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Why do people hate Oblivion so much?

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,277
Location
Massachusettes
I played with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul along with various patches and Qarl's HD packs and enjoyed it until I started experiencing regular crashes every few minutes. And that was the stable version. It was then that I realized that even with - and probably because of - the Unofficial Patches and the 4GB hacks it made the game a bomb ready to explode at any time and that I never wanted to play The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion in any of its twisted shapes or forms ever again. But it was fun when it worked.
 

Butter

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
7,523
There's a relatively new mod called Ascension. It's by the guy who made JSawyer Ultimate Edition and Economy Overhaul for New Vegas, and it's kind of a lightweight alternative to Oscuro's. I can't be arsed to install Oblivion and try it out, but it sounds pretty good.

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/50237

Description

The full list of changes this mod makes are too numerous to mention here, but I have included a definitive list in the Docs section for those who wish to read it. Instead, I will give a quick overview of some of the main areas, and try to explain the feeling I am aiming for.

Leveled Lists and Loot


The Manual of Arms and Armour books state that the higher material grade items can only be found in ancient treasure hordes. Lies! Get to a certain level in vanilla Oblivion, and every man and his dog wears ebony, elven, glass, and even daedric armor.

No more—the loot system has been exhaustively overhauled. The items carried by NPCs and in loot are now capped at a certain level appropriate to the character and location. You won’t see bandits wearing anything above chainmail armour, and generic loot has also been capped at Mithril and Orcish material. The best loot has been transferred to the boss chests located at the very end of dungeons, and only ancient tombs and ruins have a chance of concealing the highest level glass, elven, and ebony gear. To find daedric gear, you must travel to the plains of Oblivion itself, or delve deep into the twisted dungeons in the realm of the Mad God. Futhermore, items will no longer stop spawning when you get to higher levels—iron armour will remain common throughout your adventure, as it should be.

Boss chests also contain various other valuable treasures, ranging from silver and gold clutter, to valuable gemstones and jewellery. This acts as the prize for completing a dungeon, and will be the primary source of income for dungeon delvers. Ayleid containers may also contain additional Welkynd Stones, and Varla Stones can even occasionally be found in boss chests. Thieves also have a chance of finding more valuable loot in homes across Cyrodiil.

Ayleid coins and gold clutter have been added to act as treasure items, and several underused vanilla items have been distributed to existing loot lists. This includes fine iron and steel weapons, all enchanted arrows, and leather bracers, amongst others.

All weapon and armour loot will now also have random health and enchantment charge, determined based on the inventory it is found in. NPCs skilled in Armourer can also carry items with up to 125% repair condition.

Creatures and NPCs


Creatures will no longer stop spawning when you get to a certain level—you can now always encounter Zombies, Imps, Scamps, etc regardless of your level. Furthermore, all random spawns points have been capped, so that tough creatures such as Liches, Minotaur Lords, Storm Atronachs, etc will now only spawn at boss-level points, usually at the end of dungeons. Boss chests contain the best loot, but they’re also the best guarded!

To balance this feature, some low level creatures now have a chance of spawning in groups once you reach higher levels. For example, you can now encounter a pack or wolves in the wilderness, or a squad of skeletons in a dungeon.

Speaking of skeletons, they will now wear helmets appropriate to their level. You can now easily tell skeleton champions apart by their ebony or elven helmets before you go charging into combat.

Character Stats


Player health is now calculated as twice your current endurance, with no level up bonus. This means your maximum health is less, and tank characters will have to rely more on good quality armour instead. It also prevents the meta game of raising endurance early, which is off-putting, difficult to understand for new players, and breaks immersion.

Magicka regenerates much more slowly, but spells in general cost much less if you are skilled in the school. This means that spamming spells in no longer a viable tactic for most characters unless they specifically excel in the arcane arts. Characters with spell support may find that they need to pack some more potions of sorcery for their adventures. Draining a spellcaster’s magicka is also far more determintal now, and will force them to engage you prematurely in close combat.

The fatigue system has been overhauled to create a balance similar to Morrowind. Fatigue will drain whilst running, but only VERY slowly—much slower than it regenerates whilst not running. The rate of fatigue drain is influenced by the amount of equipment your carrying, so travelling light will prevent you getting tired as fast. Those skilled in athletics may even be able to regenerate fatigue whilst running when they are carrying less, and a master of athletics will always slowly regenerate fatigue, regardless of their encumbrance. Fatigue is now a resource that has to be monitored during combat, just like magicka or health. Potions, food, and drinks all restore more fatigue, and can be found more often in loot. You may find that you have to slow to a walk or rest for a short period of time between fights, and this immerses you in your character's sense of exhaustion. It's also a great opportunity to survey your surroundings and take in some of the amazing Cyrodiilic vistas that you usually run straight by.

I designed the new fatigue system with a low-level, heavy armour spellsword, unskilled in athletics in mind (the worst-case scenario). I found that the new fatigue drain whilst running was perfectly playable—you only have to slow to a walk for less than 30 seconds at most after heavy combat to regenerate your fatigue fully from zero. Running alone with no breaks will usually take 5 minutes or more to fully drain your fatigue.

Your maximum encumbrance is now three times your strength, rather than five times. This is quite a severe limitation on your inventory space early in the game, and you will now have to make more decisions as to whether you really need to pick an item up. Do you really need to be carrying a shield? Should you carry a shortword as backup instead of a longsword? Can you wear clothing or light armour instead of a piece of heavy armour? Do I really need an Alembic? These will be things that you now have to consider, and it will enhance your immersion in the game world. Don't worry, characters with high strength will still be able to wear a full set of heavy armour, and feather is now a much more valuable enchantment at all stages of the game. Burden can be more potent against your foes too, as the effect is more likely to immobilise them and will also make their fatigue drain quicker due to the fatigue changes.

The movement speed penalty for worn equipment weight has been reduced, meaning that heavy armour has one reduced downside versus light armour. The Light Armor master rank bonus has also been reduced, meaning that heavy armour will always provide more protection than light, making it the armour of choice for tank characters. Playing a heavy knight should now be less painfully slow, and heavy armour in general is less of a dud choice.

Gameplay Balancing


A range of other tweaks have been included to generally balance various other aspects of the game and make all play-styles feel more natural and worthwhile. Overpowered aspects of the game have been toned down, whereas some others have been modified to behave more like you would expect to enhance immersion. These include changes to alchemy, sneak, pick-pocketing, hand-to-hand fighting, barter, persuasion, skill leveling rates, and more. The aim here is subtlety. Wherever possible, only minimal behind-the-scenes settings have been altered so that most information pertaining to the vanilla game's item and character stats, etc is largely still correct.

Although slight, these changes can have a large effect on how you play the game. For instance, playing an unarmed monk is now a perfectly valid choice, as you can be skilled in marksman and hand-to-hand will remain a viable back-up combat skill throughout the game. Alchemy is less potent for those not skilled in the craft, and so it is harder to create potions more powerful than those found in loot for most characters. Persuasion and barter are much harder unless a character specialises in them—some merchants may not even haggle with novice mercantile characters at all! The list goes on.

These tweaks were all carefully designed by me with inspiration from the vanilla settings, often using extensive spreadsheets and play testing. I tried my best not to make any changes that could be considered ham-fisted or arbitrary. Settings were only changed if I thought it was necessary, fit with the vanilla feel, and would improve the gameplay experience. Wherever possible, I built around the vanilla settings instead of replacing them entirely. For example, most fatigue settings are the same, and only a small handful have been altered to create the new system.

Included in these tweaks are fixes for creature power attack damage and damage for creatures which carry weapons. In the vanilla game, creature power attacks did no extra damage, and some creatures with weapons actually did less damage than those that didn't.

Consistency


All the changes made by this mod have been made to be consistent with the vanilla game—the goal is to make it appear as though they could have been there from the start. This means that all loading screens, menu text, and tutorial messages have been updated to reflect the new features. A handful of new loading screens have also been added to explain extra details, and these all use vanilla loading screens which were rarely seen in the vanilla game.

 

Konjad

Patron
Joined
Nov 3, 2007
Messages
3,930
Location
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
OOO was good. I did have a crash once in a while, but not more often than every few hours. Perhaps combining it with some other mods made it crash for you?
 

Don Peste

Arcane
Joined
Sep 15, 2008
Messages
4,277
Location
||☆||
Anybody tried this guide for modding Oblivion?

Through the Valleys - PushTheWinButton's Vanilla Plus Modding Guide
https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/51105

Although Fallout New Vegas is the game I'm more known for modding, I actually think I enjoy playing and modding Oblivion more. This is probably because Oblivion is the first game I started out modding (as a user as a user and amateur mod maker) back over a decade ago, soon after the game's release.

During my time with New Vegas, I was part of a movement towards a 'vanilla plus' style of modding, which revolves more around creating a highly stable, balanced, and enhanced mod list that preserves the vanilla spirit of the game. This is different to the older conception of modding, which aims more to overhaul and stuff the game with lots of new (often lore-breaking) items, features, and pretty graphics, which can often lead to game instability. The vanilla plus scene was very much elevated by the venerable Viva New Vegas mod guide and the tireless work of Qolore. Despite Qolore since having developed guides for other major Bethesda games, Oblivion still remains in the blind spot of vanilla plus.

Not anymore.

This guide aims to be the definitive vanilla plus guide for Oblivion, built on my own many years of experience making and using mods over the many eras that the community has experienced (and my general displeasure at the shoddy advice given to new players in some existing Oblivion guides).
 

Mud'

Scholar
Joined
Oct 9, 2018
Messages
225
There's a relatively new mod called Ascension. It's by the guy who made JSawyer Ultimate Edition and Economy Overhaul for New Vegas, and it's kind of a lightweight alternative to Oscuro's. I can't be arsed to install Oblivion and try it out, but it sounds pretty good.

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/50237

Description

The full list of changes this mod makes are too numerous to mention here, but I have included a definitive list in the Docs section for those who wish to read it. Instead, I will give a quick overview of some of the main areas, and try to explain the feeling I am aiming for.

Leveled Lists and Loot


The Manual of Arms and Armour books state that the higher material grade items can only be found in ancient treasure hordes. Lies! Get to a certain level in vanilla Oblivion, and every man and his dog wears ebony, elven, glass, and even daedric armor.

No more—the loot system has been exhaustively overhauled. The items carried by NPCs and in loot are now capped at a certain level appropriate to the character and location. You won’t see bandits wearing anything above chainmail armour, and generic loot has also been capped at Mithril and Orcish material. The best loot has been transferred to the boss chests located at the very end of dungeons, and only ancient tombs and ruins have a chance of concealing the highest level glass, elven, and ebony gear. To find daedric gear, you must travel to the plains of Oblivion itself, or delve deep into the twisted dungeons in the realm of the Mad God. Futhermore, items will no longer stop spawning when you get to higher levels—iron armour will remain common throughout your adventure, as it should be.

Boss chests also contain various other valuable treasures, ranging from silver and gold clutter, to valuable gemstones and jewellery. This acts as the prize for completing a dungeon, and will be the primary source of income for dungeon delvers. Ayleid containers may also contain additional Welkynd Stones, and Varla Stones can even occasionally be found in boss chests. Thieves also have a chance of finding more valuable loot in homes across Cyrodiil.

Ayleid coins and gold clutter have been added to act as treasure items, and several underused vanilla items have been distributed to existing loot lists. This includes fine iron and steel weapons, all enchanted arrows, and leather bracers, amongst others.

All weapon and armour loot will now also have random health and enchantment charge, determined based on the inventory it is found in. NPCs skilled in Armourer can also carry items with up to 125% repair condition.

Creatures and NPCs


Creatures will no longer stop spawning when you get to a certain level—you can now always encounter Zombies, Imps, Scamps, etc regardless of your level. Furthermore, all random spawns points have been capped, so that tough creatures such as Liches, Minotaur Lords, Storm Atronachs, etc will now only spawn at boss-level points, usually at the end of dungeons. Boss chests contain the best loot, but they’re also the best guarded!

To balance this feature, some low level creatures now have a chance of spawning in groups once you reach higher levels. For example, you can now encounter a pack or wolves in the wilderness, or a squad of skeletons in a dungeon.

Speaking of skeletons, they will now wear helmets appropriate to their level. You can now easily tell skeleton champions apart by their ebony or elven helmets before you go charging into combat.

Character Stats


Player health is now calculated as twice your current endurance, with no level up bonus. This means your maximum health is less, and tank characters will have to rely more on good quality armour instead. It also prevents the meta game of raising endurance early, which is off-putting, difficult to understand for new players, and breaks immersion.

Magicka regenerates much more slowly, but spells in general cost much less if you are skilled in the school. This means that spamming spells in no longer a viable tactic for most characters unless they specifically excel in the arcane arts. Characters with spell support may find that they need to pack some more potions of sorcery for their adventures. Draining a spellcaster’s magicka is also far more determintal now, and will force them to engage you prematurely in close combat.

The fatigue system has been overhauled to create a balance similar to Morrowind. Fatigue will drain whilst running, but only VERY slowly—much slower than it regenerates whilst not running. The rate of fatigue drain is influenced by the amount of equipment your carrying, so travelling light will prevent you getting tired as fast. Those skilled in athletics may even be able to regenerate fatigue whilst running when they are carrying less, and a master of athletics will always slowly regenerate fatigue, regardless of their encumbrance. Fatigue is now a resource that has to be monitored during combat, just like magicka or health. Potions, food, and drinks all restore more fatigue, and can be found more often in loot. You may find that you have to slow to a walk or rest for a short period of time between fights, and this immerses you in your character's sense of exhaustion. It's also a great opportunity to survey your surroundings and take in some of the amazing Cyrodiilic vistas that you usually run straight by.

I designed the new fatigue system with a low-level, heavy armour spellsword, unskilled in athletics in mind (the worst-case scenario). I found that the new fatigue drain whilst running was perfectly playable—you only have to slow to a walk for less than 30 seconds at most after heavy combat to regenerate your fatigue fully from zero. Running alone with no breaks will usually take 5 minutes or more to fully drain your fatigue.

Your maximum encumbrance is now three times your strength, rather than five times. This is quite a severe limitation on your inventory space early in the game, and you will now have to make more decisions as to whether you really need to pick an item up. Do you really need to be carrying a shield? Should you carry a shortword as backup instead of a longsword? Can you wear clothing or light armour instead of a piece of heavy armour? Do I really need an Alembic? These will be things that you now have to consider, and it will enhance your immersion in the game world. Don't worry, characters with high strength will still be able to wear a full set of heavy armour, and feather is now a much more valuable enchantment at all stages of the game. Burden can be more potent against your foes too, as the effect is more likely to immobilise them and will also make their fatigue drain quicker due to the fatigue changes.

The movement speed penalty for worn equipment weight has been reduced, meaning that heavy armour has one reduced downside versus light armour. The Light Armor master rank bonus has also been reduced, meaning that heavy armour will always provide more protection than light, making it the armour of choice for tank characters. Playing a heavy knight should now be less painfully slow, and heavy armour in general is less of a dud choice.

Gameplay Balancing


A range of other tweaks have been included to generally balance various other aspects of the game and make all play-styles feel more natural and worthwhile. Overpowered aspects of the game have been toned down, whereas some others have been modified to behave more like you would expect to enhance immersion. These include changes to alchemy, sneak, pick-pocketing, hand-to-hand fighting, barter, persuasion, skill leveling rates, and more. The aim here is subtlety. Wherever possible, only minimal behind-the-scenes settings have been altered so that most information pertaining to the vanilla game's item and character stats, etc is largely still correct.

Although slight, these changes can have a large effect on how you play the game. For instance, playing an unarmed monk is now a perfectly valid choice, as you can be skilled in marksman and hand-to-hand will remain a viable back-up combat skill throughout the game. Alchemy is less potent for those not skilled in the craft, and so it is harder to create potions more powerful than those found in loot for most characters. Persuasion and barter are much harder unless a character specialises in them—some merchants may not even haggle with novice mercantile characters at all! The list goes on.

These tweaks were all carefully designed by me with inspiration from the vanilla settings, often using extensive spreadsheets and play testing. I tried my best not to make any changes that could be considered ham-fisted or arbitrary. Settings were only changed if I thought it was necessary, fit with the vanilla feel, and would improve the gameplay experience. Wherever possible, I built around the vanilla settings instead of replacing them entirely. For example, most fatigue settings are the same, and only a small handful have been altered to create the new system.

Included in these tweaks are fixes for creature power attack damage and damage for creatures which carry weapons. In the vanilla game, creature power attacks did no extra damage, and some creatures with weapons actually did less damage than those that didn't.

Consistency


All the changes made by this mod have been made to be consistent with the vanilla game—the goal is to make it appear as though they could have been there from the start. This means that all loading screens, menu text, and tutorial messages have been updated to reflect the new features. A handful of new loading screens have also been added to explain extra details, and these all use vanilla loading screens which were rarely seen in the vanilla game.



Sounds pretty good, still cant decide if i want to give it a spin at all if i can play that Enderal prequel.

I recall playing Oblivion with all the DLCs in my PS3 and it was fun~ish but all the bloom and potato faces were too much for me, also i never slept so i was like level 3 for half the fucking game and finishd the Shivering Isles almost one shotting everything with Fireball.
 

Don Peste

Arcane
Joined
Sep 15, 2008
Messages
4,277
Location
||☆||
I've looked at it, but I can't fathom why anyone would want to preserve the vanilla spirit of Oblivion.
Mainly to avoid Mod Paralysis. I'm now trying Viva New Vegas. The guide is very well made, and the mod selection seems OK to me. I was wondering if someone made something similar for the 2006 GotY.
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
Location
Finland
The only enjoyment I get out of Oblivion is with Maska'rs Overhaul, and that's due to trying to make dungeon crawling somewhat interesting.

The rest of the stuff sucks and sadly don't see any workaround with mods due to how unstable the engine is.
 

mkultra

Augur
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
469
Oblivion is the only TES game i've finished. I found many of the quests really good, some are very imaginative. i like the generic fantasy setting, i often miss that in new games, makes me feel nostalgic, easy to get into since you have so many references from books, movies, old games for that setting..

i also did spend many WEEKS modding it. For example i had a mod where other adventurers we're out doing quests, it lead to some interesting fights and/or interactions or recruitments, you could meet them in dungeons etc.. I had a ton of AI fixes (the radiant AI was a disappointment, seems like it was tuned down in the last minute due to consoles / performance - but all the features are in if you mod the game, which i did).

It's not a hard game though, the fights are stupid and can be exploited, but eh, didn't really play if for the combat, played it as a immersive sim / make your own adventure type of game. in its best moments it reminded me of Ultima 7, Might and Magic etc, the generic fantasy quests/maps that just gives you that cozy Fantasy feeling.

The engine is also really bad (it still is), the only good part about the engine is how mod friendly it is, probably the most mod friendly game out there, immense plus...
 
Last edited:

Caim

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2013
Messages
15,468
Location
Dutchland
Oblivion was too jank to be a good game, but not jank enough to be endearingly so. Also because of the "The Elder Scrolls IV" in the title: if Oblivion was a stand-alone game it would have been received a lot better. Same problem that it's contemporary D&D 4e had, come to think of it.
 
Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Oct 2, 2018
Messages
17,897
Location
大同
Oblivion had pretty good DLC (meme ones like horse armor aside). That Shivering Isles is great goes without saying, but I've also quite liked Knights of the Nine.
 

TheHeroOfTime

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2014
Messages
2,879
Location
S-pain
Oblivion had pretty good DLC (meme ones like horse armor aside). That Shivering Isles is great goes without saying, but I've also quite liked Knights of the Nine.

The shivering isles dlc and the dark brotherhood questline are legit good, but they feel they don't belong in the same game than the rest of the content. It was outsourced probably :lol:
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214


I don't get the joke if there is one here
rating_negativeman.png
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
Location
Finland
I don't get the joke if there is one here
rating_negativeman.png

There's trees, it's like Oblivion.
In fact my country is like Oblivion, surrounded by trees and lakes.
I can't relate to people talking as same as Oblivion, but I guess the looks are there.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,277
Location
Massachusettes
Oblivion is not nearly the worst RPG ever made as many of the more retarded and stuck-in-a-brain-rut codexers insist, again and again, but I can understand why so many are hostile to it. That main quest is something I wouldn't touch with a 10' pole arm ever again, but with mods it was playable and fun... until they crashed the game every few minutes, like clockwork, because of the 32-bit memory limits that even 4GB patches couldn't fix.
 

MWaser

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
607
Location
Where you won't find me
Oblivion had pretty good DLC (meme ones like horse armor aside). That Shivering Isles is great goes without saying, but I've also quite liked Knights of the Nine.

The shivering isles dlc and the dark brotherhood questline are legit good, but they feel they don't belong in the same game than the rest of the content. It was outsourced probably :lol:
If you think the Dark Brotherhood questline is good, then you need to play it again. 'Nuff said.
 

JamesDixon

GM Extraordinaire
Patron
Dumbfuck
Joined
Jul 29, 2015
Messages
11,178
Location
In the ether
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
As to the original question, it's because Todd Howard is shit at designing games. He dumbed down the game and turned exploration into a theme park ride. He is the epitome of decline for TES. The high point was Daggerfall and it's massive open world.
 
Joined
Mar 9, 2021
Messages
41
I'm playing Oblivion for the first time now and I can emphatically say that I despise whatever the hell they did with this level scaling shit. I knew something was wrong when a bear with chameleon magic completely buttfucked my spider daedra. I've beaten Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind and this game is just non-stop busting my balls with obnoxious damage sponge enemies.
 

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