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[Skyrim]: Its actually Oblivion 2, in fact, its probably just Fallout with swords.
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But that's okay. Most of my efforts were devoted to depopulating this horrible prison valley filled with insane people who think they're living in the capital of a real country.
Ooh. I want me a pet mastodon. Mastodon saddle mod must happen.
You go to a town, talk to the first person you come across, select the "insert name of town you're currently in" topic and you're usually pointed towards a quest.
2-3 times per town across all cities and you're looking at a fairly large amount of quests already. Add to that guild quests and the main storyline and you're golden.
Steam | Origin: MazPA | 3DS: 1848-2888-3654
First time runthrough? Nothing. Play completely vanilla. See what YOU think needs to be fixed. Then look for things to fix it. What bothers one person to no end might be the very thing that makes the game for you.
DarNified UI.
Personally, my first run-through of Oblivion included a bunch of mods, but that's because I was a Morrowind vet and half of the reason I play TES games is for the mods. But "Play for a bit and then decide" is perfectly solid advice. But, seriously, the default UI is pretty ass, and needs to be DarNed.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
I added this and also unique landscape. The whole game still fills very generic after playing for 6 hours or so though. I've looked at some of the overhaul mods, but they seem more mechanical than anything else.
Basically right now I'm getting the vibe of Fallout 3 with all the character and interesting parts taken out.
If you can find an up-to-date install guide, you can try FCOM (or at least OOO), and if that doesn't at least spice up some of the game for you, then it likely won't get any better.
Oblivion is still pretty bland even at its best, and there's only so much that can be done to fix it, short of ripping everything out and creating a completely different game with the base parts.
Steam | TF2 inventory
1. It's all sorts of annoying that to gain access to the spell making I have to complete the mages guild quests every time... there are so many of them and they get old really fast - I wish that there was some way to short circuit them
2. Once you play through a single time, or even get some reasonable experience under your belt, you realize (if you're playing vanilla at least) that everything you've done has gimped your character. However, so much of the game is unlocked by quests (enter the thieves guild so you can pay off bounty, mages guild for magic making, etc) that when a new game is started the first thing you want to do is go unlock them - so the first few hours of every play-though is identical.
3. The much touted radiant AI doesn't really ever do anything interesting or unique
Still if you're feeling like the game is tedious and want to learn to love it:
1. Kill someone and go to sleep; the dark brotherhood quests are really cool as are the characters you meet throughout
2. Buy a home in a city and explore every nook around it doing every dungeon/ruin/quest
One last thing I noticed in my recent play-through. Money is way too hard to come-by early, and way to easy to come-by late. It seems that somewhere around level 13 all of a sudden any encounter will harvest thousands of dollars - whereas all the exploration early will net you a few hundred if you can even carry it.
That was pretty awesome.
3DS FC: 5129-0946-8305
Then, on top of that, throw in a couple of the mods that add more content, quests and story to the world, and you can't help but find new quests (both epic and mini) as you travel and talk to people. I don 't have links handy at the moment, sorry, but check out Integration: The Stranded Light, and Kragenir's Death Quest as two mods that add a huge pile of new quests to the world. Integration:TSL in particular is incredibly clever, though aimed at higher levels who know their way around and a bit of the lore, etc. From what I remember, Kragenir's has plenty of smaller quests that are more accessible early on.
For number one Frostcrag Spire is a pretty good DLC to get, gives you an enchanting and spell making table without having to do any of the mages quests. And I believe the Radiant AI system was mostly scrapped shortly before release because it wasn't working.
And one of my favorite things to do is buy a house and fill it with items from my travels. Stick skulls on the mantle piece, make stacks of books around the house, fill bowls with gems and collect something that I just stack in a room. I think I did that with soulgems last time.
worksfunctions; it's just many of the options for it are turned off or scaled back. I've seen mods that go back and re-enable a lot of the disabled Radiant AI stuff and it's a broken, hilarious mess. Bethsoft got RAI working more or less as it was meant to in Fallout 3.In fact, Radiant AI is likely why a lot of Oblivion was lacking. An enormous amount of time and development resources were poured into RAI and I would not be surprised if some of it was done at the expense of content generation.
Steam | TF2 inventory
If you ever decide to give it another shot or in case anyone else reading doesn't know how...
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Tutorials.Detail&id=60
Most mods will go into <install directory>\Oblivion\Data (or <install directory>\Steam\Steamapps\Common\<whatever Steam labels Oblivion as> in Steam). If the first folder in whatever .zip, .rar, or whatever is Data, then you just dump it in \Oblivion\. When in doubt, look at the readme. Unlike back in the dark, dim early days of Morrowind modding, when nobody would be arsed to use proper directory structure or include readmes, most modders are at least courteous enough to provide basic install instructions. If a mod's likely to have compatibility issues with something, the readme will usually say, though a little "common sense" can provide a some insight too (like if you have two mods which alter, say, the interior look of the Waterfront Shack you can buy in the Imperial City, it's more than likely safe to assume that they're not compatible with each other).
After a little while the process of installing mods becomes less like some Byzantine nightmare and more drag-and-drop reflex. Though readmes are still worth readin, and I at least glance at them to see if there are any oddball install instructions, even after nearly a decade using (and rarely making) mods for TES stuff.
Steam | TF2 inventory
Fuck Wrye Bash. I curse the fact that it and its stupid bashed patches are still necessary for Oblivion when it's been all but replaced by far less riduclous bullshit utilities that don't require a CS degree to properly use for Morrowind.
Steam | TF2 inventory
Wrye Bash is a nice and powerful utility, but it's vastly overpowered for what the majority of people who get it need to use it for and largely incomprehensible beyond what's covered in readmes. Having to install Python and half a dozen Python libraries and utilities and then using this powerful program to simply merge leveled lists? It's like using an NSA supercomputer to check your email.
Steam | TF2 inventory
Steam | TF2 inventory
3DS FC: 5129-0946-8305
Right now I'm running:
Unofficial patches
Fransesco's
MMM
Unique landscapes (really cool, you can tell when you cross into a UL area).
Darnified UI
Realistic levelling.
I'm using BOSS for load order but haven't touched wyrebash at all yet.
Gamertag: Clorfhanger
Is it 'The' NSA, or just NSA? I've never written a letter to a government agency before, and I wasn't entirely sure how to address this. You know, like how you always start off with Dear Mr. Such-and-such. The 'the' just sort of wrote itself in there. Oh, it's not Dear *Mr.* The NSA is it? Uh... Mrs. The NSA? I guess that would imply that the NSA is married, wouldn't it? How weird would that be! Hitched to the whole NSA? Would you be married to everyone employed by the NSA or, like, the building or what? This is a terrible way to start off a letter. Sorry!
Dear Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., and/or Lt. Col. The NSA,
I'm just writing preemptively to let you know that that whole Nigerian prince thing was totally a joke. With my friends. I have a lot of friends. It's a funny story, actually. Like ha ha funny. So I was talking to my buddy Bill -- you know Bill, right? What a card! Anyway, my buddy Bill was all "hey, why don't we trick all our friends into giving us a bunch of money as a joke. It'll be a hoot!" It certainly was a hoot, The NSA. Now don't get me wrong, here. They're, as I've previously asserted, my friends -- I have a lot of them -- and I was going to use that money to buy them all some ponies or AAA baseball teams or something. I hadn't decided yet. I'm getting to it, though! My buddy Bill (what a card!) suggested getting some of those flying cars. They have flying cars now, right? Pretty sure somebody makes flying cars. I guess that's not important right now. Anyway, to sum up: Totally a joke. Gonna buy my friends -- I have a lot of them -- some swanky somethings. Please don't send me to federal buttrape prison.
Toodles,
Monger
P.S.: Is it cool if I say toodles? Like I said, I've never really written a letter to the government before. Also, if you could ask around about those flying cars and let me know what's going on with those, that would be tops. I'm sure there's some egghead at the NSA that knows about them.
P.P.S.: I didn't mean to say 'egghead.' It just slipped out there. No offense.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
Things I absolutely want:
FCOM
Quarl's Texture Pack
All Natural
Oblivion XP and/or Realistic Leveling.
Whatever the sound and music packs are called
Right now, I have a raw, vanilla Oblivion GotY, so it has Shivering Isles. I don't know what patches and what files to download, and in what order.
Also, I want to be a mage this time. I chose race Imperial, sign Mage and class Mage. Will that be alright?
Okay. Before you even start, you need tools:
- OBMM - Mod manager, archive invalidation, and support for OMOD installs. OMODs will make your life so much easier you have no idea. Use them wherever you can. Most large mods come "OMOD ready," which means you'll have to use OBMM to create an OMOD from the archive file you download.
- BOSS - Sorts your load order, gives you compatibility suggestions, tells you what bash tags to use, and generally saves you from nightmares on top of nightmares.
- Wrye Bash - Is kind of complicated, but a necessity for a lot of mod compatibility.
So before you get to the things that you actually want, you have to get through the stuff you need:- OBSE - Is a scripting backbone that a lot of mods need.
- Unofficial Oblivion Patch - Bugfixes.
- Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch - Bugfixes.
- Unofficial Official Mods Patch - Bugfixes.
Once you are this far, stop installing mods and make sure the game still works. If you're going to do the FCOM thing, you may even want to back up your data folder before the shit hits the fan with that install.IIRC, there's a torrent somewhere with a full FCOM install. I don't have the link, but someone else around probably does. FCOM is a massive bitch to install otherwise, and I hate the thing anyway. In the event that the torrent link doesn't turn up, there was an FCOM install guide in the other TES thread's OP, though I don't know how outdated it is. As soon as you get FCOM installed, stop installing mods and make sure the game still works.
You want to head on over to this site, which has a rundown of all the texture and LOD mods around. Depending on what visual mods you go with and how much VRAM you have on your video card, vanilla QTP3 may be a bad idea. It also has a conflict with the unofficial Oblivion patch that necessitates yet another patch to fix. I tend to recommend QTP3 Redimized to everyone, regardless, which still looks great, doesn't have compatibility issues, and is lighter on your system. Also, Really Almost Everything Visible When Distant is exquisite.
Is here. As companions to it, I'd also recommend Animated Window Lighting System and Immersive Interiors. AWLS makes windows glow with light at night and adds chimney smoke to houses. It just generally makes the world feel more alive. Immersive Interiors piggybacks on a part of All Natural that makes interior lighting match exterior weather. It makes it so that you can see outside through windows from indoor areas, which is wonderful. It all has to be hand placed, though, and the guy hasn't finished it yet. There's still a couple cities where you'll have solitary confinement nonwindows.
Oblivion XP is here. Realistic Leveling is here. They're mutually exclusive. I prefer Realistic Leveling, myself.
There's a lot of them. The only sound pack I ever used was Symphony of Violence, which replaces combat sounds with drastically better ones. You can always browse through the sound section of the Nexus to see whatever suits your fancy.
As far as I know, the GotY edition should be fully patched. If it's not, the only thing you should need is the latest Shivering Isles patch from the official site.
As long as you're using a mod to fix the world scaling and a mod to fix the leveling system, it's kind of impossible to fuck your character up. Just roll with whatever you feel like.
However, I'd highly suggest using a mod like Supreme Magicka or LAME to make magic less shitty. Supreme Magicka even has a compatibility file to bring it directly into balance with Deadly Reflex. In addition to that, I'd recommend the Race Balancing Project (OMOD data), which rebalances racial bonuses and birthsigns to make them less stupid, though it may or may not have issues with a save file from after character creation.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
Also, TNR. Don't play Oblivion without TNR.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
TNR can make a lot of people pretty ugly. I prefer the Better Looking Dark Elves, High Elves, and Redguards mod with Natural Faces + Beauty Patch to smooth out the other races.
And I can't play without Better Cities. Cities look too empty otherwise. You can install FPS patches which reduce a lot of the clutter, too, and just get the base changes.
I haven't had any issues with the three running together, other than Better Cities not wanting to work with LODGen. I do get framerate issues in the Imperial City Market District, though. It seems to be only in there and I don't know why. I think it's because the engine just isn't optimized, especially for newer hardware. It can't use our multi-core systems and 2+ GB of memory. You'd think with an i7-920 @ 3.2GHz, 6GB DDR3 memory and an ATI HD 5870 that the game would run pretty well regardless. Nope.
Anyway, I tried the Symphony of Violence mod above. It sounds great, but crashes often. I've read some comments that it doesn't like to play nice with Wrye Bash/bashed patch.
And in Skyrim news, a new preview came out in a foreign magazine. I like what I read about taverns. They're now more lively and a valuable source of information, conversations, and quests.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.