Oblivion: Rants and Mods

[Zeful]

Okay having been killed by a wolf four times in a row, I found that I was badly leveled in Oblivion to the point of incapability. Looking around I find that ideally one should be grinding 30 skill levels in roughly three attributes (or 20:2 if you wanted to level Luck) in order to out pace the scaling enemies, which causes me to wonder as I had a very similar experience with Bethesda's other RPG Fallout 3. Though that game had the decency to allow you to level manually, but it still had problems with ridiculous system mastery.

What is it with Bethesda games and trap-style gameplay that punishes you if you do anything other than play the main quest or spent hours looking up small details about how you gain experience? I should be able to run around and play at my pace then having better than half the game be trial-and-error based gameplay as I try to build a competent character (which is so hilariously tedious that I can barely force myself to do it for one level). I mean, I stop being able to kill things reliably at level 6 (I managed to get roughly 13 levels of semi-competence before running into obstacles that simply outdamaged me in Fallout). Or am I seriously not getting the appeal to this?

Is there any way to have fun playing Oblivion while still being competent or should I simply uninstall it and let it gather dust until the heat-death of the universe?

[Tydude]

I took the easy way out and lowered the difficulty until it was just enough of a challenge to make the game fun. Unless you're trying to be hard core, that's what I suggest.

[Domochevsky]

I think in order to outpace Oblivion's leveling you need to put the skills you use the least as your primary skills, as those are used to scale the enemies on. (And to level you up, but it's more controllable that way as you can prepare on your own time.)

[Zeful]

I took the easy way out and lowered the difficulty until it was just enough of a challenge to make the game fun. Unless you're trying to be hard core, that's what I suggest.I find that a game is badly designed if I have to change the difficulty mid-game to make the game playable.


I think in order to outpace Oblivion's leveling you need to put the skills you use the least as your primary skills, as those are used to scale the enemies on. (And to level you up, but it's more controllable that way as you can prepare on your own time.)
I'm doing something similar as noted here (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Efficient_Leveling#Class_Design) here but it's so hilariously tedious that I can't really force myself to do it.

[SparkMandriller]

Get one of those mods that means you can always raise your attributes by 5 when you level. Doesn't fix everything, but at least it means you can just go up a level when you want to instead of spending ten minutes jumping so you get 5 strength instead of 4. If you do that and make sure you don't have any of the really fast levelling non combat skills as your favoured ones things shouldn't be too hard.

[Zodiac]

Here's a mod that stops having enemies scale their levels with you. (http://www.oscurogamedesign.com/down-game-ooo-high.html) Among other beneficial features that the game a lot more playable.

[Zeful]

Here's a mod that stops having enemies scale their levels with you. (http://www.oscurogamedesign.com/down-game-ooo-high.html) Among other beneficial features that the game a lot more playable.

That would cause problems with my existing mods, at least one of which is no longer on the internet anymore. Further it seems to require four other mods. Which in turn requires me to hunt them down and see if they would cause problems. I'm don't want to lose my current set up if at all possible.

[Zodiac]

You can check compatibility with other mods here (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:FCOM#Compatibility_Guidelines_.26_Patches) and you can download the whole thing here (http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3953). And here's (http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Oblivion_Mod_Manager) what I use to keep track of the mods I have. The most recent wave of mod updates were making them more compatible with each other so odds are OOO will probably work.

EDIT: Wrong link for compatibility list, let me look for a different one.

EDIT #2: Found it.

[EleventhHour]

~Level Scaling~

They used to do it better. See Morrowind, that despite it's inferior engine, and graphics, used an area-based level system, the only things that scaled with you were...

...cliff racers... :smalleek::smallsigh:

Oblivion was okay, but the best option was just to never level up, and murder the entire place at level 1. It scales, after all. (Though you might want to level before fighting the boss, he doesn't lose much of his damage potential.)

[Mtg_player_zach]

I've never had any problems with difficulty in oblivion. I've played with and without OOO. I've even done fists only before and done just fine. I've done mage and well mages are broken good. I've done stealth and that's always really fun. Actually I've done just about every character type you can think of and never had issues, I've increased the difficulty slider too. One shotting enemies just seems too easy.

[blueblade]

I haven't played in a while, but I remember OOO and MM were they way to go to get a working game without scaling. To me, it was so seamless that it felt like this was how it was meant to be played.

[Zeful]

You can check compatibility with other mods here (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:FCOM#Compatibility_Guidelines_.26_Patches) and you can download the whole thing here (http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=3953). And here's (http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Oblivion_Mod_Manager) what I use to keep track of the mods I have. The most recent wave of mod updates were making them more compatible with each other so odds are it will probably work.

EDIT: Wrong link for compatibility list, let me look for a different one.

EDIT #2: Found it.
My mods aren't on that list, and aren't designed to work with the Oblivion Mod Manager or any of the plugin-handlers because the programmer found them to be a lazy way of doing things (his words).


I've never had any problems with difficulty in oblivion. I've played with and without OOO. I've even done fists only before and done just fine. I've done mage and well mages are broken good. I've done stealth and that's always really fun. Actually I've done just about every character type you can think of and never had issues, I've increased the difficulty slider too. One shotting enemies just seems too easy.
I on the other hand, got humiliated by the same timber wolf 4 times in a row playing a stealth character, and after level 3 couldn't one shot anyone without using the tutorial poison (and even then, it only worked on enemies I could kill in two or three hits anyway). Even my attempts to run through the main quest as quickly as possible met with failure. I've pretty much just given up on the game because the effort to make a character competitive is simply stupid, unintuitive and a host of other angry adjectives aimed at deriding the failure of the designers.

[endoperez]

They used to do it better. See Morrowind, that despite it's inferior engine, and graphics, used an area-based level system, the only things that scaled with you were...

...cliff racers... :smalleek::smallsigh:

Morrowind might not have scaled the enemies so badly, but the level-up system was still horribly designed. The game felt like a chore, despite having installed several mods that supposedly helped the gameplay like fixing cliff racers. I can't imagine how horrible it must have been without those fixes...

There are mods that fix that. In Morrowind, I found that Galsiah's Character Development much improved the leveling system and actually made the game fun. No more levelup screens, ever! If you wanted to increase strength, you didn't jump just before level-up, but trained strength-based skills. Skills improved more than one attribute, too, at slower rates. There's a version of it available for Oblivion:

http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Not_Galsiah%27s_Character_Development

It's a major upheaval so there will probably be some problems, but even with the problems it could be worth it.

[factotum]

See, this is why I totally disagree with level scaling in games. If everything scales up with you, what's the point in your character getting more powerful? As he gains power what should happen is that stuff that was difficult before becomes a speedbump, and he is capable of taking on stuff that he couldn't even dream of before. It should not be possible to complete the entire game at level 2! (You can't actually do it at level 1 in Oblivion because you need to level up for at least one quest, but that's the only thing stopping you).

[Triaxx]

@Zeful: What exactly do your installed mods DO? Possibly one of them is the problem.

As for Fallout 3, those that out damaged you are either from DLC, or you're really badly built. Essentially only the Reaver should be able to kill you because it is over powered, but using VATS severely cuts the damage the enemies can do.

And in any case, Oblivions Stealth Damage does not scale effectively like it should. Level 1 is the best way to complete the game, because those things that can't be defeated with an x3/x6 stealth attack, are still not that hard.

Wolves are also pretty throughly over powered, because it's so hard to raise block. And so they end up stagger-locking you even if you block. It's one of the reasons I open with a magical blast if I have to go toe to toe with one. Drain Strength, or Drain Speed are good, paralysis is better, Enough damage to one shot them is best.

@factotum: You can even complete that at one if you're willing to cheat just enough to advance the quest stage to the next one.

[Zeful]

@Zeful: What exactly do your installed mods DO? Possibly one of them is the problem.They add a few locations and shops to the game, change/add a handful of models and textures, nothing that would interfere with the difficulty, but since the host removed them, I can no longer retrieve them if I want to overhaul the game and fix it.


As for Fallout 3, those that out damaged you are either from DLC, or you're really badly built. Essentially only the Reaver should be able to kill you because it is over powered, but using VATS severely cuts the damage the enemies can do.It's the second, as the instance I'm referring to was repeated death by Yau-gui (the mutant bears), and I found the VATS system to be inferior to my own (horrific) aiming in just about every circumstance.


See, this is why I totally disagree with level scaling in games. If everything scales up with you, what's the point in your character getting more powerful?Actually I agree with level scaling in games it's just has to be implemented properly (which pretty much no game does). If you make the game evaluate the player during certain events and then scale enemies accordingly you can actually work that into the narrative and make it seem like the world is actually reacting to them creating a better sense of immersion, especially if you could tie in an AI to better combat the player.

[J.Gellert]

I just used the Oblivion XP-levelling mod. Made everything simpler.

You kill things, get XP, and gain points to place wherever you want when you level up, RPG-style. Simple. Elegant.

Combine that with a non-scaling mod (really, it's a must, my immersion is broken as soon as I see a random roadside bandit in glass armor) and you're ready.

Oblivion's levelling system is the absolutely worst I have played or even seen, ever. I find no good reason why any sane designer would want to stray so far from things that work.

[SparkMandriller]

Actually I agree with level scaling in games it's just has to be implemented properly (which pretty much no game does).

Does Gradius count? I find the scaling in Gradius to be pretty fair.

[Somebloke]

Yeah, I decided to base my first character's skill-set on roleplaying incentives and what the computer suggested with my play style.

Five hours and then levels later I was being slaughtered by passing butterflies.

Oblivion does not handle levelling well. Fallout 3 at least indicated that they paid attention to this.

[Mtg_player_zach]

I need to play oblivion again and reevaluate the difficulty, though I think I have OOO, but I think that mod is supposed to increase difficulty.

[Project_Mayhem]

I can't say I ever had a problem with Fallout 3. I suppose if you didn't pick a weapon skill, but ... no-one would be silly enough to that right :smalltongue:

It was worse in Fallout 1 and 2 anyway. The difficulty in those games will take you and destroy you unless you build optimally, and head to the right locations to get cool stuff straight away.

[Triaxx]

I tend to play even my BFG characters by moving mostly in stealth mode and keeping one eye on the terrain. Yao guai aren't that threatening if you see them first and can put a sneak attack round into the head. If that doesn't kill them, then they don't run forwards fast enough not to be out run backwards. Plus they stop for an instant before lunging and you can get out of range.

VATS is not a long range weapon. It has a fairly short range of activation to start with, and suffers accuracy problems even with 100 skill at those ranges. Grenades work well at those ranges, because they explode, but most weapons tend to be a bit wimpy. Even Eugene only hits a few times at range. Close and personal is where it's best, with a shotgun, or SMG.

And not only the scaling of the enemies, but the weapons scale more quickly. That iron longsword with an attack power of 2 at the start? By level 50, it's got an attack power of 6 or so. In F3, the pistol starts at 8, but by the end it's a power of 14, which is a much more considerable jump. So the enemies are more powerful and so are you. Oblivion only made the enemies stronger, without a comparable increase of equipment.

On the other hand, the magic was strong enough you could compensate, but only if you knew how.

[Mtg_player_zach]

I tend to play even my BFG characters by moving mostly in stealth mode and keeping one eye on the terrain. Yao guai aren't that threatening if you see them first and can put a sneak attack round into the head. If that doesn't kill them, then they don't run forwards fast enough not to be out run backwards. Plus they stop for an instant before lunging and you can get out of range.

VATS is not a long range weapon. It has a fairly short range of activation to start with, and suffers accuracy problems even with 100 skill at those ranges. Grenades work well at those ranges, because they explode, but most weapons tend to be a bit wimpy. Even Eugene only hits a few times at range. Close and personal is where it's best, with a shotgun, or SMG.

And not only the scaling of the enemies, but the weapons scale more quickly. That iron longsword with an attack power of 2 at the start? By level 50, it's got an attack power of 6 or so. In F3, the pistol starts at 8, but by the end it's a power of 14, which is a much more considerable jump. So the enemies are more powerful and so are you. Oblivion only made the enemies stronger, without a comparable increase of equipment.

On the other hand, the magic was strong enough you could compensate, but only if you knew how.



Staff of paralyze, Weakness to magicka/shock 300%. Shock, magnitude 80, 3 seconds duration. Kills anything in the game.

[Zeful]

I tend to play even my BFG characters by moving mostly in stealth mode and keeping one eye on the terrain. Yao guai aren't that threatening if you see them first and can put a sneak attack round into the head. If that doesn't kill them, then they don't run forwards fast enough not to be out run backwards. Plus they stop for an instant before lunging and you can get out of range.But at that point I was so unfocused that a sneak attack shot to the head did less than half damage.


VATS is not a long range weapon. It has a fairly short range of activation to start with, and suffers accuracy problems even with 100 skill at those ranges. Grenades work well at those ranges, because they explode, but most weapons tend to be a bit wimpy. Even Eugene only hits a few times at range. Close and personal is where it's best, with a shotgun, or SMG.The only time VATS seems to be useful to me is if I'm close to death and can kill in three shots if I could sight him. That's it. Every other time it's been useless for anything.


And not only the scaling of the enemies, but the weapons scale more quickly. That iron longsword with an attack power of 2 at the start? By level 50, it's got an attack power of 6 or so. In F3, the pistol starts at 8, but by the end it's a power of 14, which is a much more considerable jump. So the enemies are more powerful and so are you. Oblivion only made the enemies stronger, without a comparable increase of equipment.Enemies carried gear based on your level (before the wolf humiliation, most enemies were wearing Steel armor and had Steel Weapons. A Daedric Dagger is roughly three times as powerful as a Iron Dagger. It's possible, though one quest (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Two_Sides_of_the_Coin), to get a nearly full set of Chainmail Armor (Light) and a Silver Longsword at level one.


On the other hand, the magic was strong enough you could compensate, but only if you knew how.Which requires a lot of work to get to the arcane university, and get the money to spend making spells (as well as buying the component).


Staff of paralyze, Weakness to magicka/shock 300%. Shock, magnitude 80, 3 seconds duration. Kills anything in the game.I couldn't cast either of the spells. The magicka cost is more than I have unless I'm obsessively leveling Int.

[Mtg_player_zach]

But at that point I was so unfocused that a sneak attack shot to the head did less than half damage.

The only time VATS seems to be useful to me is if I'm close to death and can kill in three shots if I could sight him. That's it. Every other time it's been useless for anything.

Enemies carried gear based on your level (before the wolf humiliation, most enemies were wearing Steel armor and had Steel Weapons. A Daedric Dagger is roughly three times as powerful as a Iron Dagger. It's possible, though one quest (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Two_Sides_of_the_Coin), to get a nearly full set of Chainmail Armor (Light) and a Silver Longsword at level one.

Which requires a lot of work to get to the arcane university, and get the money to spend making spells (as well as buying the component).

I couldn't cast either of the spells. The magicka cost is more than I have unless I'm obsessively leveling Int.

If you are a mage you should. Of course at lower levels it would be different numbers but the result is the same. Dead enemy.

And getting into the university, isn't that hard. Any build of character should be able to get in.

[TheDarkOne]

I find that a game is badly designed if I have to change the difficulty mid-game to make the game playable.

Really? Are you suggesting that a game should have the same difficulty from start to finish? Otherwise, I think most games try to have increasing difficulty throughout, so it's entirely reasonable that someone could handle the start of a game on hard, but find the end of the game unplayable on the same difficulty.

[EleventhHour]

Really? Are you suggesting that a game should have the same difficulty from start to finish? Otherwise, I think most games try to have increasing difficulty throughout, so it's entirely reasonable that someone could handle the start of a game on hard, but find the end of the game unplayable on the same difficulty.

But the end of the game can be just an simple as the start... If you never level up. It's not a natural progression of difficulty, all the enemies just level up with you, without regard for common sense. Bandits in suits of full daedric armour, who could sell it for tens of thousands, but instead make camps out in the wilderness and try to rob passer-bys, who, aside from the PC, have 10-20 gold in stuff.

[Starbuck_II]

Okay having been killed by a wolf four times in a row, I found that I was badly leveled in Oblivion to the point of incapability. Looking around I find that ideally one should be grinding 30 skill levels in roughly three attributes (or 20:2 if you wanted to level Luck) in order to out pace the scaling enemies, which causes me to wonder as I had a very similar experience with Bethesda's other RPG Fallout 3. Though that game had the decency to allow you to level manually, but it still had problems with ridiculous system mastery.


Wait...there is a main quest?
I thought the object was finish all the guilds. I haven't even started more than giving that monk the amuley (he gave me gear for the idea of it. And something about a heir, but seriously I only cared about sellable stuff).
I did gain levels, but only to increase my mana.
Granted I play on normal.
Redguards rock.

[Zeful]

Really? Are you suggesting that a game should have the same difficulty from start to finish? Otherwise, I think most games try to have increasing difficulty throughout, so it's entirely reasonable that someone could handle the start of a game on hard, but find the end of the game unplayable on the same difficulty.
No, I am suggesting that the difficulty curve of the game be smooth, with difficulty increasing at a rate the average player (myself) can beat out of the box as the game was meant to be played.

[warty goblin]

But the end of the game can be just an simple as the start... If you never level up. It's not a natural progression of difficulty, all the enemies just level up with you, without regard for common sense. Bandits in suits of full daedric armour, who could sell it for tens of thousands, but instead make camps out in the wilderness and try to rob passer-bys, who, aside from the PC, have 10-20 gold in stuff.

Wait, there are RPGs where the economy and enemy behavior make sense? Because I've sure as hell never played one

[SparkMandriller]

No, I am suggesting that the difficulty curve of the game be smooth, with difficulty increasing at a rate the average player (myself) can beat out of the box as the game was meant to be played.

What happened to the days when games took some practice to beat, huh? Not trying to support Oblivion's difficulty or anything, but I saw that line, and it just makes me sad. So sad.

[Terry576]

What happened to the days when games took some practice to beat, huh? Not trying to support Oblivion's difficulty or anything, but I saw that line, and it just makes me sad. So sad.

The fact that even with mods, Oblivion's normal difficulty scale on a computer is hopelessly broken?

Seriously. Just to test, I consoled in a Daedric Longsword at Level 1, and fought a skeleton, after consoling 65 strength.

The thing took 10 hits to take down.

On the midway point.

There's a fine, fine line between "difficult" and "broken."

I like to think that Oblivion walks that line everyday.




Is there any way to have fun playing Oblivion while still being competent or should I simply uninstall it and let it gather dust until the heat-death of the universe?

Your best bet? Use NGCD's mod. It makes leveling make sense.

[Zeful]

What happened to the days when games took some practice to beat, huh? Not trying to support Oblivion's difficulty or anything, but I saw that line, and it just makes me sad. So sad.

Practice is different from increasingly obnoxious grind. In order to complete Oblivion at all, I have to ignore that level up message entirely, only leveling up once to get an item to complete a quest, or I have to waste time training skills obsessively to get decent stat enhancement. Further this is very different because it's a RPG rather than a shooter or platformer, because player skill has next to no impact on the difficulty of the game. The impact is does have is instead based on how easily one understands the system to find the traps in it.

Oblivion has an equal (if not greater) amount of necessary system mastery as 3.5 does.

I have fun practicing games that are hard because of an intentional design choice, as long as the skills needed are reasonable. Games like Oblivion and Kaizo Mario World do not fall under that definition.

[Mtg_player_zach]

Practice is different from increasingly obnoxious grind. In order to complete Oblivion at all, I have to ignore that level up message entirely, only leveling up once to get an item to complete a quest, or I have to waste time training skills obsessively to get decent stat enhancement. Further this is very different because it's a RPG rather than a shooter or platformer, because player skill has next to no impact on the difficulty of the game. The impact is does have is instead based on how easily one understands the system to find the traps in it.

Oblivion has an equal (if not greater) amount of necessary system mastery as 3.5 does.

I have fun practicing games that are hard because of an intentional design choice, as long as the skills needed are reasonable. Games like Oblivion and Kaizo Mario World do not fall under that definition.


You can dodge enemies. You have to aim. You can make strategic choices when you fight. If you can't take them toe to toe, then don't engage them that way. Hit them with stealth first. Or use magic. Or both.

And um, alchemy is a godsend (everything you play should have it as a major skill, it's that good). Poison your weapons. Jump over their heads and shoot them with arrows while they chase you with swords. Jump to places they can't get to. Roofs. Summon your own creatures to fight for you.

I'm sorry, there are multitudes of things you can do in oblivion to avoid dying. If you rush straight at every enemy you see and hit him with your sword and then do the same to every enemy following him, yeah, you are probably going to die. Or if you don't have skills that work with the attributes you want. I never had to do much to alter my leveling. I did occaisionally go for the odd bonus. But I never had to go and have 5's in all three points just to compete. I leveled when I hit the skill increases. But yeah, I DID pick major skills that would lead to the attribute increases that I knew I would want for the type of character I was playing. Aside from that, I played the game. It was fun and to this day is at least top 10 favorite games I've ever played.

Now, so that I'm not being an asshat I'm going to try and give you some advice. OOO is a good mod. Changes stuffs. Don't remember what. Pick your race according to what you want to do. You are mainly looking at the attribute scores here. Here is a table that can help you. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Races
For demonstration, I'm going to go through a character creation with you. I'm going to be stealthy. Let's look at what we want for that. We are going to want to be fast. We want to be agile. So our main two attributes are going to be speed and agility. Lets look at the races. Looking at this, I can see that dunmer, bosmer, and argonian's would be our best bets. I like the dunmer. It has the most important attribute for us at 50 which is speed. Good agility too. I like the skill increases it gives me. I think we might have a little bit of magic to us as well. As we said we want agility and speed. We want to be average with strength and magic as a last case scenario kind of thing. So we will start picking skills.

I have picked my major skills as the following:
Athletics (30), Alchemy (30), Acrobatics (25), Conjuration (30) , Destruction (40), Light armor (30), Marksman (30).
I chose my specialization in magic because my inherent bonuses would be better with the stealthy stuff we would be using so those skills don't need to be as high at the start since we will be using them more and leveling them up quicker, they will catch up faster than anything. So I compensated and made magic so that we would be competant enough to summon and blast from the start.
The scores we end up with are pretty good. (Acrobatics is a bit low, just jump like crazy). That was just a personal choice of mine, you would be completely fine with picking stealth instead. Both should work fine. I chose the steed as our birthsign, since we want to be faster than anything since we are avoiding melee battle if possible. So I chose the sign with the bonus to speed. I also considered, the tower (I think, the agility, speed, luck one) and the mage (in OOO, its added to be 30 point bonus with 10 to willpower), but I went with the steed but your character might have slightly different purposes.

Note, I chose dunmer over bosmer because of the dunmer's fire resistance. Bosmer is slightly better for our purposes otherwise I think.
Our major attributes scores were the following.
Strength 40
Intelligence 40
Willpower 30
Agility 45
Speed 75
Endurance 40
Personality 30
Luck 50

Health 60
Magicka 88
Fatigue 155

That is how I go through building my characters. Just follow a similar process for your characters (any style). Oh, um the skills I chose all complement what we want to do with our character. In no time we should have 100 speed and good agility, from there we would work on intelligence.

I probably left some stuff out, but eh. That should be good for now.

[SparkMandriller]

I have fun practicing games that are hard because of an intentional design choice, as long as the skills needed are reasonable. Games like Oblivion and Kaizo Mario World do not fall under that definition.

Oh, right, okay then.

Kaizo Mario is pretty awesome though.

[Terry576]

Alright, Zeful, your problem is with the leveling system.

nGCD (http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Not_Galsiah's_Character_Development) is your best friend.

It levels up attributes according to use. The more you swing your sword, the higher your strength. The more you use your spells, the higher your intelligence/willpower, and so on and so forth.

It's a wonderful mod, especially considering how awful the leveling system is in comparison to it.

[Zeful]

Stuff about playingI was playing to my strengths, I snuck around shot with the bow, if that didn't kill them I drew my blade and went back to full speed. I poisioned my weapons when I had it and they were useful (Damage Fatigue/Magicka were pretty worthless most of the time). Though I disagree that Alchemy should be a major skill, it levels up too stupidly fast which would exacerbate my problems.


For demonstration, I'm going to go through a character creation with you. I'm going to be stealthy. Let's look at what we want for that. We are going to want to be fast. We want to be agile. So our main two attributes are going to be speed and agility. Lets look at the races. Looking at this, I can see that dunmer, bosmer, and argonian's would be our best bets. I like the dunmer. It has the most important attribute for us at 50 which is speed. Good agility too.Hilariously this was exactly my choice. Though I went the other way 'round. I chose Dunmer because I thought it would be fun to play a Dark Elf, then found that they make great thieves/assassins.


I like the skill increases it gives me. I think we might have a little bit of magic to us as well. As we said we want agility and speed. We want to be average with strength and magic as a last case scenario kind of thing. So we will start picking skills.

I have picked my major skills as the following:
Athletics (30), Alchemy (30), Acrobatics (25), Conjuration (30) , Destruction (40), Light armor (30), Marksman (30).So you chose every Speed skill as your Major skill? Why? Considering how the game does skills, this prevents you from keeping your speed high without devoting entire levels to it.

I chose my specialization in magic because my inherent bonuses would be better with the stealthy stuff we would be using so those skills don't need to be as high at the start since we will be using them more and leveling them up quicker, they will catch up faster than anything. So I compensated and made magic so that we would be competant enough to summon and blast from the start. The scores we end up with are pretty good. (Acrobatics is a bit low, just jump like crazy). That was just a personal choice of mine, you would be completely fine with picking stealth instead. Both should work fine. I chose the steed as our birthsign, since we want to be faster than anything since we are avoiding melee battle if possible. So I chose the sign with the bonus to speed. I also considered, the tower (I think, the agility, speed, luck one) and the mage (in OOO, its added to be 30 point bonus with 10 to willpower), but I went with the steed but your character might have slightly different purposes.The Thief gives 10 to Agility, Speed, and Luck. Though I agree with the choice to run Magic Spec.


That is how I go through building my characters. Just follow a similar process for your characters (any style). Oh, um the skills I chose all complement what we want to do with our character. In no time we should have 100 speed and good agility, from there we would work on intelligence.

I probably left some stuff out, but eh. That should be good for now.Except by having every speed skill be major, you will be needing to devote entire levels to speed to build it up. Unless OOO awards every stat boost on level up rather than forcing you to choose three, which I didn't see looking through the link to the mod.


Alright, Zeful, your problem is with the leveling system.

nGCD (http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Not_Galsiah's_Character_Development) is your best friend.

It levels up attributes according to use. The more you swing your sword, the higher your strength. The more you use your spells, the higher your intelligence/willpower, and so on and so forth.

It's a wonderful mod, especially considering how awful the leveling system is in comparison to it.
I might put it in but I'm probably going to have to install the UOP before hand.

[Triaxx]

What weapon were you using?

VATS works best when there's more than one enemy at a time. If you're fighting one, real-time works well. If you're fighting two, they're about equal. If you're fighting three though, VATS lets you queue an attack on each and then finish them in real-time as they stagger from the shots. Or to finish the crippling of a limb.

I didn't mean the gear the enemies were carrying, I meant the gear itself didn't get much better the better you were at using it.

Money isn't a problem if you use alchemy to condense food into stamina potions.

Then you're missing something. As your skill rises, it modifies down the magicka cost. Slowly per level, but in big jumps when you go from apprentice to journeyman and so on.

Further thoughts on the above post:

Dunmer are terrible thieves and assassins. Khajit are where it's at. Especially with the night-vision toggle mod. Playing a fast, lightly armed character means that you'll raise light armor, athletics and acrobatics fairly fast, so you'll gain speed with reasonable ease. (Mind you Athletics is a monster to raise.) Acrobatics ability to make attacks while jumping is surprisingly useful if you do it from the high ground because you're out of reach of their attacks and yours should disrupt theirs.

When building Khaal, my Khajit Assassin, who's now level 14, I picked Athletics, Blade, Illusion, Acrobatics, Light Armor, Security, and Sneak as his skills, and Thief as his sign.

Illusion guarantees the ability to strike and fade, granting sneak attack after sneak attack. Athletics lets you run in and out of range, because it affects movement speed, even if you're sneaking. Acrobatics lets him leap up onto rooftops, rocks and other structural elements to extend the range of combat. Light armor keeps him light and safe. Security and Sneak are obvious.

One thing you will want to do is find/beg/steal something that gives you water walking. In outdoor spaces, this means you can pull the combat out onto the water, and use it as a place where enemies cannot reach you. Incidentally, if you had an okay time with the main quest, you can reset sigil stones until you get one with water walking.

If you're going for speed, you'll probably want to fast travel to Cheydinhal, and use the east exit and grab the ring of speed at Fort Farragut.

[Mtg_player_zach]

I was playing to my strengths, I snuck around shot with the bow, if that didn't kill them I drew my blade and went back to full speed. I poisioned my weapons when I had it and they were useful (Damage Fatigue/Magicka were pretty worthless most of the time). Though I disagree that Alchemy should be a major skill, it levels up too stupidly fast which would exacerbate my problems.

Hilariously this was exactly my choice. Though I went the other way 'round. I chose Dunmer because I thought it would be fun to play a Dark Elf, then found that they make great thieves/assassins.

So you chose every Speed skill as your Major skill? Why? Considering how the game does skills, this prevents you from keeping your speed high without devoting entire levels to it.
The Thief gives 10 to Agility, Speed, and Luck. Though I agree with the choice to run Magic Spec.

Except by having every speed skill be major, you will be needing to devote entire levels to speed to build it up. Unless OOO awards every stat boost on level up rather than forcing you to choose three, which I didn't see looking through the link to the mod.


I might put it in but I'm probably going to have to install the UOP before hand.

Looking back over, we can see that yes we have a few speed skills but the other skills we won't be using unless we have to. Mostly we are going to be shooting things with our bow, and sneaking around. The destruction and conjuration aren't going to be leveling as much per level since we aren't going to be using them as much. Most of the leveling is going to come from acrobatics, alchemy, light armor, and marksman. And alchemy we have control over. It works out. Our speed is starting high, and should get to 100 pretty quickly. You could also replace one of the skills with sneak, so that it starts out higher.

[fknm]

Practice is different from increasingly obnoxious grind. In order to complete Oblivion at all, I have to ignore that level up message entirely, only leveling up once to get an item to complete a quest, or I have to waste time training skills obsessively to get decent stat enhancement. Further this is very different because it's a RPG rather than a shooter or platformer, because player skill has next to no impact on the difficulty of the game. The impact is does have is instead based on how easily one understands the system to find the traps in it.

Oblivion has an equal (if not greater) amount of necessary system mastery as 3.5 does.

I have fun practicing games that are hard because of an intentional design choice, as long as the skills needed are reasonable. Games like Oblivion and Kaizo Mario World do not fall under that definition.
Player skill has no impact on the difficulty of an RPG? Maybe on console RPGs and the ludicrously easy crap that the PC has gotten for the last several years, but go back and play Wizardry 4 and see if your song changes.

Comparing Oblivion to Kaizo Mario World is absurd. Oblivion is ****-easy, even if played "as designed".

[DabblerWizard]

I never really had an issue with Fallout 3 as described.

The first character I created worked out great, and all I did was enhance skills that I thought were interesting and sensible. I didn't look up builds or any such silliness. Sure yao-guai were tough, but then again, they're also super mutated bears on steroids. I would have expected nothing less. It's good to have an enemy or two that makes you terrified, using up far more ammo than you'd prefer, especially in a game like Fallout 3.

If anything, Fallout 3 failed to continue leveling up the enemies as time went on. By level 30, in very hard mode, with Broken Steel, almost all the enemies could be killed all too easily.

[Tengu_temp]

My experience with Oblivion:
It starts very easy. As the game progresses and enemies start to scale, you need to buy good spells from the guilds to catch up, and make sure to kill bandits and take their stuff. You do not want to go to Kvatch and see elemental Deadras while you're still with mid-game equipment, like I did. Once you get access to glass/Daedric weapons and armor, the game becomes very easy again.

My experience with Fallout 3:
Early game is hardest, especially if you wander into the wrong places, like the ant nest while your only weapon is the pistol. Hardest doesn't mean hard, however - this game is stupidly easy. As a challenge game I played an unarmored martial artist on hard difficulty, and I died very rarely and from my own fault, usually from running around with very low HP instead of using a few stimpacks (this game showers you with them) to heal myself.

[Mman497]

I might put it in but I'm probably going to have to install the UOP before hand.

When you say the UOP do you mean the Unofficial Oblivion Patch? Because that is compatible with everything.

The best way to counter the level scaling is through OOO or FCOM (http://devnull.sweetdanger.net/convergence.html). The best way to fix the leveling is to use a level mod like nGCD (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14065) or KCAS (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1888). With a proper load order, FCOM shouldn't interfere with mods.

Oblivion gets much better with added mods; right now I'm running 58 mods that don't interfere. This spreadsheet (http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pb7X4kMdvelbqrwmeFgmsEA&gid=0) should help you arrange mods with the use of Wrye Bash (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22368).

Other advice would be to look around UESP and the TES official forums.

[Triaxx]

Also both TESNexus and it's forums.

[Oslecamo]

using a few stimpacks (this game showers you with them) to heal myself.

Well in vanilla Oblivion you can kinda to that as well. The whole countryside is filled with ingredients, it's just a matter of patience and you can get as much healing potions you want.

But yes Fallout 3 still pretty easy because the enemies don't level up and hardly use items themselves. Oblivion monsters at least used spells and special powers.

[Zeful]

That is how I go through building my characters. Just follow a similar process for your characters (any style).

Going back to this because I just now only realized that I didn't understand you. What is your process for choosing major skills? Because the skill set up you gave and your running monologue don't match up. You wanted to be fast and agile, so you put every speed skill as major skills, but only one agility skill. You're not using Destruction or Conjuration much but they're major skills. Was this decision to balance the selection of Alchemy as a major skill?

[Cespenar]

People have already said similar stuff, but I really need to reiterate:

You don't play Bethesda games without mods.

[Mtg_player_zach]

Going back to this because I just now only realized that I didn't understand you. What is your process for choosing major skills? Because the skill set up you gave and your running monologue don't match up. You wanted to be fast and agile, so you put every speed skill as major skills, but only one agility skill. You're not using Destruction or Conjuration much but they're major skills. Was this decision to balance the selection of Alchemy as a major skill?


Looking back I would probably replace destruction with sneak, but I chose them because they would be slow to level and they would start higher as a major skill (starts at 25+ bonuses) that way they would be useful without needing to grind at all. And yeah, the faster skills in our major skills list I exampled were the speed and agility ones, that would ultimately result in higher bonuses for your attributes (not perfect but enough not to get owned).

Hope that was pretty clear.

[shadow_archmagi]

First Fallout 3 Character wandered around with a laser rifle, a fedora, sunglasses, and a sweater. (Casual Spring, I think. +1 AGI)

Beat the game with no difficulty whatsoever.

[Tengu_temp]

People have already said similar stuff, but I really need to reiterate:

You don't play Bethesda games without mods.

I disagree. Mods can enrich those games, but they won't turn them into a completely new experience - if you didn't like Oblivion/Fallout 3 without mods, then you won't like it no matter how many mods you use.

[factotum]

First Fallout 3 Character wandered around with a laser rifle, a fedora, sunglasses, and a sweater. (Casual Spring, I think. +1 AGI)

Beat the game with no difficulty whatsoever.

It's arguable Fallout 3 was a tad too easy, but that's Bethsoft all through...if they get a lot of complaints about a particular feature in one of their games they usually overcorrect so massively in the next one that it becomes a problem in the other direction! See Daggerfall, where magic made you godly, and compare to the magic system in Morrowind for an example.

[Cespenar]

I disagree. Mods can enrich those games, but they won't turn them into a completely new experience - if you didn't like Oblivion/Fallout 3 without mods, then you won't like it no matter how many mods you use.

I'm not talking about a completely new experience (Though I'm sure there are mods for that too). I'm talking about Bethesda making about %70-80 of the game before publishing it and the modding community practically completing the game.

Though I can't dispute that mods would make people who dislike the games change their minds, those on the edge can very well be persuaded, and those who like the games would have an overall better gaming experience.

[Triaxx]

I disagree. Mods can enrich those games, but they won't turn them into a completely new experience - if you didn't like Oblivion/Fallout 3 without mods, then you won't like it no matter how many mods you use.

Maybe, maybe not. If the levelling system in Oblivion was your complaint, there are several mods that address it and in such different ways to make it a completely different experience.

[SparkMandriller]

I disagree. Mods can enrich those games, but they won't turn them into a completely new experience - if you didn't like Oblivion/Fallout 3 without mods, then you won't like it no matter how many mods you use.

I dunno, I doubt the people that mod the game to be full of Idolmaster girls or whatever are really getting that much out of the base gameplay.

[Caewil]

It's a hard game, but that just means you have to use better tactics. Charging up front and wailing away at things only works against weak opponents.

For a melee fighter, the most important stats (for me) were the ones that improved movement speed. Kite stuff and avoid getting trapped. Use jumps to dodge shorter opponents. Choose your fights wisely.

Running away like hell often works. (yay speed!)

Alchemy is imba. Don't take it as a primary skill but level it up to full ASAP. It can give amazing regen, fortified stats and health, resistance to damage and poisons that DOT the final boss with one use. Slap on the paralyzing trait so that they can't move while taking damage. I believe there's a potion/poisons guide on the Oblivion Wiki. Oh, you can sell the potions for money as well.

EDIT: That magic is completely broken goes without saying. Major Cheese is to combine Max Frenzy + Max Rally + Invisibility (1 sec). It makes them go insane and randomly attack any targets in sight - except you, because you're invisible! And once they've been counter-attacked by their target, the aggression remains even after the spell wears off. It also generates no aggro. Very useful as an assassin since you can cast it on a target and let the guards kill them.

[Penguinizer]

Now think about how powerful it's in Oblivion. Then realize it was actually nerfed for oblivion.

[Triaxx]

Realize that it's been nerfed twice to reach that level. Once from Daggerfall for Morrowind, then again from Morrowind to Oblivion.

Incidentally, if you're playing a level 1 game, the most effective Summon you can lay your hands on is a Clannfear. Seriously, it's fast and does great damage, and can shred most targets without your intervention.

[factotum]

Realize that it's been nerfed twice to reach that level. Once from Daggerfall for Morrowind, then again from Morrowind to Oblivion.


Er, what? They definitely boosted magic between Morrowind and Oblivion...just the reintroduction of mana that regenerated over time actually made magic possible to use!

[Penguinizer]

We were talking about alchemy.

[Triaxx]

Sorry, edit confusion. Yes, alchemy was definitely nerfed, not that it's stopped us from abusing it.

And magic was still nerfed a bit, but the re-introduction of regenerating mana really helped even it out.

[EleventhHour]

Er, what? They definitely boosted magic between Morrowind and Oblivion...just the reintroduction of mana that regenerated over time actually made magic possible to use!

>.> I think it was a nerf. Morrowind you could cast one spell and destroy Vivic, with Destruction, let alone summoning, Charms, Enrage or any of the other sillier ones. And if that's a nerf down from Daggerfall, I'm a bit afraid.

[xp194]

Not entirely sure if I remember exactly, but here's how Alchemy was broken in Morrowind

You step into Seyda Neen witha newly aquired Mortar and Pestle, and rooting around and shopping, find various herbs to make potions with.

The Effectiveness of these potions is defined, partially at least, by your intelligence score.

You can make potions that boost intelligence temporarily.

Can you see where this is going?

Eventually, you've boosted intelligence so high that your potions aren't so much quick pickmeups and stat boosts so much as trips to Godhood. Not to mention that the completed potion always is more expensive than the sum of its parts, making it very profitable as well...

[Suedars]

People have already said similar stuff, but I really need to reiterate:

You don't play Bethesda games without mods.

Morrowind was quite playable without mods. In fact the only mods I ever really use are BetterBodies, Herbalism, and a homemade mod that gives Dunmer a Magicka boost (which took all of 3 minutes to make).

[Zeful]

Not entirely sure if I remember exactly, but here's how Alchemy was broken in Morrowind

You step into Seyda Neen witha newly aquired Mortar and Pestle, and rooting around and shopping, find various herbs to make potions with.

The Effectiveness of these potions is defined, partially at least, by your intelligence score.

You can make potions that boost intelligence temporarily.

Can you see where this is going?

Eventually, you've boosted intelligence so high that your potions aren't so much quick pickmeups and stat boosts so much as trips to Godhood. Not to mention that the completed potion always is more expensive than the sum of its parts, making it very profitable as well...

Except in Oblivion, there is a hard cap on your Effective skill (which is the combination of varying effects related to any skill) of 100. Once any skill hit an Effective level of 100, that was as good as it got and you could only receive the remaining mastery bonuses by leveling the skill (For example once you hit an Effective Skill level of 100 in Restoration, the spell costs will only decrease when you get the next mastery perk (likely Master, but with efficient Min/Maxing, you could also still need to get the Expert mastery perk). you received no other bonuses to that skill from attribute enhancement or skill advancement). Combined with the fact that you can't make blind potions anymore (you must know the related effect before you can combine them) it requires a Journeyman level of Alchemy to make a Fortify: Intelligence potion. There was no real need to remove Intelligence's effect on Alchemy and disable all but one Fortify: Alchemy effect.


Looking back I would probably replace destruction with sneak, but I chose them because they would be slow to level and they would start higher as a major skill (starts at 25+ bonuses) that way they would be useful without needing to grind at all. And yeah, the faster skills in our major skills list I exampled were the speed and agility ones, that would ultimately result in higher bonuses for your attributes (not perfect but enough not to get owned).

Hope that was pretty clear.
Not really.
It really wasn't relevant to my question. I asked how you actually used your process to choose major skills. Everything in this post confuses me because at this point you seem to be suggesting that pick major skills based on what I want to do, which I've tried, and lead my problem outlined at the beginning of the thread.

[MoelVermillion]

You can make potions that boost intelligence temporarily.


You know you just got me thinking, I'd love to see a lets play or something where the main character got addicted on these things. After a certain point the guy became accustomed to being super smart and he began to get worried that if he reverted back to his old intelligence he'd forget things that he'd figured out or lose a part of himself, for this reason he is now addicted on these potions taking way more then is necessary to make sure he never reverts back to his old intelligence, however he keeps taking them so he keeps getting smarter so he has to take more to make sure his new intelligence doesn't drop getting him ultimately leaving him broken and paranoid that if he stops drinking these things even for a few seconds he'll lose everything!

But more on topic I understand your pain OP, I'm not a fan of scaling enemies, they're a little better if it just drops more powerful enemies in an area when you level up rather then levelling the pre-existing ones but even so. If my adventurer can kill stuff around the starting town at first level when he can now drop meteors and summon hellfire at will I damn well expect him to be more effective against the stuff around the starting town.

[warty goblin]

But more on topic I understand your pain OP, I'm not a fan of scaling enemies, they're a little better if it just drops more powerful enemies in an area when you level up rather then levelling the pre-existing ones but even so. If my adventurer can kill stuff around the starting town at first level when he can now drop meteors and summon hellfire at will I damn well expect him to be more effective against the stuff around the starting town.

Oblivion doesn't have a starting town.

As I point out every single time this issue comes up, pretty much every RPG ever has scaling enemies. Most however, being linear (or very sparse graph) sequences of maps, simply have higher level enemies occur later in the game. Note that not infrequently the capabilities of these enemies are still tied to player level - I'm fairly sure that Dragon Age auto-levels enemies - but either way the scaling is still there.

Oblivion, being genuinely open world, can't get away with that. If the enemies don't auto-level with you, you end up making an essentially linear traversal of the geographies that don't contain enemies way, way above your level, which sort of misses the point of being open world.

Anyway, leveling enemies, particularly in open world games, don't bother me. I'd rather have the freedom of exploration and consistent challenge than the adolescent power fantasy of dominating trivial enemies who used to challenge me. One can keep me playing for hundreds of hours, the other gets boring in about fifteen minutes.

[MachineWraith]

Off-topic: I've never had problems playing either game, but I figured smoother leveling would be nice, so I downloaded nGCD. Now I can't seem to level in any way, shape or form. Level won't go up, and neither will my attributes. Help?

On-topic: Like I said, never really had much trouble with either game. My first Oblivion character was a sneaky wood-elf vampire assassin. Used lots of custom-enchanted arrows and bows, with nasty poisons thrown in wherever necessary. Armor and clothing being custom enchanted with 5-15% Chameleon, totaling to over 100%, made things pretty easy, too.

In Fallout, I've had the exact opposite experience of the OP with VATS. VATS made the game disgustingly easy. My character was built around stealth, energy weapons, and small guns. Sniper headshots for days, and once I got the Grim Reaper perk, it didn't even matter how many enemies there were.

[Terry576]

Off-topic: I've never had problems playing either game, but I figured smoother leveling would be nice, so I downloaded nGCD. Now I can't seem to level in any way, shape or form. Level won't go up, and neither will my attributes. Help?

How many mods do you have running?

Toss us your full list and we'll see what we can do.

I had to clean install Oblivion to fix the fact that one of my mods {I unno which one} caused half the items in game to become invisible.

It made these things called "Worn (Item Name)" If they were armor, and killed all the barrels, chests, and sacks in the game.

I think that might've been OOO's trap mod though. :smallannoyed:

[SparkMandriller]

Oblivion, being genuinely open world, can't get away with that. If the enemies don't auto-level with you, you end up making an essentially linear traversal of the geographies that don't contain enemies way, way above your level, which sort of misses the point of being open world.

But on the other hand, if everything is scaled exactly to your level, there's still no point being open world, because everything is the same. In Morrowind if you poked around in a tomb you could find nothing, or you could find a clan of vampires who'd murder you, but who also had one of the only three pairs of daedric greaves in the game. In Oblivion, what's the point checking things out? They'll have exactly the same enemies as everywhere else, and exactly the same items as everywhere else. Gets boring, yo.

And that whole completing the game at level 2 or finding bandits with glass armour thing is just stupid, too. I don't think I've ever obtained a full set of daedric armour in Morrowind, but some dumb bandit in Oblivion has? And all his friends have too? S'crazy.

[Penguinizer]

The reason you haven't gotten full daedric in Morrowind is that it's practically impossible. Some of the pieces are on friendly NPCs.

[Ellye]

Is there any way to have fun playing Oblivion while still being competent or should I simply uninstall it and let it gather dust until the heat-death of the universe?Oblivion was a terrible designed game. It has this absurdly counter-intuitive never-playtested leveling system, boring combat, terribly done enemy scaling....
I have no freaking idea how did this game made any success at all. It was one of the worst pieces of software I've ever came across, and I've played a lot of crap.

Still, if you really want to try that game, use the OOO Mod. It fixes a lot of the issues that the developers should have fixed themselves and makes the game almost bearable.

[SparkMandriller]

The reason you haven't gotten full daedric in Morrowind is that it's practically impossible. Some of the pieces are on friendly NPCs.

There's a full set if you've got both expansions.

[factotum]

The Effectiveness of these potions is defined, partially at least, by your intelligence score.

You can make potions that boost intelligence temporarily.


I'm pretty sure they put a hard cap of 100 on Intelligence boosts in one of the patches. Didn't stop you raising your Int to insane levels, of course, you just had to drink a lot more potions to do it!

[Zeful]

When you say the UOP do you mean the Unofficial Oblivion Patch? Because that is compatible with everything.Actually, now that I've installed it, my game crashes when ever I quit (:smallconfused::smalltongue:), It's apparently interfering with my companion mod.

[Terry576]

Actually, now that I've installed it, my game crashes when ever I quit (:smallconfused::smalltongue:), It's apparently interfering with my companion mod.

Get Easy Companion Share. It fixes that issue.

Can we change the title? This became "Oblivion: Rants and Mods".

[Zeful]

Get Easy Companion Share. It fixes that issue.

Can we change the title? This became "Oblivion: Rants and Mods".

I have Easy Companion Share (it came with the mod). When the mod was enabled, It caused the game to crash when ever I quit.

Huh: It's apparently the companions themselves causing the problem. That's unfortunate.

[Hubert]

Hello everyone.

I'd like to give my opinion Oblivion.

For my first five (or so) plays, I had the same problems as the OP: the very beginning of the game (lvl 1-5) was quite easy and entertaining. But soon, the enemies scaled up and each of the (numerous) battles I had to fought was more and more a chore. I don't think that my character builds were that bad, but it seems that my gameplay was simply not adapted to this game.

I gave up then retried some times without progressing much, until I found the right (for me at least :smallsmile:) combination of mods:

Oblivion Oscuro Overhaul, the well known megamod. This mod has the advantage of being quite customizable, and gets rid of the "scalable world". Now the enemies scale up with you, but only in a certain range. Moreover, the level of the enemies is also dependent of the area, so there are low-level, medium-level and high-level areas.

Less Annoying Magic Experience (LAME). This mod changes a lot of things about the magic in the game. Mostly:
* The duration of buff spells is extended. No more protection spells that last only 10 seconds.
* The summoned monsters are buffed and can now be actually more than just meat shields.
* The effect of numerous purchasable spells are buffed. If a journeyman level in destruction allows to cast a X-points fire damage spell, buying a (X-10)-points fire damage spell that also requires journeyman level in destruction is a bit pointless.

With these two mods, I can at least enjoy the game. I can get hard fights (and cool loot) if I want to, but I also have medium-level areas to play with my new swords and spells when I become a bit lazy. :smallbiggrin:

[Level8Mudcrab]

I dislike Oblivion's scaling system, gets so annoying. I much prefered Morrowind.

Once I did the tutorial area on hardest difficulty. Since I wasn't at the stage where I picked my skills yet they were all really low. This combined to how powerful the enemies were made it a very unpleasent experience, rats were difficult to fight and their jump attack took off nearly half my health.

I also remember one of my games where I didn't do the dark brotherhood quests until around levels 20-25ish. That orc in the Cheydinhal Sanctuary was equipped with mostly deadric armour with a little ebony. Not sure how that's gonna work with the whole stealth thing.

Still a good game though and there are some really nice mods. Anyone played the lost spires?

[Triaxx]

Zeful: Not totally correct. Both Athletics and Acrobatics function past the 100 point barrier.

@Scaling: I don't disagree that it's everywhere. I don't disagree that it was badly implemented.

Rats at level 1? Fine. Daedric monstrosities at level 20? Okay. Guards that are capable of crushing me at any level not doing anything about them at any level? Not fine. I don't know about anyone else, but if I have ravening hordes wandering around outside my city, I'm going to send the guards out to mow down some of them.

I much prefer scaling zones. Weak enemies around the cities, and along the patrolled roads, and stronger ones the further from the roads you get.

Yes, I do know there's a mod for that, I know it's not OOO, but I don't recall the name.

And the armor is the joke about the orc, he doesn't bother sneaking, just runs in and kills.

[Arcanoi]

And the armor is the joke about the orc, he doesn't bother sneaking, just runs in and kills.

He's also a brick wall. If you level up too much before going after him, you'll need to lower the difficulty to beat him, or he will crush you.

[Avilan the Grey]

I know it has already been stated in this thread, but the key to Oblivion is to pick the skills you use ALL THE TIME as MINOR skills. Otherwise the game outlevels you.

Regarding FO3 however the problem is that after level 5-7 depending on build, it gets way too easy on Normal. And that comes from a guy that can't handle ME2 on "Veteran" without constant re-loading.

[MachineWraith]

He's also a brick wall. If you level up too much before going after him, you'll need to lower the difficulty to beat him, or he will crush you.

Actually, if you haven't alerted anyone yet, you can steal the apples at the dinner table and replace them with poisoned apples and kill a few people that way. I got lucky enough with my level 17 assassin to have the orc eat one. Made things much easier :)


How many mods do you have running?

Toss us your full list and we'll see what we can do.

I had to clean install Oblivion to fix the fact that one of my mods {I unno which one} caused half the items in game to become invisible.

It made these things called "Worn (Item Name)" If they were armor, and killed all the barrels, chests, and sacks in the game.

I think that might've been OOO's trap mod though. :smallannoyed:

Better Imperfect Water
Book Jackets DLC
DLC Frostcrag + Unofficial Patch
DLC Horse Armor + Unofficial Patch
DLC Mehrunes Razor + Unofficial Patch
DLC Orrery + Unofficial Patch
DLC Shivering Isles
DLC Spell Tomes + Unofficial Patch
DLC Thieves Den + Unofficial Patch
DLC Vile Lair + Unofficial Patch
Extended Death Camera
House Map Markers (only bought)
Immediate Character Generation
Knights + Unofficial Patch
Male Body Replacer v4
Natural Habitat by Max Tael
Natural Vegetation by Max Tael
Natural Weather HDR 2.1.2 (bugfree)
nGCD Birthsigns
nGCD Oghma Infinium
nGCD Skeleton Key
nGCD
Quest Award Leveling - Finger of the Mountain
Quest Award Leveler - Knights of the Nine
Quest Award Leveler - Mehrunes Razor
Quest Award Leveler - Vile Lair
Quest Award Leveler
Reneer's Guard Overhaul + Shivering Isles
Slof's Clouded Leopard
Slof's Horses Essential
Slof's Playable Xivilai
Spell Icon Replacer
Sunken Ships
Symphony of Violence
The Lost Spires
UOP
UOP Vampire Aging + Face Fix
Update My Statue
Vanity Camera Smoother
Wyrmfang

[AeonWarior]

Off-topic: I've never had problems playing either game, but I figured smoother leveling would be nice, so I downloaded nGCD. Now I can't seem to level in any way, shape or form. Level won't go up, and neither will my attributes. Help?

that is part of how nGCD works, as your skills increase the stats associated with those skill increase with it passively. Your level is the same way it increases to mach your total skill values passively and invisibly, once in a while check your stats page on the tab menu and you'll notice your level is higher then when you last checked it. You just get..... better

if that doesn't help I'm not sure then but this is how the mod worked for me.

debugging is fun. though I understand that there will always be problems, its like taxes it'll always be there. My oblivion is far from stable.

[MachineWraith]

I wanted to test how it worked, so I afk-sneak'd into a wall for an hour. Came back, sneak was at like 60+, up from 25, but not a single stat or level increase.

EDIT: Also, magicka doesn't recharge. At all. Ever. I made a Breton with a custom mage class, Apprentice birthsign with sky-high willpower and intelligence, and my magicka wouldn't recharge at all. It was like the game thought I chose Atronach or something.

[Starbuck_II]

Rats at level 1? Fine. Daedric monstrosities at level 20? Okay. Guards that are capable of crushing me at any level not doing anything about them at any level? Not fine. I don't know about anyone else, but if I have ravening hordes wandering around outside my city, I'm going to send the guards out to mow down some of them.


Wait, you couldn't kill the guards?
I killed them at level 1, level 5, level 10, and even level 15. I haven't tried to kill them lately but I'm positive I could beat them.
Granted killing imperial guards gave me a huge bounty (5000 gp and that was paying the thieves to pay it in 1/2 the amount). But I got nice gear (starting gear sucked).

Red Guards are just an awesome race I guess.

[Penguinizer]

There's a full set if you've got both expansions.

I was referring to vanilla. There's a full set of it, but you have to kill a plot important character for it. There's also a way to get it without killing him but it's tricky.

[nooblade]

Anyway, leveling enemies, particularly in open world games, don't bother me. I'd rather have the freedom of exploration and consistent challenge than the adolescent power fantasy of dominating trivial enemies who used to challenge me. One can keep me playing for hundreds of hours, the other gets boring in about fifteen minutes.


But on the other hand, if everything is scaled exactly to your level, there's still no point being open world, because everything is the same. In Morrowind if you poked around in a tomb you could find nothing, or you could find a clan of vampires who'd murder you, but who also had one of the only three pairs of daedric greaves in the game. In Oblivion, what's the point checking things out? They'll have exactly the same enemies as everywhere else, and exactly the same items as everywhere else. Gets boring, yo.

Bethesda games don't do this very well at all, but I think these two opinions (weaker enemies are boring, certain forced enemies are boring) show that there's something to be gained by NOT making the player go from wimp to titan through RPG leveling progression. Even the weaker enemies should cost you something in ammo, potions, magic, stamina, or hp. If you're going to spend development time to make a unique and interesting thing, then it's stupid design to force it into a small niche.

[warty goblin]

But on the other hand, if everything is scaled exactly to your level, there's still no point being open world, because everything is the same. In Morrowind if you poked around in a tomb you could find nothing, or you could find a clan of vampires who'd murder you, but who also had one of the only three pairs of daedric greaves in the game. In Oblivion, what's the point checking things out? They'll have exactly the same enemies as everywhere else, and exactly the same items as everywhere else. Gets boring, yo.

No, not everything is the same. It just means that there is no arbitrary increase in enemy power levels based on geography. Most open world games don't have any - or extremely minimal - level-up mechanics, and they still work fine. Why? Because they give me a variety of things to do which are compelling either for story reasons, or because the basic gameplay is enjoyable.


And that whole completing the game at level 2 or finding bandits with glass armour thing is just stupid, too. I don't think I've ever obtained a full set of daedric armour in Morrowind, but some dumb bandit in Oblivion has? And all his friends have too? S'crazy.
It's no stupider than the dozens of other blatant idiocies that every other RPG on the planet gets away with without anybody batting an eye. It might not be to your taste, but it makes about as much sense as perfectly functioning traps hundreds of years old, 90% of the population being some sort of armed robber, every fight being to the death, and the possibility of a person running around with eight hundred pounds of gear and multiple arrows sticking out of them yet still killing everybody in sight. All of these things are essentially ignored, because they make for better gameplay, despite making absolutely no sense.


Bethesda games don't do this very well at all, but I think these two opinions (weaker enemies are boring, certain forced enemies are boring) show that there's something to be gained by NOT making the player go from wimp to titan through RPG leveling progression. Even the weaker enemies should cost you something in ammo, potions, magic, stamina, or hp. If you're going to spend development time to make a unique and interesting thing, then it's stupid design to force it into a small niche.
This is more or less my opinion as well, but then I've more or less reached the opinion that RPG mechanics when used in anything but strict moderation are more or less an intellectually bankrupt Pavlovian dead ends - ones that can be quite enjoyable, but nothing more.

And really, when it comes to open world design, I'm not sure that it gets much better than STALKER's take on it.

[Garland]

I don't know, I played the game with OOO and some cosmetic mods (i wish I had known about that "LAME" mod then), on normal difficulty, and I even played the way the designers "intended" (that is, putting the skills you actually wanted to use as major skills), which I knew was less efficient, and I never had much trouble in the game.

Only enemies who were really hard that I remember, were Mankar Camoran and the current Umbra. Yet still, I had fun in these fights, running away from Umbra and kiting her through environment hazards, guards and other things to wear her down.

Maybe I'll play it again someday, with some crazy custom character class.

[factotum]

All of these things are essentially ignored, because they make for better gameplay, despite making absolutely no sense.


The critical difference there is that the level scaling as implemented in Oblivion did NOT make for better gameplay, because it was so blatant it killed your suspension of disbelief stone dead. As for open world games without level scaling--Might and Magic VI didn't have it, AFAIK, and it was still all kinds of awesome. Yes, if you went to Dragonsand at level 1 you'd die right sharpish, but it was a believable way of making you avoid that area until you were tough enough to handle it. If Bethesda had written that game they'd probably have made it so the famed Dragonsand only had geckos in it if you went there at level 1!

[SparkMandriller]

No, not everything is the same. It just means that there is no arbitrary increase in enemy power levels based on geography.

I dunno dude. You go to one side of the map, you'll find some scaled monsters and some scaled items. You go to the other side, pretty much the same thing. Maybe you'll find an ancient ruin or something, and it'll be full of scaled monsters and items, just like every other one. Kinda boring.


It's no stupider than the dozens of other blatant idiocies that every other RPG on the planet gets away with without anybody batting an eye.

Cool non argument bro.

[Triaxx]

Wait, you couldn't kill the guards?
I killed them at level 1, level 5, level 10, and even level 15. I haven't tried to kill them lately but I'm positive I could beat them.
Granted killing imperial guards gave me a huge bounty (5000 gp and that was paying the thieves to pay it in 1/2 the amount). But I got nice gear (starting gear sucked).

Red Guards are just an awesome race I guess.

Yeah, I could kill the guards, but not straight on, and since they're always five levels stronger than you, I think they should be able to handle some of the monsters.

[xp194]

They will assist if you are attacked, at least by NPCs. one of the easier ways to get someone's stuff is to goad them into attacking you, then running past a guard, who will intervene.

[Caewil]

Or cast frenzy + rally and make them attack a guard themselves.

[Zeful]

Actually, now that I've installed it, my game crashes when ever I quit (:smallconfused::smalltongue:), It's apparently interfering with my companion mod.

Update: Apparently the Unofficial Oblivion Patch was designed to run in Wyre Bash rather than as an indipendant plugin :smallsigh: so it's interfering with all of my mods.

[Penguinizer]

It really works in Morrowind. The normal wildlife is hardly dangerous, but even for higher level-ish characters, the daedric ruins can still be dangerous. It just feels immersive.

[Triaxx]

That would explain the problem. They got informed that the outdoors are too easy and dungeons too hard, and in typical fashion, went way too far the other way.

Which means TES V will either be perfect, or so rage inducingly bad that gamers will descend en masse on Bethesda, rip the building from it's foundations through sheer Cheeto and Red Bull fueled rage, and throw it into the sea.

[Terry576]

That would explain the problem. They got informed that the outdoors are too easy and dungeons too hard, and in typical fashion, went way too far the other way.

Which means TES V will either be perfect, or so rage inducingly bad that gamers will descend en masse on Bethesda, rip the building from it's foundations through sheer Cheeto and Red Bull fueled rage, and throw it into the sea.

And we will either sing praises of the glory, or warn future companies of the horrific ending of Bethesda, as to send them a message:

Don't $#@! with us.

[Domochevsky]

And we will either sing praises of the glory, or warn future companies of the horrific ending of Bethesda, as to send them a message:

Don't $#@! with us.

Clearly this must be the fault of these darn pirates. :smallcool:

[fknm]

Nah, what'll happen is Bethesda will say "we've learned from the mistakes of our previous games which, naturally, were perfect even though we're now claiming we made mistakes", then they'll dumb it down even more, and the mainstream gaming press will eat it up, and it'll sell millions of copies to most gamers while a few of us curmudgeonly types will grumble about how they don't make them like they used to.

[Khosan]

...they don't make them like they used to.

We can only hope.

[Avilan the Grey]

Nah, what'll happen is Bethesda will say "we've learned from the mistakes of our previous games which, naturally, were perfect even though we're now claiming we made mistakes", then they'll dumb it down even more, and the mainstream gaming press will eat it up, and it'll sell millions of copies to most gamers while a few of us curmudgeonly types will grumble about how they don't make them like they used to.

Dumbed down compared to what? I have not noticed anything Bethesda-made being "dumbed down" at all?

And I prefer mainstream gaming press, at least they tend to be honest and not have strange hatreds towards specific genres or companies (or platforms).

[Zeful]

Dumbed down compared to what? I have not noticed anything Bethesda-made being "dumbed down" at all?

And I prefer mainstream gaming press, at least they tend to be honest and not have strange hatreds towards specific genres or companies (or platforms).

I think it has to do with the change to the interface, journal (you had a ubiquitous arrow that showed every quest objective on both), the removal of certain skills/options (Spears, Unarmored Combat, Throwing weapons), the emphasis on player-skill-based minigames rather than random chance (Speech-craft is easy once you figure out the two patterns you need for victory, and Security's rule of 3 (most lock difficulties required roughly three bumps to a tumbler to get it to the "right spot" to lock it in)).

Or rather these are complaints that people that liked Morrowind keep saying but, meh, I've never played it, and I'm not really all that interested to.

[factotum]

Dumbed down compared to what? I have not noticed anything Bethesda-made being "dumbed down" at all?


Compared to their previous games? They seem to reduce the number of skills available in each iteration, and also the number of ways to get around--for instance, they had Climbing in Daggerfall, which disappeared in Morrowind to be replaced by Levitation, and then that went in Oblivion. (Probably because you'd have been able to fly over the walls of the Imperial City and find that everything inside was in a separate cell and there'd be no-one there...another slight annoyance, actually, considering Morrowind towns and cities were totally integrated with the overworld map).

[Zeful]

Compared to their previous games? They seem to reduce the number of skills available in each iteration, and also the number of ways to get around--for instance, they had Climbing in Daggerfall, which disappeared in Morrowind to be replaced by Levitation, and then that went in Oblivion. (Probably because you'd have been able to fly over the walls of the Imperial City and find that everything inside was in a separate cell and there'd be no-one there...another slight annoyance, actually, considering Morrowind towns and cities were totally integrated with the overworld map).

Can you give a breakdown of Skill/Attribute distribution? Because I think that much of the issue was that certain stats were more or less ubiquitous no matter which character you played..

[Avilan the Grey]

Compared to their previous games? They seem to reduce the number of skills available in each iteration, and also the number of ways to get around--for instance, they had Climbing in Daggerfall, which disappeared in Morrowind to be replaced by Levitation, and then that went in Oblivion. (Probably because you'd have been able to fly over the walls of the Imperial City and find that everything inside was in a separate cell and there'd be no-one there...another slight annoyance, actually, considering Morrowind towns and cities were totally integrated with the overworld map).

It all depends on perspective I think; I have always felt that they tend to have too many useless skills to begin with compared to other cRPGs (I always got the feeling that they went down a random skill list from a random table top RPG and just copied it, without real thought if this was a good idea or not). The loss of Climb and or Levitate for example, is not something I have even noticed.

[Triaxx]

You're closer than you know. Appearently The Elder Scrolls is based off of... a DnD game the creators were playing. Thus the blessings of Talos and Mystara that are upon ye.

[dsmiles]

A little off-topic, but has anyone else had a problem with the Natural Weather mod turning their sky fuchsia?

Also, can somebody help me get the HGEC bodies working, I installed it according to the directions, and BAM! Nothing.

[Arcanoi]

(WHILE I WOULD NOT KNOW ABOUT SUCH THINGS, YOU FILTHY PERVERT) You should probably use OBMM for any mods that are OBMM compatible. It makes things easier.

[dsmiles]

(WHILE I WOULD NOT KNOW ABOUT SUCH THINGS, YOU FILTHY PERVERT) You should probably use OBMM for any mods that are OBMM compatible. It makes things easier.

Who says I'm a pervert? I'm just taking suggestions off the Steam Oblivion forum to make it more realistic. (Granted, the fuchsia sky kinda throws it off a little...And yes, it's really that color.)
I installed the natural weather in it's omod format, and BAM! You see? Fuchsia. the "natural weather" (fog, rain, etc.) is there but my sky is the color of a prom dress! I'm tempted to just deactivate that mod.

[Arcanoi]

HGEC bodies

More realistic, huh? :smallwink:

Also, I think Natural Weather needs both Wrye Bash and OBSE. Do you have those?

[dsmiles]

That's what they say. Any clues on the sky, though? I have the same question open on several different forums, and nobody has the same problem.

[Ranielle]

If you're using more than a few mods, Wyre Bash is a must. That tool is better than the game itself.

[SparkMandriller]

A little off-topic, but has anyone else had a problem with the Natural Weather mod turning their sky fuchsia?

I think we're gonna need screenshots of this.

[dsmiles]

If you're using more than a few mods, Wyre Bash is a must. That tool is better than the game itself.

Wyre Bash, eh? I'll try it, but it may be above my skill points in Knowledge: Computers and Information Technology.

I'll try to get some screenshots, but again, this may be above my level. Every time I try to take a screen shot, I manage to get a picture of "not what I was looking at." Consider my knowledge base to be somewhere between Average User and Knows Enough to be Dangerous to Myself (but Not Enough to be Useful).

[Khosan]

(WHILE I WOULD NOT KNOW ABOUT SUCH THINGS, YOU FILTHY PERVERT) You should probably use OBMM for any mods that are OBMM compatible. It makes things easier.

On a semi-related note, for the love of all that is holy, don't turn off the content filter when browsing TES Nexus.

They're everywhere.

[dsmiles]

Also, I think Natural Weather needs both Wrye Bash and OBSE. Do you have those?

The mod didn't say that those were needed, just obmm. I'll give it a try, and see if I still have sky (in Technicolor!).

[Triaxx]

Really? There's anything that bad on Nexus?

[dsmiles]

Please tell me that was sarcasm.

[Khosan]

Really? There's anything that bad on Nexus?

It's not so much that it's incredibly depraved, it's just the sheer quantity.

[dsmiles]

It's not so much that it's incredibly depraved, it's just the sheer quantity.

Although there is some (not-so-incredibly) depraved stuff on there, depending on your definition of "depraved."

[SparkMandriller]

I'll try to get some screenshots, but again, this may be above my level. Every time I try to take a screen shot, I manage to get a picture of "not what I was looking at." Consider my knowledge base to be somewhere between Average User and Knows Enough to be Dangerous to Myself (but Not Enough to be Useful).

Start game.
Press printscreen key.
Exit game and start MS Paint.
Press ctrl+v or go edit>paste.
Save file as .jpeg.
Go to http://imageshack.us/ and upload the file, then paste the link here.

I think Oblivion can save its own screenshots, but according to the internet you need to edit one of the .inis for that, so maybe we should just stick to paint for now.

[dsmiles]

Thanks. I'll see if I still have sky when I go home today.

[Avilan the Grey]

It's not so much that it's incredibly depraved, it's just the sheer quantity.

...And? Nothing there that's worth noting, really.
Since I am an adult, I never filter searches on anything.

[dsmiles]

...And? Nothing there that's worth noting, really.
Since I am an adult, I never filter searches on anything.

That may be a problem if you run a slower connection...your search will never end! :smallbiggrin:

[Triaxx]

No, not sarcastic at all.

[MachineWraith]

After trying to figure out what's wrong, I've basically said "Screw it."

I'm just going to uninstall, delete all my mods/saves, reinstall, and then be very, very careful about what mods I add. I'll do what I should've done in the first place, and test each mod in OBMM and in game before playing with it.

It will be a long, painstaking process, but hopefully it will have a good result.

On that note - Any recommendations for good mods?

[Terry576]

After trying to figure out what's wrong, I've basically said "Screw it."

I'm just going to uninstall, delete all my mods/saves, reinstall, and then be very, very careful about what mods I add. I'll do what I should've done in the first place, and test each mod in OBMM and in game before playing with it.

It will be a long, painstaking process, but hopefully it will have a good result.

On that note - Any recommendations for good mods?

FCOM Convergence allows you to run Francesco's, OOO, MMM, and WarCry all at once.

And with a clean install, it should be relatively easy to run.

[warty goblin]

...And? Nothing there that's worth noting, really.
Since I am an adult, I never filter searches on anything.

It does tend to vary honestly. Unless you really look it's mostly just nude mods covering a range of improbable boob sizes, and your basic fetish wear. If one actively looks for such content however it gets a bit more raunchy, and ends at hardcore fully animated sex mods and poses for some out there sorts of fetishes - I wasn't even aware that girl on zombie was a thing people thought about until one unhappy day on TESNexus.

And then occasionally something oozes over from the Japanese community, which tends to dissolve the viewer's brain.

[Hubert]

On that note - Any recommendations for good mods?

If you will play a magic-oriented character, I advise the use of "Less Annoying Magic Experience" (LAME). As it says, it makes the game a lot less frustrating for a mage.

I also use the "Always Plus 5 Modifier" mod. It may be considered a cheat, but it allows to level up as you play, without carefully planning your skills upgrades.

[Avilan the Grey]

It does tend to vary honestly. Unless you really look it's mostly just nude mods covering a range of improbable boob sizes, and your basic fetish wear. If one actively looks for such content however it gets a bit more raunchy, and ends at hardcore fully animated sex mods and poses for some out there sorts of fetishes - I wasn't even aware that girl on zombie was a thing people thought about until one unhappy day on TESNexus.

And then occasionally something oozes over from the Japanese community, which tends to dissolve the viewer's brain.

Rule 34. Always remember Rule 34.

Other than that... I guess TOS nexus is older than FO3 Nexus (which probably increases the amount of nude mods etc exponentially), but on FO3 Nexus I tend to just go through the top 100 list and Files of the week etc, unless I am specifically looking for something and then I have pretty strong Search-Fu. You really only find the worst stuff if you either look for it specifically, or just blindly click away.

[dsmiles]

Ok. The sky of another color is gone, and HGEC is working. De-installed and re-installed the offending mods, and everything is fine now. Thanks for the help (and I didn't try Wyre Bash, I'm not even sure what that would do to my current setup).

[Triaxx]

It does tend to vary honestly. Unless you really look it's mostly just nude mods covering a range of improbable boob sizes, and your basic fetish wear. If one actively looks for such content however it gets a bit more raunchy, and ends at hardcore fully animated sex mods and poses for some out there sorts of fetishes - I wasn't even aware that girl on zombie was a thing people thought about until one unhappy day on TESNexus.

And then occasionally something oozes over from the Japanese community, which tends to dissolve the viewer's brain.

Never wandered into All Things Alchemical did you?

Truthfully I was not shocked at all by the stuff on there. I was impressed by the imagination and the script work though.

[Mystic Muse]

I have a question. I've been into an oblivion gate or two and I was wondering something. A wikipedia for the game says that there's only seven different random oblivion realms. Does this mean for the 90 gates there are the creatures and items are different even if you go to the same realm or is it seven and you're done. No more treasure no more nothing?

[Zeful]

I have a question. I've been into an oblivion gate or two and I was wondering something. A wikipedia for the game says that there's only seven different random oblivion realms. Does this mean for the 90 gates there are the creatures and items are different even if you go to the same realm or is it seven and you're done. No more treasure no more nothing?

The first. Each gate randomly selects one of the 7 worlds, and then populates it as normal using monster and chest locations of the world.

[Mystic Muse]

The first. Each gate randomly selects one of the 7 worlds, and then populates it as normal using monster and chest locations of the world.

Thank you.

[Maeglin_Dubh]

UOP and OOO.

It looks like those two alone should make the game playable. What hoops do I have to jump through to make this work?

[Zeful]

ARGAFARBLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Stupid Clannfears (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Daedra#Clannfears). How on earth are you supposed to deal with an enemy that's faster than you and hits you for 20% of your health with each strike, with armor.

[Mystic Muse]

Have one yourself? That's what I did. Being a Conjurer might not fit your character though and level grinding for conjuration is pretty boring.

[Zeful]

Have one yourself? That's what I did. Being a Conjurer might not fit your character though and level grinding for conjuration is pretty boring.

I'm following someone else's suggestion for character build, conjuration's a major skill (and I haven't really been using it). And Clannfears are the only creature that can do kill me reliably, everything else lacks the speed to catch up when I'm shooting.

[warty goblin]

ARGAFARBLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Stupid Clannfears (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Daedra#Clannfears). How on earth are you supposed to deal with an enemy that's faster than you and hits you for 20% of your health with each strike, with armor.

My main Oblivion character was simply tough enough to whack them to death with a large sword or axe. I did all of my combat up close and personal like in full heavy armor, so had crazy health and a really high strength since I took both Blade and Blunt as majors and punched all the rats I met. Worked like a charm.

[Triaxx]

Variety is one of Oblivions best features.

Actually though, Conjuration is the easiest magic skill to grind. For one it's the highest xp-to-cast ratio, and for the other, except in equipment, new summons invalidate old.

Oh, and Turn Undead is Conjuration, and at one second, full strength, it'll affect anything and can be recast right away. Skingrad's Mages quest is a perfect place to train it.

Personally, my strategies for Clanfears are to either summon my own, or blast them with the most powerful shock spell I've got.

Sadly, it's almost always Fingers of the Mountain.

[Ailurus]

When you encounter them inside the gates, I can usually get a decent success rate luring clannfears to the edge of a ledge or a lava pool. Then circle around them, and thwack them as hard as you can to knock em off the edge/into the lava. Only trick is, just make sure they don't send you over the edge with their blasted jump attack.

[Zeful]

When you encounter them inside the gates, I can usually get a decent success rate luring clannfears to the edge of a ledge or a lava pool. Then circle around them, and thwack them as hard as you can to knock em off the edge/into the lava. Only trick is, just make sure they don't send you over the edge with their blasted jump attack.

Sadly I'm doing the Breaking The Siege of Kvatch so their's no lava to force them into, and I'm running low on supplies.

[MachineWraith]

I believe you can just leave and come back, with no ill effects.

But yeah, Clannfears are easily one of the most powerful creatures in the game for their level. One of my favorite summons, because they just dish damage out like crazy. It doesn't help that they have damage reflection either.

[dsmiles]

I prefer the hit-and-run lightning spells.

[Triaxx]

Lava's easy if you're prepared with a Water Walking enchantment.

Clannfears are one of the few places I feel it's okay to cheat. They're so much stronger than the other enemies you encounter in those areas that it feels like a boss encounter, but it's not. And you often encounter bunches of them.

[dsmiles]

So...I cheat. Kind of. I have a gun. :smalltongue:

No, seriously. I have a gun. It's the Gun Mage mod, and it's pretty cool, if you like steampunk-type guns (and aren't playing third person view). It allows you to cast your spells through the gun (like a Gun Mage in IK, hence the name). Initially, I thought it was too powerful, but then I found out that AoE spells don't go off, using this mod, unless they hit a target. If they just hit the wall, too bad, so sad, no spell for you! (Although some objects are valid targets.)

Unfortunately, it's really just a re-skinned bow, so the third person animation looks kind of silly.

[dsmiles]

Yes, double-post...

Anyone try out Nehrim (http://www.nehrim.de/indexEV.html)? I downloaded this 1.6G monster yesterday, and wanted some opinions.

[Triaxx]

I'm currently having tons of fun with OOO. Climbing out of the sewers and heading to Vilverin to find not two, but the full eight possible spawns. Dayum.

[Zeful]

Yes, double-post...

Anyone try out Nehrim (http://www.nehrim.de/indexEV.html)? I downloaded this 1.6G monster yesterday, and wanted some opinions.

I'm downloading it now, it looks interesting. I might end up playing it more than Oblivion.

[Zeful]

I'm downloading it now, it looks interesting. I might end up playing it more than Oblivion.

I started a file and I have to say that the tutorial area is frightening (not helped that I was playing it in the dark.

[dsmiles]

I'm currently having tons of fun with OOO. Climbing out of the sewers and heading to Vilverin to find not two, but the full eight possible spawns. Dayum.

I haven't tried OOO, or MMM, or Francesco's mods. Yet. 8 spawns? As in 8 bandits, or 8 sets of bandits? (And a random, wandering conjurer.)

@Zeful: How's the translation? I've seen a lot of German to English translations that are just horrible, and it kind of ruins the immersion for me.

[Eldan]

I'm currently having tons of fun with OOO. Climbing out of the sewers and heading to Vilverin to find not two, but the full eight possible spawns. Dayum.

I just reinstalled all my ~100 mods yesterday, including OOO. The world just became dangerous. Though I'm using Alternate Start, so I'm somewhere north of Anvil..

I've just found a quest I have no idea where it came from. I downloaded no specific quest mods, but it's here and obviously not official, since there's no spoken dialogue.

I'm at the Brena river, between Hammerfell and County Kvatch. I've never been here before, so I don't know what's included in the game normally and what not, but...

There's at least two Ayleid dams blocking the river, artificial lakes and sunken ruins included. It looks absolutely awesome.

And nearby, there's a ruin full of bandits and necromancers who hired me to fnd out how to control the dams. The ruin so far is full of secret passages and monsters, but doesn't seem to contain any traps.


How does one kill an ice atronach at level 1?

[Triaxx]

Eight bandits. Where there's a single bandit in Vanilla, up to 4 will spawn, any more than four being considered as too taxing for the already resource heavy game. Since there's two bandits there, it's possible for both postions to spawn 4 bandits for a total of 8.

Fortunately after I reloaded, I was greeted with a mere 6, four of which who were archers. Hit and run has a new meaning.

I totally want to know what mods you're playing now.

Icy's at level 1 are reasonably easy, as long as you have a mage character with powerful destruction spells, like Flame Spear from Vigge in Skingrad.

[Eldan]

Nope. I've only been to Anvil, my only fire spell is that free flare you get at level one, and I'm a sneaker. But there were so many narrow passages that I managed to shoot about three dozen arrows into that thing while also fireballing it.

[Zeful]

@Zeful: How's the translation? I've seen a lot of German to English translations that are just horrible, and it kind of ruins the immersion for me.
I don't speak German, so I haven't a clue. But given that there were 50+ professional German VAs and this looks to be a serious production, I'm going to assume that it's decent. Though I'll admit that I was expecting English dialouge.

[Eldan]

I found out two new things today:

1) Oh ****, Ice Atronachs can heal themselves faster than my fireballs hurt them, and my arrows bounce off while barely scratching them.

2) They don't seem to be able to swim. Instead, they sink to the ground and then try to walk out, which makes them great targets.



My new favourite mod is thief's arsenal. It includes equipment from the Thief series, including weapons to knock enemies unconcious without killing them, water arrows to extinguish torches and climbable ropes.

[Triaxx]

1)I've run into that same first problem while trying to put the hurt on Necromancers. I'm going to have to seriously rethink some tactics here.

2) DFA time! Fire Touch FTW!

I keep trying to snag Theives Arsenal and forgetting. Anyone else use Akatosh Mounts?

I've also got a custom Exits mod, but it's not very clean so I haven't put it up for general use.

I also like Kalikuts Glass Retex mod. Gives them a Dark green color, instead of that silly bright green color.

[Eldan]

What's the Exits thing about? Haven't heard of that one?

Also, Thief's is fun, but I've never seen a place where the vine arrows/ropes were actually useful. Or where I could use them at all.

Akatosh Mounts I haven't tried yet. Are they good? I mostly use Midas' Flying Carpet.

[Triaxx]

Basically ways in and out of cities for theives and assassins. Some of the placements are a bit weird because I'm not capable of modeling proper ones. Bravil has an entrance at the base of one of the canals that pops you up under water, and an entrance to Cheydinhal that's just outside the east gate. Lets you get in and out without being caught by the guards, say during Thief and Dark Brotherhood missions. You haven't heard of it because I made it for me. There's also stealth exits which is on TESnexus, but I haven't played with it, because I don't like the way it fits into the world.

I'd put mine up, but I don't know how to clean it so it doesn't create conflicts.

Seems to me thief's would be more useful if the buildings had larger interiors and weren't all stone. As it is I think Skingrad is the best place to use it to reach the balconies to enter places undetected. Probably also more useful if more houses had balconies.

Haven't used the Flying Carpet, but the Mounts are basically dragons like the Akatosh Statue in Talos Plaza. They fly, and walk, and come in five flavors. Fire, Frost, Shock, Shadow, and Earth. Plus they come with Saddlebags to store your awesome loot. They aren't combat mounts, but they will put the hurt on vanilla enemies.

[hotel_papa]

Playing Nehrim... It is rather exceptional work. My only issue is that the translation team missed a few small details. Usually not a big deal i.e. the name of a map marker is in German, but the entrance itself is in English. Some documents were left untranslated, which I'm kinda okay with, having enjoyed Morrowind and all of it's Daedric language business. Some of the time, I feel I'm missing out on things. (The lists of all the local trainers you can buy is an unfortunate omission.)

Other than that, it seems to address many of the grievances named in this thread, such as the leveling system and the equipment scaling insanity. As for those creeped out by the beginning... just wait until you meet an Armored River Crab... those things only seem to spawn after I've harvested a few of their non-threatening little cousins, and they kill me every time. The humiliation of being owned by a re-statted mudcrab.

tl;dr - It's worth the download. It's easily worth as much as you paid for Oblivion, and it's free.

Download here. (http://www.nehrim.de/dataEV.html)

[Triaxx]

I stuck my stealth exits on TESNexus, as Unseen Exits, Here. (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34779)

[Terry576]

Nehrim rocks. But I'm stuck in the prologue area. :smallfrown: My torch died and Iunno what to do.

[dsmiles]

My torch died and Iunno what to do.

Try not to get eaten by a grue? :smallwink:

EDIT: Ok, I'm convinvced. I'm going to install it and play it this weekend.

[DemonicAngel]

At first I thought "well, maybe I should just wait a bit until everyone is already translated."
then you guys made me download it.
gonna fire it up tomorrow or something.

[Zeful]

Nehrim rocks. But I'm stuck in the prologue area. :smallfrown: My torch died and Iunno what to do.

Keep going. The only time torches are important are for the puzzle boss.

And while Nehrim is nice, it's so far the only game that made me physically sick from fear.

[Triaxx]

Cheat in a light spell? Or another torch? I haven't played it because of the download size, but when you can't progress for whatever reason, it's not cheating.

[Terry576]

Alright, here we go, Pros/Cons of Nehrim:

Pros:

Leveling System is Good
Great Story
Epic Design
More RPG-Oriented


Cons:

SCARIEST DUNGEONS EVAR

[dsmiles]

Maybe that should go into the "Unsettling Video Game Experiences" thread?

[Zeful]

Cheat in a light spell? Or another torch? I haven't played it because of the download size, but when you can't progress for whatever reason, it's not cheating.

Except there isn't a reason to cheat in such a spell. I only ever used the torch for added navigation. Running out of torch doesn't prevent you from progressing, it just makes progressing easier.

[Triaxx]

I don't mind pitch black dungeons. But if you give me a torch, I expect to either see glowing enemies in my path, or another torch waiting to be picked up. And if I don't get either I will cheat. Even if it's only for a 5ft 90 second light spell.

Enemies appearing into your circle of light is much, much scarier than them just being in the dark. In the dark is just annoying.

[Zeful]

I don't mind pitch black dungeons. But if you give me a torch, I expect to either see glowing enemies in my path, or another torch waiting to be picked up. And if I don't get either I will cheat. Even if it's only for a 5ft 90 second light spell.

Enemies appearing into your circle of light is much, much scarier than them just being in the dark. In the dark is just annoying.

So your argument boils down to; "If the game doesn't cater to me, I will cheat"? That's a horrible ethic. In Obivion you never need a torch, all the dungeons have massive internal and unexplained illumination. Nehrim only has illumination where it can be explained (I spent three minutes trying to pick up one of the glowing crystals), and there are torches to be picked up but they are sparse.

[Triaxx]

No, I'm saying that I'll cheat if there's a lack of planning. If I can reach the next torch from the previous one, I won't bother. I won't cheat if it's my incompetence, but if it's a design fault, I'll correct it.

[Zeful]

No, I'm saying that I'll cheat if there's a lack of planning. If I can reach the next torch from the previous one, I won't bother. I won't cheat if it's my incompetence, but if it's a design fault, I'll correct it.

And how can you prove it's a design fault? Just because you can't reach the next torch within the lifespan of the previous one doesn't prove that there is a lack of planning, it could have very well been a deliberate choice for atmosphere (which the game uses masterfully). You may disagree with that choice, but then it is "This doesn't cater to me, so I'll cheat" rather than a "design fault".

[dsmiles]

GAH! I can't get Nehrim to install!! I run the installer and it just sits there! :smallfurious: Stupid computer!!!

[Triaxx]

Simple. I run through with god mode on and find the next torch. Then see if I can reach it before the previous one runs out. If it's possible to succeed in the fastest viable time and reach the torch, then there's no flaw. It's only my incompetence that's causing it.

If, completing it in the fastest possible time still leaves me in the dark and unable to continue, then I'll say design flaw. Make it as difficult as you want, but the moment it becomes all but impossible, you've done something wrong.

But I'm going to suspend this argument until I have a chance to play it for myself.

[SilentDragoon]

GAH! I can't get Nehrim to install!! I run the installer and it just sits there! :smallfurious: Stupid computer!!!

Something like that happened to me as well, turns out my Vista computer was taking no less than 10 minutes to pop up a (UAC?) Consent panel. Not sure why it took so long, but the same thing happened when I tried to install 2 of the larger Mass Effect 2 addons, so I think the >1 GB size may have something to do with it. Are you running Vista by any chance?

[Eldan]

Yeah, Vista can do that sometimes... try closing everything else that could use up a lot of RAM, that can help.

[dsmiles]

Something like that happened to me as well, turns out my Vista computer was taking no less than 10 minutes to pop up a (UAC?) Consent panel. Not sure why it took so long, but the same thing happened when I tried to install 2 of the larger Mass Effect 2 addons, so I think the >1 GB size may have something to do with it. Are you running Vista by any chance?

Yes. :smallfrown:
I wish I could get all of this stuff for my Linux computer. :smallsigh: It's so much better...

[Triaxx]

One of many reasons I opted to skip Vista.

[Schylerwalker]

One of my oddest experiences playing the game, I was wandering through the Nibenean Basin region, heading towards the lair of that lich for one of the late-state Dark Brotherhood quests, when I was assaulted by any invisible creature, which stayed invisible.

It was a bear! A randomly invisible bear! Seconds later, ANOTHER invisible bear attacked me, followed by an invisible...whatchamacallit, the dryad things that heal themselves.

They turned visible once I killed them. IT was so bizarre. :smalleek:

[Zen Monkey]

One of my oddest experiences playing the game, I was wandering through the Nibenean Basin region, heading towards the lair of that lich for one of the late-state Dark Brotherhood quests, when I was assaulted by any invisible creature, which stayed invisible.

It was a bear! A randomly invisible bear! Seconds later, ANOTHER invisible bear attacked me, followed by an invisible...whatchamacallit, the dryad things that heal themselves.

They turned visible once I killed them. IT was so bizarre. :smalleek:

I found it weird at first too, thinking it was a glitch or something, but you can actualy make out the predator-style invisibility aura. It's a quest involving things getting turned invisible. I believe it begins in a little village not too far north from the main city, though it's been a while.

[Eldan]

Yeah, there's a village where everyone is invisible, including the sheep and the farmers. Guess a few monsters got turned invisible too.

[Triaxx]

That's Aleswell. It's quite a fun little thing, though you'll almost have to have Detect Life to find most of the people. They don't seem to have the aura thing.

Or go into the Inn at night.

[Rowsen]

That's Aleswell. It's quite a fun little thing, though you'll almost have to have Detect Life to find most of the people. They don't seem to have the aura thing.

Or go into the Inn at night.

I did that one the other day. Fun little quest.