Fixing Oblivion

It’s a buggy game. Unfortunately, I can’t help with that.

I can, however, point any PC gamers among you towards these two player-created mods which have made my Oblivion non-fighter experience a whole lot better.

Mod 1 – Fixing the Interface:

It’s like he looked into my shrivelled, wasting, PC gaming heart and saw that it was good…

Selected highlights:

• Double the inventory items, skills, factions and accomplishments on-screen
• Bigger maps
• A condition bar for your current weapon
• A few extra mapped buttons
• The option to remove those pesky quest markers from the compass. Sometimes they’re useful (e.g. when you’re circling the entrance to a cave but can’t see it coz you’re a midget in 6ft tall grass) but a lot of the time it takes the fun out of hunting for someone when it points right at them, no matter where they are in the city.

The BTMod is here. I would have provided “before” screenshots but I forgot to take some and this mod is not easy to uninstall.

Mod 2 – The Mercenary Mod:

For those of you who, like me, aren’t as into the hacking and slashing as the game would like you to be this handy mod allows you to hire all kinds of mercenaries to help out with fighting, thieving and the like. I’m a sneaky thief. I fight for self-defense until I can get the hell out of there. I don’t like quests where I potter about for days, following and talking and searching and stealing and at the end of it all, I don’t get to complete the quest until I get locked in a room with a fully-armoured warrior and have to fight my way out. So unsatisfying! This mod lets me hire minions to do some of my fighting for me :)

They’re not the most intelligent when it comes to tactics like “Don’t charge headlong into a group of 3 ogres” and “I know you can see that ghost’s arm through the buggy wall but standing there bashing the stone blocks while I endanger myself elsewhere isn’t going to help,” but it goes a long way towards redressing the imbalance. You even get a few commands, like “Wait here”, “Follow me” and “Scout this area.” The only time I asked my merc to scout he wandered up to the nearest person and started gossiping, so I’m not so sure about that one. Maybe it works better when you’re lost in the grass.

The Mercenary Mod is here.

Screenshots (click to view at full size):

Word of warning – before I installed these mods, Oblivion crashed on exit about 70% of the time. Now it’s more like 95%, but I really can’t say whether it’s down to these mods or something else – Windows updates? Could be anything.