f13.net

(Rather than post in the ancient Oblivion threads, I'm just tossing this in a new one to spare people from confusion upon seeing the leviathan threads emerge from the deep.)

Anyhow, for lack of feeling like doing anything else, I reinstalled Oblivion with the OOO mod yesterday.  I hadn't played it yet on my latest hardware; it looks glorious on a 22" monitor with a good video card pumping the pixels.  I was going through the Imperial city as a sneaky-arrowy-magey sort, and broke into the basement of one of the shops just for kicks.  In the basement, I was surprised to find a manhole to city sewers; I'd gone into the sewers from the streets before, but never really stuck around in them and didn't know much about them.

"Ah ha," thought I, "if stores have sewer entrances, I can break into them from below and steal their riches for my noble quest!"  So I headed into the sewers to see how useful they could be for larceny.  While there, I found the heavily-armed and aggressive homeless people I'd encountered before, along with various rats, which was no surprise.

What was a surprise was walking into a room and finding it covered in blood, hanging corpses, coffins, and skulls.  Hmm.  Apparently someone's been naughty in the sewers.  Vampires?  Cultists?  The room was empty of bad people, though, so I kept on going.  About half an hour of exploring later, I come across a couple of guys in a dark room.  As was the tradition of my people in dealing with the noble homeless in the sewers, I proceeded to toss an arrow into one of them from stealth.

Then they kicked my ass.

While I was frantically downing healing potions and swinging like crazy with my sword and wondering why it wasn't hurting them worth a damn, a message flashed across my screen, "You have contracted Porphyric Hemophilia."

Fuck.  Sewer vampires.

Ditching the sword and switching to the basic fire spell really turned the fight around in my favor, and before much longer the two of them were back to being dead, leaving me in tattered armor and infected with vampirism.  Still being level one, I haven't decided whether I'd rather get it cured and not deal with the hassle of sunlight or get the extra boost in power that being a vampire can provide.


The thing that struck me, though, is that I had no clue that there were sewer vampires in the Imperial City.  I'd played for months when the game came out, was the head of the mage's guild, had cut a swath through the monsters of the word and owned a house in every city, but I was totally ignorant of unholy blood rites going on right under my feet for all that time.  I can't help but tremendously appreciate the amount of work involved in making a game with so much content that even a veteran player can stumble across things that they'd never seen before.

So, you don't even know about the vampire hunters that stalk the vampires in the Imperial City either?

Morrowind and Oblivion both are awesome about this. They're some of the only games I have that I know I've missed probably 50% or more of the game. It really pays off to explore in those games sometimes.

No, I've run across the vampire hunters before, and got stuck in a he-said-she-said deal where several people were accusing each other of being vampires.  I've just never found sewer vampires before.

I've been playing the crap out of this with the OOO mod installed.  It's a great game with that mod.

Was it a planned or random encounter? That's the key thing to take into account.

I'm not completely sure.  Given all of the corpses and blood in that corner of the sewers, I'm certain the game has a 'spawn vampires in this area' thing going on at the very least, so I wouldn't say that their appearance was just a roll on the random monster chart.  But neither did their corpses have names, so I doubt they were manually-designed NPCs.

What is this OOO mod?

It's planned.  There are supposed to be vampires in the sewers because there's a quest line with the vampire hunters.  I'm not going to say anything about how well it was executed but it's purposeful.  Also note the presence of coffins and various vampire stuff in the sewers.

Daggerfall was awesome.

Holy shit, the OOO mod makes this fucker like a whole new game.  This is a damned impressive mod.

Francesco's Mod was a different, but similar total revamp. Adds lots of new mobs/weapons,etc. I think Oscuro's is better overall, but both give the game more playability I think.

I started Oblivion several times, and always enjoyed it, but inevitably I either found myself leveling all wrong, or else playing min-max trying to level exactly correctly. Does OOO solve this? I'm all itchy to start again after reading this thread.

nah save ur efforts for Fallout 3
Oblivion had its moments, but the game at its release state was broken not in a buggy sense, but the level scaling aspect kinda screwed the progression. Spent too much time picking flowers and mixing coffee? HA you're lvl 10 and you're fucked by Daedras!

The mega mods add that much needed open endedness

What OOO does, as far as level-based stuff go, is place caps on NPC/monster levels and loot tables.  So where in stock Oblivion if you're level 15 or so you'll be running across "scruffy" level 15 bandits running around in glass armor to rob people of their pennies, OOO Oblivion keeps the bandits running around in crappy gear and caps their max level so they will never be super-duper-uber no matter how high you level.  Other things, like daedra princes, have a cap on their lower level, so they will properly stomp your face in if you try to fight them at first level.  As a result, the theory is that if you level 'wrong' and have ten levels based entirely on alchemy and speechcraft, you should at least be able to safely fight a rat and a bum without being eviscerated like a dog.

Aside from that, the leveling system is unaltered, so you will of course find it wise to have at least a little effort spent on your combat skills.  As long as you practice at least ONE method of killing people, you should be fine.  Conjuration, Destruction, Marksman, Blunt, Blade, or Hand to Hand, just so long as it hurts.

Incidentally, the mod has altered weapon damage to make it more hardcore, including a much-needed improvement to hand to hand fighting.  It's also beefed up the power of magic to an equivalent degree, but slowed the speed of mana regeneration unless you buff your Willpower up to the high end, with the theory that they're trying to make pure mages more powerful without making it easy to be an uberpowered tank-mage.  The stated intent is making the game more challenging, and some people say that OOO makes things too hard.  Haven't really seen enough info to say whether that's the case or not, yet.

There are other leveling mods that allow for different methods of advancement.  Some of them are quite elaborate.  I never tried any of them but I would be interested in hearing about other peoples experiences.

I wasn't a fan of OOOs default leveling rate (painfully slow), so I usually played using OOO and an addon to reset the leveling to normal.

The latest OOO lets you choose from a list of leveling speeds upon install, no need to mod it anymore.

I used to use the AF Level Mod (http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=OblivionMods.Detail&id=334).

Does a few nice things, the main one being your attributes will increase automatically as your skills do, removing the necessity of making sure to get x5 multipliers.
Was pretty nice, as I recall.

Actually, get it from here (http://www.fuzionmedia.com/oblivion/afleveling.html).  Newer unbroken version and whatnot.

Is there a mod to slow down the rate of Obllivion gate growth to something less than the rates of bunnies spawning in the spring?

Guys, I kind of liked parts of Oblivion being a challenge because of the wack level curve.

I think some of you have been playing MMOGs too fucking much if you had any sort of trouble with Oblivion.

It wasn't so much a challenge as just fucking tedious as critters started having a million hit points and even with my Bastard Sword of Rectum Puncturing +5, it'd still take an eternity to kill shit when all I wanted to do was go from point A to point B and maybe pick a few daisies on the way.

Oblivion was a lonely, boring game with ugly characters and pretty environments. I got tired of climbing up towers inside Oblivion gates, and overrated NPC AI. Are you all trying to tell me that's changed?

That shit hasn't changed, but there's actually sort of an interesting world around you now.  It makes the game much more fun for the explorer type.  You never know what's going to be in dungeon A...wheras in stock Oblivion you knew that practically every encounter would be the same difficulty since it's all leveled to you.  That makes a huge difference to me, but for some it probably doesn't matter.  OOO proves to me that static is dynamic, in the sense that you can enter a dungeon and get run out of the place, you can enter and have to use every potion and resource at your disposal but get insanely awesome shit at the end, or you can waltz through it and have some fun just relaxing and feeling like a badass as you two shot everything.  Every location is going to be a different challenge given whatever your character has gone through to that point, and I love it.

Oh, and at level 2 I ran into a Frost Titan outside of Bruma, which I proceeded to train into town.  It fucking zones in and kills a bunch of guards and townsmen who congregate to fight the massive beast raid style.  It was goddamn awesome.

I use OOO with a level mod as well, I believe KCAS.  No more stupid leveled encounters, no more min-maxing necessary for leveling.  For myself, using these two mods brings the game from a C to B+/A-.  YMMV.

What does KCAS do? I reinstalled oblivion + expansion and I'm wary about installing OOO cause I really don't feel like trying too hard, but I know stock oblivion can be a yawn fest.

OOO is sort of a mixed bag on the "hardness" scale.  Sure, you'll be facing tougher enemies sometimes, but you'll also be picking up loot way out of line with your level.  Personally I think it's a lot better, if anything just for the sheer variation in enemies.  For instance, I was happily going along picking off camps filled with your standard bandit scum when the last one I came to had a named guy in full obsidion armor (keep in mind, my character is only level 1) who started tearing into me with a vengeance.  I barely managed to take him and his two archer buddies down (and I had to use potions to do so) and wind up getting some badass gear off of them.  If I were playing a tank I'd have been in heaven just from his armor alone, but as it is I got pick up a fancy rapier and a really nice bow.  Oh, and they've added in all kinds of new gear, new critters, etc.  The world is fleshed out like you wouldn't believe compared to how it was shipped.

My only advice would be to install ooo_lite instead of the full version, and just check everything but slow levelling.  You get everything you got with default ooo, but not the grind.

Or you could just go play a game that doesn't suck.

I thought Oblivion was too easy if anything, but I am also sure I picked the wrong classes.  Which ones are the hard ones?

In vanilla obivion it's a bitch to be a caster.

Well, instead of just blasting away with spells, you have to do combos:  shoot a weakness-to-fire, then follow with a fireball, repeat.  Use your summoned pets if any.  And stay out of melee range; it doesn't just do damage, it also knocks you down which delays your spellcasting by a lot.

The visuals are pretty damn good, now that I have all the sliders to max (including the distance ones).  Seeing the Imperial City from the top of the nearby mountain is awesome.  That quest where everything around you looks like a painting was pretty nice-looking too.

I was a pure caster on the 360.  Majors were the standard schools, no alchemy.  Started off having to work at it, ran away a lot, but it didn't take long to become a stiffly-animated god.  Even without going into an Oblivion gate.

Other tips are to use fire on vampires and zombies.  Make your own spells as soon as you can.  Jack up your intelligence and you can cast 3-mana spells ALL DAY.

You know what makes everything trivial?  100% Chameleon.  Make your own magical items as soon as you can.

Oblivion was ruined for me once I saw that one of the options was a difficult *slider*.  Like, not "Easy, Medium, Hard'.  Fucking 100 different settings.  At that point I knew they stopped giving a shit about making the progression balanced.

I was thankful for that slider when I was trying to clear out a particular quest. I'll limit the spoilers, but those who have done it will know which one I mean when I say you get trapped in a room with a lich. I believe I was about a 5th level Archer/Alchemist. Trapped in a small room with a lich.  :ye_gods:

After running in circles for 25 minutes and burning through all my potions, I still had barely touched the thing, and there is no way to retreat.

Dropped the slider down, spun around and feathered the bitch. Put the slider back to the middle, and only felt slightly dirty.

Yeah, I don't see the big whoop about whether a game has a slider or labelled settings of "easy", "medium", etc.  If it's about your epeen and playing for "the challenge" then by all means, slide that fucker all the way up and bask in your leetness.  No one is stopping you.

Oblivion is one of the worst games ever in the history of ...well...games.

nope. not that close. Just a lot of 'doubtful design decisions' which ruined the overall experience (rats at lvl 1 and apples in chests for dungeon loot, etc) They hyped too much as well, which led to a huge let-down to some people who really believed them.

Too bad someone couldn't port Daggerfall's game code into Oblivion's engine.

So long as they managed to fix all the bugs in Daggerfall.  I couldn't begin to tell you how many hours I put into that one, but I can say I never managed to make it through any of my multiple attempts without some bug breaking the main quest line irrevocably.

Man, I have a few games to show you.  You can probably get Enchanted Arms for PS3 very cheaply at GameStop right now.

I just wish my characters didn't all look like they have severe downs syndrome.

The thing is that I bet some of these better modders could do this if there was some facility for random dungeon generation, but what do I know?

That's really what I want :P Not sure it's possible with the more elaborate set-pieces Bethsoft uses these days.

Wish there was at least a control scheme update for daggerfall, I was playing it at one point last year and the controls were driving me batty. Amazing what we take for granted in UI and controls.

that is what I'd go for

Haven't played it so I'll trust you on that...but Oblivion is what sacks of dog shit kick when they feel to need to pile onto something worse than they are.

Hey newblette, don't make it sound like that dirty pile of shit came out of my mouth.

newblette

I like that. Mildly insulting (since we are no longer about teh hate) and gender flexible.

If you have a GameCube, I recommend Geist.