Slashdot Mirror
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.
These are some of my favorites here:
Better Sortable potion names
Cool armor for the Grey Fox
Show more places on the map (wayshrines, rune stones)
Make YOUR OWN map markers for things
Those are just the ones that are bookmarked on this computer at work. My home puter has a bunch more.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.
Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul
Does a bunch of good stuff, but most importantly it gets rid of that stupid level scaling thing.
I've been involved in some debates over that, and I still maintain its dumb, mostly as it provides no sense of accomplishment to leveling or getting better items or anything.
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?
The D&D portable hole! Literally 6 feet wide and 10 feet deep. It's loaded with chests and stuff so you don't have to carry it around on your back. And you can access it whenever you wish.
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
Harvest Mod - Makes it so when you harvest fauna, most of it disappears from the environment or is replaced by a "deflowered" version of the model. Makes it much easier to tell which flowers and mushrooms you've already picked.
Stamina/Fatigue Text Switch Mod - Gets rid of the annoying use of the word "fatigue" in the game and replaces instances of that word with "stamina".
Turn Out the Lights - Makes it so you can snuff out various candles, lamps, etc. found in environments.
Tom Servo's equipment rarity mod
http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1968
Tired of seeing supposedly rare daedric and glass armor drop off common bandits at high levels? Ever wonder why these guys are harassing you for 100 gold when they're wearing tens of thousands of gold worth of armor? Download this... now rare armor stays rare, only dropping from high level creatures, and bandits have more appropriate gear. (I know this is the same as #9 on the list, but this is the one I use personally).
No psychic guards
http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=2299
It's hard to be a master of crime when the guards are psychic... ever try killing someone and having a guard port up to get you? This mod greatly reduces the guard alert radius when you attempt a crime against someone. No guards hear, no bounty. Yay.
Arrow velocity
http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1793
Now a bow actually shoots harder than a plastic Wal-Mart bow... even the lowest quality of arrows will fire harder, and the better ones work much better.
Longer summons
http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1898
The summon length in the game is really low... some only last as long as 20 seconds. This mod can double or triple that value... especially useful for pure mage characters who depend on summons to 'tank' for them.