but it’s well-recommended. It only affects females and younger males, so another mod, Smooth Faces, is recommended to smooth out the faces of all races/ages first, followed by installing Natural Faces on top of it, to overwrite and improve the younger and female faces.
Thanks, brightpenny. It’s been a rough couple weeks - on the one hand, I bought from Falcon cuz they were a small place that built the systems on demand. On the other hand, it was a hell of a time waiting for them to build me a second system. Especially when I got the credit card bill in the mail and I didn’t have a computer to show for it!
Another question - I sort of get the whole levelling scheme, and although I’m not going to go overboard to get the max modifier on every single level, I am trying to use my major skills more than the minor ones. This hasn’t been a problem, except for Athletics, one of my minor skills. I don’t have a horse yet (just haven’t gotten around to doing the first quest for the free horse), so tend to run everywhere. Running increases athletic skill. Walking doesn’t, but it’s sloooooow. Is there any way around this? Should I even worry about it?
I suggest doing it the other way around – you want to improve your minor skills more than your majors, since the majors control when you level but all skill improvements contribute to attribute bonuses. In the case of Athletics, run all the time.
I second this. The Minors are there to get your bonuses the majors are there to level you up. Get the bonuses out of the way first whenever possible so you don’t accidentally level too early.
OK, my understanding of the levelling system is fuzzy at best. I’ve been sort of ignoring it.
So you’re saying that there’s no problem with levelling up minor abilities at all? And in fact, it’s kind of a good thing?
I didn’t even know there’s a quest for a free horse. I run everywhere…except I stop every two seconds to pick flowers. Where’s the quest?
It helps to have good athletic/acrobatic skills. Yesterday I decided to run from Frost-whatever Crag to the next town. It was pretty close, no problem, don’t like to fast travel to somewhere new. It turned out that meant straight down the vertical side of a, well, crag. I managed it with only minor injuries, to get attacked by a pack of ogres or something sideways on the slope, while slipping down, down. My new skeleton guardian kept them busy while I jumped/slid down the rest of the mountain.
You know you’re playing too much when, in real life, you’re driving along and feel the overpowering urge pull over and get out of the car when you see a patch of brightly-colored flowers.
Ok well every time you get 10 levels in your majors your character level goes up. Minor skills do nothing for your character level however. Every time you get a level up in ANY skill (major or minor) it adds to your Times bonuses.
So ideally for a maxed character you’d get your minors up until you were assured of getting the x 5 bonus in whatever attributes you wanted then get your majors up until your character level goes up.
Well I got one for an assassin guild quest…but horses are pretty useless IMO. They’re not much faster then running (though I do have a high speed), they don’t jump over things, and turning in them is like steering a boat.
The main quest gets you a free horse at that monestary thing. It’s a slow old nag, but hey, it’s a horse.
Oops. I’m level 10 with 44 hours into it, and I haven’t touched the MQ.
I’m level 19, 60 hours in, and have not yet visited all the main cities. My lack of God, but this game has huge amounts of content.
I’m currently seeking a daedric artifact for the MQ – not sure where that puts me. I think maybe halfway? I haven’t done anything on it for more than 20 hours of playtime, though.
You know, previewing doesn’t do any damn good if you don’t look at the stuff in the preview window for accuracy.
That should be ***90 ***hours in.
Yeah, that’s around about half way. I think it is, anyway. Like everybody else, I spent most of the game regarding each part of the main quest as “something I need to get around to doing”, so it’s hard to remember exactly how long it is.
Some advice: I think Martin suggests bringing him Azura’s Star. You should get it, but don’t give it to him. Find him some other daedric artifact. Azura’s Star is far too useful to give away. It’s a reusable soul gem.I gave him Azura’s Star, and kicked myself later on when I read about its power and the fact that he would have been happy with any daedric artifact.
I finished the game yesterday, after logging 150 hours of play time. Of course, this does not include the time I lost whenever I had to reload (which is probably quite significant, because I reloaded many many times). I could have kept going for ages. I completed the Mages’ Guild quests, but only scratched the surface of the Fighters’ and Thieves’ Guilds. I didn’t even touch the Dark Brotherhood. I’m sure there were many side quests that I missed, and I only visited a few of the dungeons and Oblivion gates that weren’t attached to a quest. But my character was reaching his limit (he had Mastery in all but two of his major skills), and I want to go through the game again with a different character. But I’ve decided to give the game a bit of a break. When I first started playing it, I spent literally all my spare time on it. But lately, playing it has felt like more and more like a chore. I’m hoping that putting it down for a while will rekindle my enthusiasm. So onto Civilization 4…