Oblivion was the First RPG I ever played. At the beginning the game looked a little overwhelming and complex but very soon I was drawn into it. Now I play Oblivion almost daily and to me it’s the best game I ever played. And it probably will be until The Elder Scrolls V comes out. The game is very deep and gives you a lot of different things to do. One day you’re really focusing on completing certain guild quests, the other day you’re clearing dungeons to get some needed loot or you’re just roaming around admiring and exploring the world (especially with the graphical enhancement mods).
And that’s where I come to the main part of my post: Mods. Vanilla Oblivion is a great game but the endless amount of mods available makes it the best for me. I’d like to list some you really need to try out. First I would recommend you download
Oblivion Character manager (
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6386) (a very handy tool to separate your different chars),
Oblivion Mod Manager (
http://timeslip.chorrol.com/obmm_download.html) (I can’t imagine using mods without this) and
Oblivion Script Extender (
http://obse.silverlock.org/) (needed for some mods to work and it comes with a launcher from with you can easily acces the Character Manager, Mod Manager and other stuff).
Some must haves mods by category (I’m not going to provide links for all of them, just use the search function on the great mod site
http://www.tesnexus.com/. If you can’t find them pm me.) :
Gameplay:*
Alternative start: this one let’s you skip the tutorial dungeon. You can start in one of the three ports (IC, Anvil and Leyawin), create your character and even choose some extra stuff like starting gold, background, diseases, …
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Color Map Mod: this gives the dull brown maps some needed color.
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DarNified UI: this makes the HUD much smaller wich adds to the immersion a lot. You can even adjust it to your taste. Also the menus get a lot friendlier to use with their smaller font. One of the best!
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Deadly Reflex: this makes combat intenser (decapitations and stuff!).
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Harvest Flora: with this mod installed, when you harvest flora it will really look harvested until it respawns.
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Oblivion Script Optimization: improves your performance
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Real Hunger, Real Sleep: does just what it says. You need to eat and sleep on regular times, otherwise your stats will drop until you eat. Improves immersion. There’s also Real Fatigue but I don’t use that one.
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Unofficial patches (for main game and official plug-ins): these mods are needed. They shore up a lot of bugs, glitches, … left behind in the original game.
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Streamline 3.2: anhances your performance, saving system, ...
Graphics and sounds:*
Almost everything viewable when distant: does what it says
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Atmospheric Oblivion: This mods adds more ambient sound to virtually everywhere in the game and improves on certain sounds. The mod is subtle but enhances immersion.
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Better Cities: one of the best mods out there. It changes the look of each city to reflect more it’s style (when you thought Bravil was ‘dirty’, wait until you see the BC version). You rrally have to see it to comprehend what it does.
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Darker Dungeons (and Darker Nights): simple but great! Now exploring dungeons, caves, … is a lot more exciting and realistic. I advise to bring torches!
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Illumination within: when it gest dark people will light their houses and it will show through the windows. This adds a lot of mood to the game when in cities.
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Landscape LOD Replacement borders, Landscape LOD Replacement textures, Landscape LOD NormalMap fix: Replaces the original 1024x1024 landscape LOD textures with improved 2048x2048 textures and makes the far-off terrain look much less blurry.
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MD Natural Faces: it improves the faces of NPC’s
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Natural Environments: another must have. It can seem subtle at first but it enhances the vegetation, weather system, water, …
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Quarls Texture Pack 3: it improves the textures and makes an immense difference. It can be a real shot to your performance however. 512 mb video cards recommended. There’s also QTP 2 for 256 mb cards.
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Symphony of Violence: enhances the combat sounds
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Unique Landscapes: a series of mods wich make a certain area of the world more unique in its appearance.
Extra content*
Crowded Roads, Immersive Travelers and Tamriel Travellers: these 3 add extra NPC’s to the Roads (and other places sometimes) wich really takes awat that irrealistic lonely feeling you can get when running around. You should check out the mods a little because some of them even add NPC Merchants so you don’t need to always go in a town to buy and sell.
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Lost Spires: it adds an archeology guild and a lot of new locations and quests. I haven’t done the quests yet but it should be one of the best.
Keep me posted if you try these out. I'd love to hear your thoughts about them.
