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Current Top 10 Oblivion Mods

Posted by Zonk on Fri Apr 21, 2006 12:13 PM
from the see-the-light dept.
PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games)
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.
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[+] Living In Oblivion 296 comments
The Elder Scrolls series is well known among PC gamers as the high water mark for an open-ended RPG experience. The series, set in the world of Tamriel, has a staggering breadth and depth thanks to the exacting standards of the team at Bethesda Softworks. The newest title in the line brings Tamriel to life in a manner that is renewing the faith of even the most jaded CRPG player. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion may not be the perfect game for everyone. For those willing to give it a shot, Oblivion treats gamers with a level of respect that is unique, uplifting, and (hopefully) inspirational for game developers in all genres. Read on for my impressions of a truly unique game.
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  • In addition to those, my short list. (Score:5, Informative)

    by semifamous (231316) on Friday April 21 2006, @12:18PM (#15174875) Homepage

    These are some of my favorites here:

    Better Sortable potion names [elderscrolls.com]

    Cool armor for the Grey Fox [elderscrolls.com]

    Show more places on the map (wayshrines, rune stones) [elderscrolls.com]

    Make YOUR OWN map markers for things [elderscrolls.com]

    Those are just the ones that are bookmarked on this computer at work. My home puter has a bunch more.

  • Slashdot wubs Gamespy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dachannien (617929) on Friday April 21 2006, @12:37PM (#15175069)
    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 [tescreens.be], not [tessource.net] all [gamingtown.net] of which [elricm.com] 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 [userscripts.org] 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?

    • The Planet Elder Scrolls (formerly Morrowind Summit) forums were basically the place to go for Morrowind information a year or two ago, and they hosted the largest library of mods.

      Oblivion and the official forums have changed that a bit, though the Elder Scrolls Planet forums are still a breath of fresh air compared to the underage cesspool that is the official boards. And even though fileplanet downloads suck hairy balls, Elder Scrolls Planet has one of the best systems for cataloging and ranking mods, in
    • Yep, nothing more disgusting than taking free open source mods, surrounding them with Flash (and\or flashing) ads, making you wait 90 minutes to download them, and extorting you to pay to download them instantly. Fileplanet and Planet* are scumbags.
        • I'm guessing you're offended by the Troll mod, but it isn't visible anymore, post is 3, Insightful

          Scratched my head a minute wondering what the mod abuse was.

              • I called him out because he is saying Zonk is some kind of a shill, I have personal knowledge about the subject as I used to know Zonk and can attest to him not being any kind of a shill. Gamespy does have serious issues, that is a valid point - making accusations re:Zonnk which I know to be false is not valid, my comment was intended to point that out. The fact that I have been systematically troll rated for making this point IS mod abuse. Perhaps my initial response WAS off-topic, that I could see as a po

  • an almost great game (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jett (135113) on Friday April 21 2006, @12:42PM (#15175113) Homepage
    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.
    • I forgot to add:

      WTF is up with the crappy key binding system?! I'm sure there is a way to do it via the console or an .ini/.cfg but I shouldn't have to mess with that - this isn't the quake1 era anymore. I should have a menu that lets me bind whatever functions I want to whatever buttons/keys I want - instead I'm artificially limited to only rebinding certain functions to only the keyboard and anything other than the default settings is kind of wack. Also, what the hell is up with mwheeldown beind bound to
      • It looks to me like the crappy key binding system, along with the horrible kindergarden-sized interface, is a byproduct of its simultaneous development as a console game. I really, really hate the way the menus work, although BTMod helps with the size somewhat. I still wish I had separate buttons for my map, character, skills, etc., instead of hitting tab and then clicking 45 times to check my quest and equip a weapon.
        • Right around the release time there were many posts on the forums that indicated Microsoft required that the PC version be *identical* to the 360 version so that there wouldn't be any contention between the two. Assumign this is true, then I'd say they took the identical requirement quite literally.

          It's quite annoying that I can't bind J to journal, I to inventory, etc. =/

        • I still wish I had separate buttons for my map, character, skills, etc., instead of hitting tab and then clicking 45 times

          You could always try reading the manual, where you would discover that F1 - F4 gets you at least to the section you want without even hitting tab. You still have to click the sub-section you want though.
    • Let's take a peek at Bethesda's track record:

      TES: Arena. Dull-witted and buggy. No major patches.

      TES: Daggerfall. Buggier than an ant farm. 'Enjoyed' a litany of patches that didn't actually fix major things like the plotline stopping, quest-critical monsters from falling into the void, or unbelievably awful dungeon design.

      TES: Morrowind. Trades the majority of bugs for poor mechanical and art design. Who, seriously, thought it was a good idea to make every enchanted item shine like it was covered in an in

      • TES: Morrowind. Trades the majority of bugs for poor mechanical and art design. Who, seriously, thought it was a good idea to make every enchanted item shine like it was covered in an inch of iridescent plastic? Weird bugs, like NPCs on boats falling through into the water and drowning, remain. Poor design decisions, like the ludicrously expensive assassin armor all but given to the PC after Tribunal is installed, are added after the fact. Internal mechanics are horribly broken, ranging from the infinitely
          • Also, uninstall any audio/video codecs you don't need. I was crashing regularly when I got the game, and came across some posts saying the crashes were codec related. I had previously installed a package of several different video codecs and Nero (which has some codecs), and uninstalling them mostly fixed the crashes. (I say mostly because although it never crashes in game now, it does frequently crash when exiting, but that's obviously not as big of a deal.)

  • without this mod I wouldn't still be playing Ob (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JeanBaptiste (537955) on Friday April 21 2006, @12:48PM (#15175172)
    Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul [filefront.com]

    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.
    • I've been seriously thinking about installing that, it seems like most people agree it makes the game a lot better and balances out a lot of the bizzareness that starts happening at higher levels - do you have to start a new game for it to take effect? I'm still really early in the game so it's not that big of a deal but I'd really rather not have to begin again...
    • I haven't been able to understand why people feel there is no sense of accomplishment with leveling. Because the monsters get harder and have better stuff on them after you level? So what? When I level, I have been developing my character and can do more things better, that is accomplishment. Oh but now the monsters aren't weak little babies compared to me, so that reduces my accomplishment somehow? Why? If the monsters have gotten too hard, you have to start playing smarter. Any game I've enjoyed has made
      • I think the point is that in your example while they would still meet the 2 kobolds, Oblivion they would be tough kobolds and yet still be the exactly same kobolds as you fought earlier. So they would be level 15 kobolds in the spot where you fought level 1 kobolds.
        I think most games scale the difficulty by moving you to new encounter areas of greater difficulty.
        Something like World of Warcraft would be terrible if you had to be afraid of dying running through a low level zone. The point is if you need to g
        • Have you played Oblivion? In the game I've been playing, I'm LVL 23 yet I see rats still. They're the same rats I fought at the begining of the game, only they die in one hit instead of five now. The Creature leveling that's done in Oblivion is that now I see Brown Bears, Liches, and other monsters as well. Things that are still a challenge for my LVL 23 Stealth/Fighter. You see the full range of monsters that you can handle. There are other NPCs that level up with you, but they are usually bosses or

  • The Obvious Question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2006, @12:51PM (#15175210)
    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?
    • It was stated by one of the developers on a fan games forum that the art required in the Orrey took over a month for a single artist to create. What a terrible use of resources and planning by the producers at Bethesda. Either reduce the art needed for the mod or assign an equivalent amount of manhours to a programmer and/or game scripter to add enough content that this wonderful art can be appreciated as a reward payoff in of itself for unlocking it or give it enough reasons to be experienced repeatedly

  • Incorporate into official patch (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jagasian (129329) on Friday April 21 2006, @12:55PM (#15175263)
    If Bethesda is smart, they will keep an eye on these mods, so that ideas from them can be incorporated into an official patch.
    • Will never happen. Too much legal paranoia. In the realm of videogames, almost nothing crosses that sacred developer/publisher - customer line. They (dev/pub) are far too worried about being sued should they dare put someone elses "work" or "intellectual property" (indeed, most developers are completely deaf to specific suggestions, lest someone claim their "idea" was "stolen") into their game.

      Its a sad reflection on business and the legal system, really. Fans are willing to bend over backwards to improve
      • Bioware gets around this for NWN by stating in the games & toolset's ELUA by stating that they reserve the right to use whatever custom content they want for whatever use they want.

        Jaysyn
      • With how many copies of the same functionality that you see in the modding community, I don't think that there is much problem in them taking the ideas and reproducing them. As long as they don't take fan created artwork (textures, models) or directly copy dialogue/story that are copyright to the fan and use them as their own in a mod (without express permission or license) then they should be OK, right?
      • Not true.

        Take WOW for example. The devs watch the most popular mods, and build the most 'requested' features into the game. Everyone was installing Cosmos or GypsyMod to get more toolbars, so they added new toolbars. People were installing CTMOD to watch the health of their raid members, they made it so you can watch the health of anyone in your raid. Etc., etc.

        WOW mods are all legally open source, so there's never any issue if they can even steal from the community. Though I do think it would be appropriat
    • Integrating mods in an official patch?

      While it may seem an excellent idea, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
      The reason is simple, it alienates the very community they're trying to build!

      People make efforts to try and build something interesting that adds to the gaming experience, they're proud of the things they build, especially if they're popular.
      The popularity of these things pushes them either to better them or to create other mods, potentially interesting ones.

      Including their ideas in

  • In the spirit of D&D... (Score:3, Funny)

    by empvirus (881998) <empvirus@hotmail.com> on Friday April 21 2006, @01:20PM (#15175561)
    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.
  • I blogged pretty thoroughly about many shortcomings of Oblivion. At least 75% of the mods out there are fixes that mould this game into what it should have been out of the box. Oblivion was very obviously designed with the 360 in mind as is made obvious by the horrible UI, enormous font, cryptic icons, tiny buttons, and lack of onscreen information - and that's just for starters. Read for yourselves if you can stand fair criticism of everyone's favourite game.

    http://demodulated.blogspot.com/2006/04/elder-scro lls-oblivious.html

  • The ones I'm using. (Score:4, Informative)

    by tukkayoot (528280) on Friday April 21 2006, @01:37PM (#15175752) Homepage
    Natural Wildlife [elderscrolls.com] - Instead of all animals (aside from deer) being universally aggressive, this mod adds variable creature behaviors.

    Harvest Mod [elderscrolls.com] - 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 [elderscrolls.com] - 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 [elderscrolls.com] - Makes it so you can snuff out various candles, lamps, etc. found in environments.

      • you'd have to be able to deflower them first :(

        seriously, why no sex in these games? you can murder people in an assassin's guild and they been progressively shying away from the topless and/or naked temple priests from Daggerfall, or anything remotely sexual in nature... what's the game's rating, anyway? Teen? It blows, and I hope enterprising modders out there will restore it back to its Mature roots. :)
      • Does the harvest mod indicate which townsfolk you've deflowered, as well?

        No, but I just noticed a disturbing vocabulary mistake in my last post, using the word fauna [reference.com] instead of flora [reference.com]. Thus I suppose I was implying that you could keep track of which bears and mudcrabs you violate.

  • Yay mods (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bungleman (955072) on Friday April 21 2006, @02:14PM (#15176121)
    100% agree about BTMod... this came out days after Oblivion's release, and it was very needed. I'm not sure what kind of lazy programming left that original UI in the PC version, but it's inexcusable. I'm also using the Natural Environments mod and loving it. Here are some others I'd recommend:

    Tom Servo's equipment rarity mod
    http://www.tessource.net/files/file.php?id=1968 [tessource.net]

    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 [tessource.net]

    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 [tessource.net]

    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 [tessource.net]

    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.

    • I recommend using Mighty Magicka in conjunction with a longer summons mod, and the mod to allow you to summon 2 at a time. There is a 10 at a time summons mod but it seems a little too powerful with Mighty Magicka *and* the longer summon time. Mighty Magicka has several components but the conjuration bit makes all the creatures level up with you except for those "made from corpses"... ghosts do but skeletons and zombies don't I guess.

      I prefer Francisco's mod to a separate equipment loot list, as I was usin
        • attack and hide is pretty good except the indicator gets a little wonky when you do the quests where you have to follow someone and not be seen, but still have to overhear them... i think i got bugged because i ended up very close but hidden and the indicator light was bright on, and the quest conversation triggered anyway even though i wasn't hidden at all afterwards...

    • Yes. (Score:1, Redundant)

      by Supurcell (834022)
      Yes.
    • Yeah, give it a try. It's especially nice to walk around in a beautiful world that isn't mobbed with people shouting about Britney Spears and the Green Bay Packers. Plus the more action-based combat is more involving than hitting buttons to adjust statistics.
    • Like the others here have said, it isn't the same type of game (other than being fantasy world and an RPG, although WoW is less of a standard rpg in terms of story progression and npcpc interaction and effecting lasting world/plot change) but it is definitely as engrossing. You may even like it better than WoW... With all the mods coming out there is an even higher ability to tweak the game to your own liking beyond the simple UI and macro mods made for WoW.

      If you want a game that is exactly like WoW you m
      • and it offers a lot of innovations for the genre, especially in how the NPC's act
        Can you elaborate on this? I'm interested in what actual innovation is shown in this game?
    • There are people porting TES:III items and features to TES:IV already! Such as missing armor types-- certain furs, nordic, chitin, etc, and skills like unarmored!

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