More positivity, that’s what’s needed! As is often my way when feeling lost, frightened and confused by the big chaotic world of MMOs, for much of last week I ran away and hid in Oblivion, one of the best offline MMOs ever made. The grouping is a bit weak, but the class progression is top notch; i.e, you get to be, do and have everything by the end. I AM the goddamned trinity!
Of course to hide in it, I first need to have it installed, which I realised I’d not done since my last PC rebuild. As soon as I did that, I then remembered what a shameless and lazy Xbox 360 port the PC version always was, and that I was missing the painstakingly scoured and collected catalogue of mods I’d tweaked the thing with, and so set off on a real life adventure of my very own, to Pimp My Oblivion!
Back now. Was quite a short adventure, and basically a click through to here:
Which is an astonishingly huge free repository of user-made tweaks, modifications, updates, new content and even fixes for the venerable Bethesda classic. I can’t recommend the place highly enough. The game is over five-years old at this point and even so, on this fairly random day of writing, the Nexus is listing five completely new files added and about twenty edited ones; folks tweaking the tweaks and updating the updates. I suppose at this point, it would most appropriate to describe Oblivion as a community or scene, rather than game, despite being a world in which each player is the lone occupant and sole hero.
I’d been there before, of course, but not in a while and far from what I was expecting; a mostly historical archive, stagnant and static, it seems the Oblivioneers have been busier than ever, and the scale, scope and sheer unpaid effort that has gone into the bigger mods is impressive. Some are more projects than mods, with multiple staffers, version histories, change logs and huge ambition, and large as the game itself is, it is easily dwarfed by the sum total of contributions to this site.
First stop, and the very minimum I consider to make the game playable at all, is a decent UI mod. Having been designed to be playable on an SD television from about eight feet away, the default UI tends to BE A BIT ON THE LARGE SIDE, particularly when viewed at 1600×1050 resolution, from less than two feet away, so I usually went with the BTMod UI tweak, which just halves all the fonts, allowing twice as many things in all the menus and less migraines all round. This time around though, feeling daring, I’ve gone with the more elaborate DarNified UI which is a lot more detailed and customisable, offering all sorts of font options and a general rework of almost every in-game window for a much smoother ‘for the PC’ experience. It also rejiggers the hud elements to discrete and out-of-the-way locations and even provides a helpful weight/value/condition info when looking at pickupable objects, useful for thieving types.
Next lets spruce up the world! I always remember me, a long time Morrowind obsessive, being blown away at just how good Oblivion looked, even if I had to turn down the detail a bit to play smoothly. Fast forward to today and I now have a PC that’ll cope with everything turned on, and I want more! Again, the default game does the best it can with Xbox 360 Specs in mind, but seems to be capable of a lot more, if unshackled by creative tinkerers.
A simple but weighty mod is this one, which is basically some bright spark opening up the default landscape texture files in Photoshop, doubling the size and giving it a bit of Gaussian blur. Straightforward, but effective, making Oblivion’s famous distant vistas a much more smooth and more pleasing sight. This one is more elaborate and does all sorts of clever things I don’t quite understand to improve weather, foliage, night skies, wildlife and so on.
The Environment section of the website is full of this sort of mod and more. Various mods deal with more realistic water effects, weather systems and the like, and quite a few do a number on the various towns and villages, improving night-time exterior windows with lamp glow, streamers of smoke rising from chimneys, and cluttering up the streets and lanes with more scenery objects, if the PC can handle it!
Let’s not forget the people! By and large, Cyrodil is the Land of the Ugly Stick, which is great for that authentic peasant-based roleplaying experience, but many of us are more superficial than that, and it did get rather lampooned over the matter. I think this problem is high up on the list to fix for Skyrim.
Not to worry though, as probably the largest section of the Nexus is devoted to prettying up the people. The much neglected playing-with-dolls aspect of the default game is rectified with mind-bending thoroughness, with an enormous variety of mods aimed at turning grizzled, leather-faced, warty and desperate adventure-folk who sleep in hedges, into his and hers lingerie models who work part time in the more risque kind of fancy-dress shop.
Naturally, the women get more of a makeover than the men, and their replacement bodies and outfits veer wildly from the understated but practical, “Like The Default Stuff, But With Some Curves”, though the more predictable plate-mail bikini “Red Sonia” look, right though to the amusingly indecent “Madam, Do You Have A Licence For That Snake?” I personally recommend the vast Apachi Goddess Store mod (Possibly NSFW link) as your one stop shop for misogynistic curves, saucepan lids of varying sizes and puritanical snakes.
The menswear section is more sparse, but does exist and seems to run to the costume and character outfits. Ever wanted to close an Oblivion Gate as Altair? Or a Nazgul? Or some guy with white girly hair from a Final Fantasy game I haven’t played yet? Well want no longer!
Many of the mods are functional things, mods for mods, and I particularly recommend the OMOD Oblivion Mod manager, which seems initially quite complicated, but seems to provide a handy way to keep track of the dozens of mods one can end up with. It also seems to offer a way to easily revert unwanted mods, and a mechanism to check if mods conflict with each other. With many folks just forging on ahead and making changes to the world without a central authority regulating it all, conflicts are inevitable. Several other tools exist that do a similar job, and some tools are there to help make these mods, in addition to Bethesda’s own TES Toolkit. One popular mod claims to fix over 1800 bugs with the default game, which just terrifies me. Probably holding off on applying that many changes all at once – I’ve not encountered anything unplayably broken about the default game anyway. The thing seems to have turned into a rallying point for ongoing user-based self-support for a game whose original makers have long since moved on. Remarkable stuff!
One large area I am avoiding at the moment, is new content; quests, items, dungeons and NPCs. A similar level of effort and variety exists here, but everyone has a different idea of what ‘too easy’ and ‘too hard’ are, and many of these additions are likely to break the game for me one way or another. I can peruse these once I’m done with replaying the default main story and side quests. I can see that the existence of this section must have shot down Bethesda’s own dabblings in DLC on the PC (Horse armour, wizard tower, etc), before they got off the ground. Perhaps that was always going to be a console thing anyway – why release a toolkit for the PC otherwise? I’d be fascinated to see which earned Bethesda more money in the long run though; early sales of DLC for the Xbox 360, or sustained sales of the default game on the PC, driven by the options offered by the strong and lasting modding support?
It all makes the game almost unique. With careful application of selected player-made mods, Oblivion actually improves with age and seems capable of keeping up with underlying PC development. Mind you, without a strong culture of enthusiastic amateurs who refuse to just drop the game and move on to the next publisher mandated Shiny New Thing Of The Month, and a decent set of tools, this could not happen. While for the Xbox 360 owner, Oblivion is old, busted and a thing of ancient history, for the PC owner, it does appear to be a gift that keeps on giving. The difference between launch day default Oblivion, and a fully modded up Oblivion of today is quite startling. And this is all just one game – they have sister sites for Dragon Age, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and The Witcher too. I’m not even sure the release of Skyrim will kill this ongoing tradition off, and it seems to be quite a self-staining thing, an enthusiastic community indeed. I wonder how far they can take it?
For quite some time, I’ve been leaning hard toward just giving up on the PC and becoming a 360 gamer, but all the above does illustrate the perks of the PC. Mod communities are not nearly as insignificant as I thought. Perhaps I’ve just been going at the wrong mindset; maybe the three month rule isn’t nearly long enough.
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