Current Top 10 Oblivion Mods
For those of us playing on the PC, the Oblivion experience has only gotten better since launch. Planet Elder Scrolls has a short blurb on ten promising mods already released by the community. The top two have been running on my system for slightly over a week now; I highly recommend BTMod (mentioned by Tycho last week) and Natural Environments.
Is this a legitimate /. article or a shill? Gamespy comes up with a list of ten of the "most influential and eye-catching" Oblivion mods, despite the fact that there are hundreds (513, in fact) of mods listed here, not all of which are hosted on Planet Elder Scrolls.
Note that Gamespy only included mods hosted on their website, and that Gamespy is notorious for running interstitial ads that require a Greasemonkey script to bypass. Besides, this wasn't submitted by a Slashdot reader - Zonk posted it himself. The linked article had nothing more than some guy's opinion on what mods were good, so if Zonk is such an Oblivion fan, why not just link us to his favorite mods right there in the Slashdot article, rather than shilling for the ad-ridden IGN network?
I'm excited that we have so many mods already - what is sad is that people have to waste time creating mods that fix the game. Why aren't the developers doing this? They released a buggy as hell game with several glaring design/balancing/"realism" issues - why do we need a mod to make animals behave correctly? Why do we need mods to fix broken quests? Why do we need mods to fix the screwed up UI? Why do we need mods to fix the stupid inventory system? Why do we have to manually edit .ini files to change obvious performance enhancing settings? Why do we need people creating custom shaders to improve performance on low-end cards? Why do we need people to create improved textures for high-end cards? To me all of these issues illustrate that the development team has some serious problems - they've got their own mods out to add content to the game (that they are charging for!) but they have released a seriously flawed game - what the hell is up with that?
That said, I'm not an RPG fan really but Oblivion is one awesome game - and it does run great on my 2.3ghz A64 w/6600GT, minus all the godamn bugs. And fanboys - don't tell me it is my system! I've got a fresh install of XP, fully patched and updated - Oblivion, HL2, and Firefox are the only programs installed on it - the fact that my entire system locks up if I load any of my saved games without first creating an entirely new game on a product that the developer is already releasing paid expansions for instead of patches is BS.
If a handful of amatures can produce a decent mod in a reasonably short period of time (I think the game was only released last month) why are they charging $2 for a Horse texture or a 10 minute quest?
If Bethesda is smart, they will keep an eye on these mods, so that ideas from them can be incorporated into an official patch.