Current Top 10 Oblivion Mods

For those of us playing on the PC, the Oblivion experience has only gotten better since launch. Planet Elder Scrolls has a short blurb on ten promising mods already released by the community. The top two have been running on my system for slightly over a week now; I highly recommend BTMod (mentioned by Tycho last week) and Natural Environments.

Slashdot wubs Gamespy

[Dachannien]

Is this a legitimate /. article or a shill? Gamespy comes up with a list of ten of the "most influential and eye-catching" Oblivion mods, despite the fact that there are hundreds (513, in fact) of mods listed here [tescreens.be], not [tessource.net] all [gamingtown.net] of which [elricm.com] are hosted on Planet Elder Scrolls.

Note that Gamespy only included mods hosted on their website, and that Gamespy is notorious for running interstitial ads that require a Greasemonkey script [userscripts.org] to bypass. Besides, this wasn't submitted by a Slashdot reader - Zonk posted it himself. The linked article had nothing more than some guy's opinion on what mods were good, so if Zonk is such an Oblivion fan, why not just link us to his favorite mods right there in the Slashdot article, rather than shilling for the ad-ridden IGN network?

an almost great game

[Jett]

I'm excited that we have so many mods already - what is sad is that people have to waste time creating mods that fix the game. Why aren't the developers doing this? They released a buggy as hell game with several glaring design/balancing/"realism" issues - why do we need a mod to make animals behave correctly? Why do we need mods to fix broken quests? Why do we need mods to fix the screwed up UI? Why do we need mods to fix the stupid inventory system? Why do we have to manually edit .ini files to change obvious performance enhancing settings? Why do we need people creating custom shaders to improve performance on low-end cards? Why do we need people to create improved textures for high-end cards? To me all of these issues illustrate that the development team has some serious problems - they've got their own mods out to add content to the game (that they are charging for!) but they have released a seriously flawed game - what the hell is up with that?

That said, I'm not an RPG fan really but Oblivion is one awesome game - and it does run great on my 2.3ghz A64 w/6600GT, minus all the godamn bugs. And fanboys - don't tell me it is my system! I've got a fresh install of XP, fully patched and updated - Oblivion, HL2, and Firefox are the only programs installed on it - the fact that my entire system locks up if I load any of my saved games without first creating an entirely new game on a product that the developer is already releasing paid expansions for instead of patches is BS.

The Obvious Question

[Anonymous Coward]

If a handful of amatures can produce a decent mod in a reasonably short period of time (I think the game was only released last month) why are they charging $2 for a Horse texture or a 10 minute quest?

Incorporate into official patch

[Jagasian]

If Bethesda is smart, they will keep an eye on these mods, so that ideas from them can be incorporated into an official patch.

Re:How about ten essential mod download sites

[Gunslinger47]

"That don't require you 'sign up'?"

I believe this site [bugmenot.com] doesn't require login.

Re:an almost great game

[Bieeanda]

Let's take a peek at Bethesda's track record:

TES: Arena. Dull-witted and buggy. No major patches.

TES: Daggerfall. Buggier than an ant farm. 'Enjoyed' a litany of patches that didn't actually fix major things like the plotline stopping, quest-critical monsters from falling into the void, or unbelievably awful dungeon design.

TES: Morrowind. Trades the majority of bugs for poor mechanical and art design. Who, seriously, thought it was a good idea to make every enchanted item shine like it was covered in an inch of iridescent plastic? Weird bugs, like NPCs on boats falling through into the water and drowning, remain. Poor design decisions, like the ludicrously expensive assassin armor all but given to the PC after Tribunal is installed, are added after the fact. Internal mechanics are horribly broken, ranging from the infinitely abusable alchemy to the arcane min-maxing that the level advancement and attribute gain system all but demands.

TES: Oblivion. Keeps Morrowind's obnoxious level advancement system, plus adds the insult upon injury of monsters leveling with you. Bandits running around in king's ransoms worth of equipment, 'psychic guards' that punish you for taking too long in completing quests, early quests that are virtual deathtraps (including one that can lock a first level character in a small room with two heavily armed adversaries), and atop all of that, an army of CTD bugs.