Player Mods make this game the ultimate RPG
It's not the core game itself that I'm so thrilled about (though it is solid)--it's the powerful, yet fairly easy mod tools they've made available to the player community that make this game so great. Every PC gamer can tweak the game to suit his/her taste and the type of experience he/she wants for their very own customized version of their ultimate Oblivion experience.
Want more realism for things like encumbrance and needing to eat, drink, and sleep? OK, you got it. Want more of a challenge from the AI? No problem. Want weapons performance/damage balanced in a different manner--how about a new weapon altogether? Sure thing. Want a more arcade-like experience? We gotcha covered. Want a different UI with more/less stats displayed? Done. Spells too powerful/too slow/too easily utilized? Tweaks aplenty.
The list of player-created mods is already huge--and the game's been out for what--a few weeks (this review is April 13, 2006)? If there's just about anything in the way the game functions that displeases you, there's probably a mod already out there that addresses it. And that's not even considering the potential for conversions. When you purchase the game, I highly recommend going to the official Elder Scrolls Forums and searching through the mods section to decide what you might like. Here are just a few that I have installed to my taste (descriptions by others):
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**Natural Environments 1.1**
This tweaks the water and weather in a number of settings to make it, prettier? More realistic? It at least gets the water looking like water, and not sewage. The thread for it has example images, etc. I use this and like it so far. Much more dramatic transitions.
**Landscape LOD Texture Replacement**
Pretties up the world by using more detailed textures for the LOD drawing, thus making far off ground look much less blurry. Plays nicely with the following mod that features another improvement to the LOD view.
**Landscape LOD NormalMap Fix**
Fixes the Normal maps on the LOD textures to give them some definition. Plays nicely with the above LOD mod. I use both.
**BTMod 2.20**
This is almost a requirement to play on the PC, as it helps remove alot of the restrictions to the UI that the console version created. Resizes the interface, blah blah blah, just get it.
**Detect Life Change**
Redoes the Detect Life effect to something much more eye pleasing in my opinion. More of a shimmering skin effect than puffs of purple clouds. Also comes in three tasty colours to suit your preference.
**Tag's Natural Wildlife**
A small mod to make animals behave, well, more like animals. And less like exterminating machines sent back in time to hand you your ass. I think we're all a little sick and tired of every mud crab under the sun deciding you're public enemy number one. This makes animals behave realistically, with parameters on aggression, flight, and defensiveness.
**Deadlier Traps**
Amps up the trap damage on some of the traps to make them deadly. No more giant, spiked balls swinging into your face and doing 10% damage. No more walking on spike floors. Gives traps some actual prescence in the game. Also nice for luring enemies into them.
**Attack and Hide 2.0**
Tired of attacking from stealth and being insta-acquired by NPCs despite no reasonable way for them to have found you? This makes sneaking and attacking a little more realistic in driving NPCs to search the area where they were attacked for you, instead of bee-lining towards your position. Includes three levels of difficulty to suit your taste. There's also a 2.1 release here which reduces the magnitude of Chameleon spells for balance purposes, but I prefer modularity, so I stick to the 2.0 release myself.
**Lyrondor's Combat Behavior Modifcation**
Tweaks the combat AI in the game to make your opponents more varied, devious and cunning. Plays nicely with lots of mods as it only touches the combat AI scripts.
**Adventurer's 0.5**
My balancing mod of choice. Does a number of tweaks to the game according to the preferences of the modmaker which I've found mesh well with what I want from Oblivion. I've tried a number of loot balancing/npc scaling type mods, and this one seems to work for me.
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Other developers better be taking notice. I've got this game functioning exactly like *I* want to play it now--which is probably very different from the guy with the SAME GAME next door. The implication to the future of gaming is important. We can only hope that this kind of collaboration is possible in other games in the future.
No game is perfect, but I'd say Bethesda has hit this one out of the park.