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Oblivion Mods

J

jonneymendoza

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 11, 2004
Messages
6,413
Hi i have just reinstalled oblivion on my laptop which can run it on med-high and was wondering what are the best recommended mods for this game?

I heard this game got loads of mods. cheers in advance
 
yeah there are mods that improve visual quality like Qarls Textures III a real MUST
but using it really comes down to your lappy specs like a gooood vid card
 
Graphics mods are nice, but I would never play without OOO and at least one sort of leveling leveling mod such as nGCD or OXP.

If you want to see which mods are currently the favorite, go to the nexus.

For any more mod questions I recommend going to the official bethesda modding forums at www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums
 
If I could only take one Oblivion mod with me, it would be TheTalkieToaster's Companion Recruit & Share mod. Let's you recruit any NPC that has a disposition of 80 or higher and equipt them with weapons/armor/potions/etc.

Other than that.. try my Diverse City Guards! Both located at www.tesnexus.com
 
jonneymendoza said:
is it recomended to get this patch? http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=5296
Click to expand...

Very highly recommended. The unofficial patches are very well made, and fix literally thousands of bugs that Bethesda is too cheap to spend money fixing. I even went as far as to tell Bethesda that they should look into adopting the unofficial patch as their own - with all the work done for them the only cost would be distribution - but the response I got was that there are simply no plans whatsoever to spend another cent on Oblivion. So be glad you're on PC instead the poor folks on XBOX or PS3.

In truth, there aren't many critical game-crashing bugs left in by the developers, but there are indeed a fair number of character-breaking bugs that need to be fixed by the U.O.P. The majority of the UOP fixes are small oversights on Bethesda's part, but it's better to have them fixed than not.

I'm running hundreds of Oblivion mods, and love every single one of them. Dealing with many mods requires a little bit of help so I'll try to give you the quick&easy version.

Install Order:
1) Install Oblivion
2) Install any official DLC add-on packs, like Knights of the Nine, etc if you've bought them
3) Install Shivering Isles if you own it
4) Install the latest 1.2 patch from bethsoft's website
5) Install the latest unofficial patch.
6) Install the latest unofficial "Official Mods" patch if you are using any of them
7) Install the latest unofficial Shivering Isles patch (if you have SI)

From this point I highly recommend creating a backup of the entire Oblivion\data directory if you have enough disk space to spare. It just makes it possible to start 'fresh' without installing everything over again.

When you install mods, keep in mind that they sometimes will overwrite each other's assets depending on the order that you install them.

Load Order: When the game starts, it loads all of its data from the master files (.esm) and plugin files (.esp) in the data directory. It loads them in ORDER OF DATE MODIFIED. It is very important to note that this process is based on consecutive over-writing rather than some sort of intelligent merging. This means that if one plugin "overlaps" with another plugin, then whichever one loaded last "wins" and the previous plugin will have no affect in that area. If you want your mods to work right, you will want to have control over the order in which your mods are loaded. The official Oblivion launcher doesn't give you any options here, but there are other popular alternatives:

1) Oblivion Mod Manager: Like all load-order managers, OBMM will change the 'date modified' property on your plugins so that they load in the order that you specify. But OBMM can do a lot more. First and foremost, OBMM offers an alternative method of installing and uninstalling your mods. Using OBMM you can create special ".omod" archives that contain your mod files. OBMM keeps track of all your OMODs and lets you activate/deactivate them at will, and will let you know about any mod conflicts before they happen. OBMM also offers many other very useful Oblivion utilities.

2) BOSS: By comparison, BOSS is a very simple program. Rather than giving you direct visual representation of your load order, BOSS will order your mods so that they match a masterlist of mods. The masterlist can only assume what you want your mod order to be, and for the most part it is set up very well. If there are any specific changes you want to make, you can edit the masterlist and run BOSS again.

3) Wrye Bash: Bash is probably the most powerful utility available for Oblivion. You likely won't need it unless you plan on running a large number of mods, or if you're running the notorious FCOM. Along with powerful load-order managing functions, Wrye Bash can let you merge mods together in a way that's more effective than what Oblivion does by default. These merged mods are compiled into a "Bashed Patch" which should always load last or nearly-last. If you plan on using Bash, read the documentation thoroughly.

I personally use all three of these programs together. I use OBMM to install my mods, BOSS or order them, and Bash to run FCOM.

Some basic mod recommendations
1) Overhauls
There exist for Oblivion several projects which seek to 'overhaul' the Oblivion experience, the most popular being Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (OOO), along with Francesco's and Oblivion War Cry. The most important thing that each of these mods do is that they make it so your enemies are not always the same level as you. If you're not aware of it yet, enemies in Oblivion "level up" with you, so that no matter where you go there's always an "appropriate" challenge. These overhauls mean that there may be more variety in the opponents you face, which can make things a lot more interesting. Overhauls also add new creatures, new items, new quests, and more. You should only use one of these at a time because they don't cooperate well with each other... unless:

The Overhaul to end all Overhauls is called FCOM, an amalgamation of Francesco's, WarCry, Oscuro's, and Martigen's Monster Mod. It seeks to take the best of these different resources and merge them into a single coherent experience. There's altogether an enormous amount of material to be managed, so Wrye Bash is mandatory.

2) Character Leveling Mods
Improving your character in TES has always been a little awkward. You use your skills to improve them, and once your Major skills have improved enough you gain a level. Minor skills do not contribute to your level, but increase slower. Because your enemies are scaled to your level, you actually want to be as low level as possible which means you really only want to ever raise your Minor skills. It's bloody counter-intuitive. Your attributes increase based on which skills you used most during the level. It can take a lot of effort to make sure you maximize your attributes, but if you don't you might find your character relatively weak. Since so many people dislike this system there are lots of alternatives via mods.

Some mods, like nGCD, will manage your character level and attributes automatically so you never have to think about your 'character level' again, if you don't want to. Your character just progresses in a very naturally and well thought out way. Very highly customizable.

Other mods, like Oblivion XP Leveling, throw out the skill-use-to-improve mechanic entirely and instead reward the player with experience points for killing things or completing quests, not unlike most RPGs. It's perhaps less immersive because experience points is such a ridiculous artificial idea, but at the same time you won't ever find yourself 'practicing' a skill for hours on end (a common occurrence in Oblivion).

3) Graphics mods
First and foremost you will want to upgrade the user interface. By far, the most popular and most effective way to do this is to use DarNified UI. I can't say enough good things about this interface. Personally, I use a special variant called "DarkUI'd DarN" which is essentially DarNified UI except with much darker textures.

There are various texture replacements available that improve the appearance of most things in the game. The most famous of this is Qarl's Texture Pack 3 (QTP3) which provides a huge number of high quality textures. QTP3 has been effectively reduced since its release to QTP3R which is less stressful to your video card but still very high detail. Other popular texture improvements include Bomret's SI textures and Detailed Terrain. All are compatible with each other and are recommended if you have >512MB of vram.

4) Gameplay mods
Magic in Oblivion is often somewhat underpowered, and all of the beneficial spells expire way too quickly to be useful for prolonged combat. There have been several mods that work on Oblivion's lacklustre magic system, including Mighty Magick, Supreme Magicka, Less-Annoying-Magic-Experience, and Midas Magic. LAME is my favorite.


... eh I'm running out of time so I'll post what I have. Like I said, there's tons of information available at the official forums.
 
Graphic mods are nice, but I don't go for the best mod. They require too much graphic card power. I just went for the simple texture mod. The grass fix so they don't look like repeating tiles, the mountain texture and some ground texture stuff.

Anyway, since you're running on medium, I wouldn't recommend graphics mod anyway.

But the best of all is always gameplay mod. I heard there's this companion mod, haven't tried it though.
 
I'm bookmarking Kaldskryke's post. Probably use it a dozen times a week at the Bethsoft forums. :p
 
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