The Quest for a playable Oblivion is starting to feel like going after the Saint Graal.
After a year and a half, almost 20 Gb of downloads, hours of debugging, testing and countless crashes, I have yet to play with a steady character for more than a few weeks. Sometimes the goal seems almost within reach… so close I become hopeful … only to be disappointed again by yet another conflict between mods, a yellow square in the game or more crashes to desktop.
The good news is that finally, I have reached my most stable mix of mods to date. Crashes are now relatively rare. Conflicts between mods are still there but significantly more manageable. Still.. I am waiting for a final release of Oscuro’s Overhaul and a few fixes to Martigen’s latest version. A few more weeks of wait hopefully and the wait will be over.
Yet.. for all this trouble, I still feel it is worth it.
The potential to turn Oblivion into a decent RPG is still intact. I have come down my initial enthousiasm for the game only a few weeks after installing it for the first time. Without mods, the game is simply too ‘simple’ to be worth playing. Running around and kill, kill, kill in dungeons stops being fun after 10 minutes. Mods bring back the pleasure and challenge of playing this game.
Looking at the amount of mods produced since the release of the game, I am not the only one to feel Oblivion is worth saving. The sum of work from the modding community is simply amazing. A year and a half after the release, almost all the major issues with the initial game have been addressed in some way.
I still find it difficult to think about a comment I read in an interview of someone at Bethesda at the occasion of the release of Shivering Isle. While he acknowledged the work of the modding community, he said they did not see any user developed mod worth including with the official extension (?!!!)
How about one of the vastly superior user interfaces or the hundreds of bug fixes from the Unofficial Oblivion Patch just to name a few ?
Fortunately, they did release the tools that made it possible to make this game worth playing, so I can’t really be mad at them for ignoring what has been done with these tools. Let’s hope they will redeem themselves with TES V.