Has vanilla Oblivion never really "bothered" anyone else?

[Jathom95]

I thought about this recently. I suppose you could say the game being such a large part of my free time back in the day, plus playing it on the 360 for years, I was biased anyway.

 

But honestly, even nowadays, vanilla Oblivion overall with a few quality of life improvements is still every bit as enjoyable as it ever was to me. I won't deny that I've done several playthroughs with things like OCO or texture replacers in place. But when it comes down to it, I don't think they'd be absolutely necessary for me to be able to play. I've seen other people say there's something about the vanilla layout, faces and all, that gives it a certain charm. I'm inclined to agree. For all its jankiness, I still don't mind it.

 

Even the UI, something that seems universally hated, has never really bothered me. To be honest, I've never found a replacer that keeps the exact style intact and that's really what I want, something like Vanilla UI Plus for Fallout 3/NV. Ideally, if I were to use one, I'd really just want to be able to see more items without making everything tiny and a larger map. No other changes. and sadly that seems what most UI mods do. They either change fonts around, or other elements so I never feel as content as I do without.

 

I dunno, it might just be the ole' nostalgia at work. But has anyone else ever felt this way, even if it's only certain things about the game?

Edited February 26, 2021 by Jathom95

[Striker879]

I'm onboard with most of what you're saying Jathom.

 

About the only things I couldn't go back to vanilla are the faces and bodies (sorry, you will never have any luck prying OCO v2, HGEC and Robert Male from my cold dead fingers, so your chances of doing so before that last day I spend here will be less than nil) and the vanilla encumbrance system (come on really ... one single flax seed weighing in at 0.1 is all it took for me being able to move at full speed to being rooted to one point ... Realistic Fatigue/Basic Physical Activities forever for me).

 

The interface is not bad in my opinion, but then again I am known for making my own determination of what bugs me and what doesn't so all those "Better" mods have an uphill battle on their hands before I even give them a glance. When something bugs me I go looking for alternatives.

 

The last place I'll look for alternatives is somebody's "must have" mod list. Even looking at other's forum/mod comments posts I seldom see a proper explanation of why mod A is superior to vanilla ... just a flat statement that "it is" (and that never piques any interest on my part to investigate further).

[HadToRegister]

Some of the heads are beyond ridiculous, some are so big and round that they look like Charlie Brown characters.

[Jathom95]

Don't get me wrong, the faces in particular are what I sympathize with most people on. When a quarter of your playthrough is spent looking at them, of course you want them to resemble something vaguely human lol. I have used and still do play with OCO, RMB+HGEC. They're very nice alternatives to vanilla. My point is more or less that graphical quality, for me at least, is secondary to the actual gameplay.

 

It's why I have such a difficult time trying to go back to something like Skyrim nowadays. I played Oblivion extensively for years, without mods on top of that. Never once did I find myself bored or unable to play the game for being too "ugly". I loved playing through Skyrim the first couple of times after it had released. Now? I can throw every mod I can think of at it and I still am instantly bored out of my mind. The depth in gameplay just isn't there for me. Take the cities for instance. Bethesda might've had a difficult time with FaceGen lol, but they really nailed making each city feel distinct and lived in with Oblivion. Everytime you visit one even in vanilla, you get the feeling that people actually live there and carry out their own distinct lives. And with NPC schedules that are present in Oblivion, they often do. Compared to Skyrim, where NPCs mostly stay in their respective cities and feel more akin to walking set pieces, repeating the exact same scripted conversations over and over.

 

It's just got that "something" that keeps me coming back.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Jathom95

[Pellape]

Well you got some points for sure. We do spend a lot of time in the caves and I really dislike the vanilla caves as they look so plain and unrealistic and fortunately Qarl did something about it.

 

We also have all necessary bugfixes and crash prevention mods that we cannot live without and all unofficial patches so you cannot play it vanilla, right out from the box really.

 

I am also to lazy to play it vanilla, without all my tools I made to make tedious stuff, less tedious. It is a bloody Swiss knife I guess.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Pellape

[Jathom95]

Well you got some points for sure. We do spend a lot of time in the caves and I really dislike the vanilla caves as they look so plain and unrealistic and fortunately Qarl did something about it.

 

We also have all necessary bugfixes and crash prevention mods that we cannot live without and all unofficial patches so you cannot play it vanilla, right out from the box really.

 

I am also to lazy to play it vanilla, without all my tools I made to make tedious stuff, less tedious. It is a bloody Swiss knife I guess.

 

I guess I should elaborate that I mean "vanilla friendly" more so than strictly vanilla. Fixes and quality of life improvements are frankly necessary nowadays, especially since many of them fix issues at the engine level.

 

What I mean more or less is such drastic changes that make it not feel like Oblivion anymore. This is why I think something like this will always be subjective to individual preferences.

[Pellape]

Well it sure is as you can play the game in any way you want or choose any mods you want or not choose any at all. It is entirely up to you. I play this game now for the 3rd time and I enjoy every bit of it, I mix the 4 guilds with Main story and also mix it with brilliant mods. I also mod it a lot myself by adding all kinds of conveniences as i am a bit lazy after all. ;) What do I wanna focus at when I play? That is the main question and that is exploring, go where I have not been before, well not in least 15 years...

[Jathom95]

^ Yeah, I know what you mean.

 

 

...and the vanilla encumbrance system (come on really ... one single flax seed weighing in at 0.1 is all it took for me being able to move at full speed to being rooted to one point ... Realistic Fatigue/Basic Physical Activities forever for me).

 

@Striker879 I'm right on board with the encumbrance system being horrible in vanilla. Besides the issues that RF remedies (use it and BPA myself), everything is honestly too damned heavy. In the inventory that is.

 

I've started using Counting Beans - A Weight Mod by CoffeeIsDead to remedy that one. That's been an issue for Bethesda since Morrowind at least. If encumbrance is supposed to be measured in pounds, then the vanilla system makes everything far heavier than it should be. 40 lb warhammers? 36lb swords? That mod tackles this particular issue nicely. Doesn't hugely unbalance the game, just makes sure that one dungeon sweep won't take up 85% of your inventory space. I don't know that I can play without it now.

[Striker879]

I read somewhere (probably on the UESP Wiki, but it could very well have been somewhere else) that the weight system is metric. If that is the case then divide by 2.2 to get weight in pounds. An 18 pound warhammer sounds reasonable to me ... you do want to do some damage with it, right?

 

That said I still do enchant up some gear for myself to help sidestep some of the vanilla game limitations. As my magic skills get better with a character I think it is quite reasonable that my guy should also get skilled at enchanting. My current character uses Magicka-based enchantment limits and it's not that I dislike using it but for my next character I'm going to look into using Enchantment Mastery in conjunction with Sorcerys Toll. I already have the option turned on in Unequip Broken Armor for there to be a chance of destroying broken equipment (I do enjoy living dangerously ... and yes when one of my custom enchanted pieces gets destroyed I do say bad words, in fact at times a rather long string of them). Don't fight minotaurs toe to toe ... that is what fireballs where invented for.

 

Another of my must have mods is Packdonkeys ver 2. It helps sidestep that encumbrance situation in a believeable way and getting enough gold for my first one is always job #1 for my character after starting the game (alt starts are the only way to go for me anymore).

 

So have you tweaked your RF and BPA INIs Jathom?

[gnarly1]

I thought about this recently. I suppose you could say the game being such a large part of my free time back in the day, plus playing it on the 360 for years, I was biased anyway.

 

But honestly, even nowadays, vanilla Oblivion overall with a few quality of life improvements is still every bit as enjoyable as it ever was to me. I won't deny that I've done several playthroughs with things like OCO or texture replacers in place. But when it comes down to it, I don't think they'd be absolutely necessary for me to be able to play. I've seen other people say there's something about the vanilla layout, faces and all, that gives it a certain charm. I'm inclined to agree. For all its jankiness, I still don't mind it.

 

Even the UI, something that seems universally hated, has never really bothered me. To be honest, I've never found a replacer that keeps the exact style intact and that's really what I want, something like Vanilla UI Plus for Fallout 3/NV. Ideally, if I were to use one, I'd really just want to be able to see more items without making everything tiny and a larger map. No other changes. and sadly that seems what most UI mods do. They either change fonts around, or other elements so I never feel as content as I do without.

 

I dunno, it might just be the ole' nostalgia at work. But has anyone else ever felt this way, even if it's only certain things about the game?

Yes it 'bothered' at lot of people, specifically the appalling level scaling and to a lesser extent the Radiant AI which was disappointing in execution and a PR fail, IIRC. And then there was the horse armor DLC which became a meme due to its infamy.

 

Mod author Oscuro was so bothered by the level scaling that he created OOO (Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul which is still available on the Nexus) and it was wildly popular as it created a deleveled Imperial Province and was well executed. It helped to land him a job at Obsidian.

 

There was a major project to unify the 4 major game overhauls (of which OOO was one) into a compatible framework, called FCOM Convergence, although it was rather involved to install and troubleshoot, IIRC.

 

I binge-played Oblivion when it first came out but now I can't stand the game. It's an uninspired RPG that's set in a game world that's a forgettable facsimile of medieval Europe.