Oblivion, like Morrowind before it, has a great modding community dedicated to altering and improving the game experience in a variety of ways. There are a great many mods to choose from. In fact, there might be too many. There’s more than one Oblivion mod specifically created to organise mods and there’s even an unofficial patch for the unofficial patch — yes, mods for mods — all of which must be carefully installed in a very specific manner to avoid sundering the ancient barriers between our world and the eldritch planes, resulting in a demonic invasion that will see the end of mankind, or more horrifically, game progress being lost in a crash to the desktop.
I was content playing the vanilla game for my first playthrough. Contrary to histrionic claims Oblivion was broken and needed mods to be functional, the game is actually perfectly playable without them. I finished the main storyline without any user-created content and was mostly satisfied with the experience. There are a couple of things the new player should be made aware of, however.
Tweak
While the four-year-old game plays fine with the default settings, consider making some edits to the Oblivion.ini file to get the most out of current hardware. I strongly recommend going through Koroush Ghazi’s outstanding 13-page Oblivion Tweak Guide before doing this.
Some of the more useful tweaks include enabling screenshots (why this is disabled is mystifying) and letting the game engine take advantage of multicore processors, hyperthreading and additional system memory. It’s also worth enabling the console in order to display frame-rates (highly useful when optimising the game), change the horizontal field of view to taste or remove the menus while taking screenshots.
Speaking of screenshots, the otherwise extensive tweak guide neglects to note you can’t take screenshots in Oblivion with antialiasing enabled in-game. The usual workaround of hitting Prt Scr to copy a screencap to clipboard memory doesn’t work either. If you want to capture Oblivion’s beautiful vistas in BMP format without jaggies, you will have to do some additional tinkering.
The workaround requires the nVidia graphics driver control panel. (ATI has its own of version of this.) Although the default nVidia control panel includes a program profile for Oblivion, it doesn’t seem to recognise the Steam version of the game. Despite that, changes made to this profile is actually applied in the game.
To make the changes, bring up the nVidia control panel by clicking on its icon in the system tray.
Click on “Manage 3D Settings”.
Uncheck the “Show only programs found on this computer” checkbox.
Select “Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion” from the program list.
Select “Antialiasing – Mode” then select “Override any application setting” from the drop-down menu. Next, select “Antialiasing – Setting” then select “2x” (or higher) from the drop-down menu.
Finally, hit “Apply”.
Regardless of whether you decide to tinker with settings yourself or opt for the convenience of mods, it’s highly advisable to regularly hit F5 to quicksave and let the game autosave while waiting, resting and fast travel. Oblivion is stable for the most part but it is still entirely capable of crashing once in a while. You wouldn’t want to lose precious minutes of game progress.
Speaking of
I had no trouble with Oblivion’s much-criticised levelling system but there are two things about it worth noting.
The most unusual thing about Oblivion’s levelling system is it automatically levels up enemies to maintain parity with the player. If you were to attack a particular bandit camp as a level 2 character, for example, you might be up against some desperate lowlifes awkwardly swinging rusty swords. Visit that same camp as a level 20 character and you’d find the same foes well-armoured and adroitly wielding mystical weapons.
After seeing the handwringing on various message boards over this — one gamer was so concerned he made every effort to avoid levelling up and was at level 7 when he completed the main quest — I was anticipating a broken system that rendered the game completely unplayable. That wasn’t the case. The auto-levelling of foes means the player will need to be prepared before venturing forth, careful in battle and put some actual thought into character development. These are all things to be appreciated rather than feared.
The bottom line is the auto-levelling system is fair to the player. The game may not allow you to beat up hapless low-level demons and take their candy, but it also doesn’t let you get clobbered by enemies that are of a much higher level. Since foes are always at the same level as the player, there’s no pressing need to grind to complete the main storyline. I suspect gamers who claimed grinding was necessary had been so thoroughly conditioned by games that required it before lopsided boss battles they couldn’t imagine doing things any differently.
That said, players might want to grind anyway.
Bound Dagger, Bound Dagger, Bound Dagger
The second thing to keep in mind about Oblivion’s levelling system is levelling up requires training a character’s major skills by repeatedly using them. In theory, this is a more natural system. It stands to reason the more you do something, the better you’d be at it. In practice, however, Oblivion’s levelling system usually leads to ridiculous situations which might see the player character constantly jumping around like a kangaroo on amphetamines in order to improve the Acrobatics skill.
It must be stressed again there’s no great need to grind to complete Oblivion’s main storyline; the only reason to grind is it’s the fastest way of appreciating the full breadth of the game’s fantastic character customisation options. There are plenty of ways in this game to compensate for a character’s shortcomings or simply vary play style, whether it’s creating a custom spell to get a better bargain in shops or enchanting armour to transform a melee warrior into a passable spellcaster.
The problem is Oblivion is not especially combat-intensive so most skills that get used primarily in battle improve very slowly. The impatient player will understandably be tempted to take shortcuts to speed up the process even if these shortcuts are comically absurd. For example, if you wanted a Daedric pet to help you in battles, you’d first have to raise your Conjuration stat and the fastest way of doing that is to repeatedly conjure up a dagger like a deranged Crocodile Dundee.
Bethesda clearly recognises the need to reduce the tedium in its Elder Scrolls designs — Oblivion’s inclusion of fast travel and quest target markers are two examples of its willingness to streamline — so here’s hoping the developer turns its attention towards improving its skill system. There’s no point in having outstanding spellmaking and item enchanting systems if they require too much tedious effort to fully exploit, and you know a skill system is deeply flawed when one of the recommended methods of training a skill efficiently involves placing a weight on the keyboard.
