The Oblivion Retrospective Part 1: Tweaks

In this several part piece I’ll be taking a whirlwind tour of the wide variety of mods that are available for Oblivion. I’ve found over my hundreds of hours playing the game that there are few aspects of it that haven’t in some way been altered by the community to be more streamlined and efficient, so I will attempt to share some of my favourites from the past few years with you.  Rather than simply compile a list, as have many in the community (I heartily recommend Wryre/A’s list at the Oblivion wiki) I’ll be pointing out a few of the major innovations that took place – sometimes very soon after the introduction of the game – and let you decide how you want to change your version.

Today’s post will be about what I most love: game and interface tweaks. It is somewhat inevitable that in any major new release there will be myriad complaints from the community, be it the number of people who desired that the world map in the game come in colour rather than the slightly bland not-quite-monochrome that was its default setting, or simply people who didn’t want to have to scroll through all four hundred keys that they had slowly accumulated over the course of a hundred hours of play. I consider mods of this type to be essential to making the experience of playing Oblivion a good one, particularly because of the many hours I’ve spent in the game. They streamline many of the game’s aspects and in some cases correct mistakes made by the developer which, once you’ve played the modded version, seem so obvious.

The first example I’ll pull out of the air is the keychain mod.  This was one of the major improvements made in the early days of the game and changes an entire aspect of inventory management. Without the mod your inventory will slowly accumulate keys, each one taking up its own slot in the inventory and slowly adding to the time it takes to get from the top to the bottom of the page. There was no earthly reason for this foolishness, particularly since the only thing you could do with a key once it was in your inventory was throw it away, so the community stepped up to the challenge and wrote a program that would allow all your keys to be put in a single key chain.

Another good example of a game-changing mod  would be the  100% Harvest Chance mod. One of my main gripes with the game is that there is a percentage based change to harvest any given plant. In some cases this has led my character down a path where he needs a single ingredient to form his high level potion but, due to bad luck, hasn’t managed to gain anything from an entire farm of corn.

Finally, my personal favourite comes in the form of a tiny addition – the ability to fast travel to your houses. I’m lazy and I keep all my stuff in my house. When I have finally come across a very nifty looking artefact I don’t want to have to walk across the map just to put it in a display case. With this little addition you don’t have to.

I’ve only talked about three individual mods in this post but the reality is that my current Oblivion game has about 30 active user created changes in it, the majority of which are like this small patches. They changed my game in ways that I have come to rely on and, I wouldn’t have been able to play the game as much as I do without them.

In my next post I’ll be looking at the huge overhauls that you can get for the game, and how they affect your experience.

A few more recommended tweaks:

Quest Award Leveller: levels-scaled quest rewards get stronger as you do! A must get mod if you want quest items to continue to be useful long after you acquired them

Colour Map: Don’t you hate the bland map?

At Home Alchemy: A quick fix that allows you to use your alchemy apparatus once they have been set down. A very useful fix if you don’t want to carry around the heavy alchemy apparatus.