Unmissable Mods Month: Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul

God Tamriel was a weird place wasn’t it. The bandits must’ve been killing exactly the same number of skeletons as you to keep up with your ever increasing strength! And where did they get that armour? In all seriousness, I understand why Bethesda made the game the way they did, it was to give people who aren’t serious gamers a chance, but we’re serious gamers so we want a challenge right? How about something that’ll make you have to beware of who you pick a fight with till you are a little stronger?

When it came to picking our list of the 25 greatest mods it seemed, to me, that there would have to be one of the two big Oblivion mods included: either Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul (OOO) or Francesco’s Mod. Having enjoyed both, at different times, and having them both do very similar things I decided that the best option was to simply pick the slightly more popular one and run with that. However, it might be worth bearing in mind that everything I am about to say applies to both modifications, the decision to pick one over the other was only made because you can’t put the same thing on the list twice (no matter how much you want to).

Ok, slightly lengthy preamble over let’s talk about OOO.

Well, to begin with it is the seminal total overhaul mod for Oblivion, it goes ahead a rebalances everything (and I mean everything). I haven’t read the notes that come with it in their entirety – the brief version is 34 pages long – but I can tell you that no effort was spared. This can be seen in the changes to the game.

The main problem with Oblivion was immersion. It was very hard in the vanilla game not to notice the fundamental flaws with the world. NPCs had about 3 voices, there were no children anywhere, and people’s lives were carefully scripted with no simulation of spontaneity at all. It was ironic but Bethesda seem to have been trying so hard to make this a deep and fundamentally functional world that they forgot that humans can be convinced by smoke and mirrors. Oscuro’s can’t bring perfect immersion back, but it can at the very least bring it to that point where the most glaring flaws are gone. No longer will you encounter bandits with glass armour, or marauders with Daedric. That sort of stuff is reserved for top tier and very rare characters, in doing so he ups the value of that top tier loot, making you feel more invincible and unique the stronger you become. Conversely, when you start, beware of who you fight.

If you are going back to Oblivion then install this. It’ll make the game fresh, interesting and better. Honestly, this is the kind of mod that makes me praise not only the end result, but the vision and the work that went into making it a reality.

Why is it on our list?

Because it breathes life into a world resembling a latter day Frankenstein.

Get if from

http://www.oscurogamedesign.com/down-game-ooo-high.html

Easy to Install?

Whilst this does require a little more fiddling than most oblivion mods would the link above includes all the information you’ll need (and more) to get it running. Just be aware that there may be compatibility issues with other Oblivion Mods.