Oblivion

Supported Video Chipsets

While it's not required, Oblivion is designed for a 64-bit, PCI Express system. Only the lowest of the recommended chipsets are available on AGP cards.

• ATI X1900, X1800, X1600, X1300, X850, X800
• ATI X700, X600 (supported, but not recommended)
• ATI Radeon 9800, 9700, 9600, 9500 (supported, but not recommended)
• nVidia GeForce 7800, 6800
• nVidia GeForce 6600, 6200, FX (supported, but not recommended)

Obviously Oblivion does not support Matrox cards, but you can have Surround Gaming with a TripleHead2Go adapter.—Oblivion can be played on pre-DirectX9 cards with the help of third-party software:

Oldblivion is a piece of software which allows graphics cards which are pre DirectX9 to run Elder Scrolls: Oblivion from Bethesda. This means that Oblivion can run on cards such as Geforce 3, Geforce 4, Radeon 9200 and so on. Oldblivion is still in an early development phase but it's fairly stable, however there still are a few bugs and kinks to work out.

Oldblivion attaches to Oblivion and applies certain non-permanent patches to it. This means that once you exit the game these patches will vanish as they are only done in RAM. Some of these patches are for making sure that Oblivion doesn't crash when run on hardware which lacks certain new functionality. It also changes the shaders used by Oblivion from pixel shader 2.0 and vertex shader 2.0 into pixel shader 1.1 and vertex shader 1.1.

The (In)famous Topless Mod

Lifts-Her-Tail: I must finish my cleaning, sir. The mistress will have my head if I do not!
Crantius Colto: Cleaning, eh? I have something for you. Here, polish my spear.
Lifts-Her-Tail: But it is huge! It could take me all night!
The Lusty Argonian Maid, Act IV, Scene III

Traditionally, Bethesda had never been all too squeamish about nudity in The Elder Scrolls series. In Daggerfall, if you undressed your character, you would see your character naked in the inventory screen. There were naked dancers in some of the temples (Kynareth, Dibella, Akatosh) and most of the witches' covens, there were scantily clad and sometimes nude women in the inns, and your character would be attacked by naked nymphs and Daedra seducers in the dungeons. Some of the books you could find and read were pretty outspoken, too.

With Morrowind, this changed a bit. Your character now had unremovable underwear, the way it was in Daggerfall with the child guard activated. But similar to The Sims, this could easily be modded. If you look for it, there is lots of sexual content for Morrowind out there. And some of the books at the very least had some double entendre, see the quote above.

But when a fan released a patch that removes the bras from the Oblivion characters, it caused almost as much buzz as the GTA Hot Coffee incident a year earlier. ESBR re-rated the game from Teem to Mature, and Bethesda announced they would take steps to prevent further such patches.

Now, if Bethesda really severely reduces the moddability of Oblivion in subsequent patches, this could be one of the few things to ensure Morrowind a lasting popularity bonus over the new game.

• Interview with Maeyanie

  I discovered a few interesting things. For one, most of the skins and model parts are shared amongst all the races, the skins are just tinted. Also, the skins included with the game have all the, ah, features you see revealed with my mod already on them, so I didn't have to do a skin myself the way I expected. I'm guessing that's what the ESRB meant when they talked about this in the re-rating, but Bethesda was right, it really was impossible to do without third-party software.

• Bethesda responds to Oblivion rerating

  There is no nudity in Oblivion without a third party modification. In the PC version of the game only—this doesn't apply to the Xbox 360 version—some modders have used a third party tool to hack into and modify an art archive file to make it possible to create a mesh for a partially nude (topless) female that they add into the game. Bethesda didn't create a game with nudity and does not intend that nudity appear in Oblivion. There is no nude female character in a section of the game that can be unlocked. Bethesda can not control tampering with Oblivion by third parties. Bethesda is taking steps to ensure that modders can not continue to hack into Oblivion's art archives to create partially nude figures.

• Oblivion Re-Rated = Bad News, John Romero thinks:

  What's the point of this all this? That modders are now screwing up the industry they're supposed to be helping. In 1993 we opened up all our data to the industrious and ambitious folks out there who want to see what it's like to be able to make their favorite game a little more like what they'd want…and get a taste of being a semi-game designer in the process. The most awesome example of what this philosophy has brought is CounterStrike.

  Now what's going to happen? You'll probably start seeing game data files becoming encrypted and the open door on assets getting slammed shut just to keep modders from financially screwing the company they should be helping. And the day a game company's file encryption is hacked to add porn and the case goes to the ESRB for review—that's when we'll see how well game companies are protected from these antics and what the courts will rule. Hopefully it'll be on the developer's side.

• Maeyanie's Homepage

Mods (Plug-ins)

Oblivion comes with an editor very similar to that of Morrowind. A few months after the release, there were already lots of mods out there.

Which Mods?

There were so fast so many mods (the first mods were out within days of the release of the game itself) that quite a number of sites have published guides which of them are the real must-haves.

• Ten essential Oblivion mods you can download right there on the site:

  1. BTmod
  2. Natural Environments
  3. Elven Cartographers – Map & Icons
  4. Dragon Knight Armor & Talon of the Silver Hawk Longsword
  5. Saddle Bags
  6. Vagabond's Better Gold
  7. Ariana Trudeaux
  8. Dark Green Glass Armor
  9. Francesco's leveled creatures/items mod
  10. Wilderness Creatures List Mod

• A Short and Useful Guide to Oblivion Mod Heaven by Ure "Vader" Paul is another favorite list, again with download links:

  1. Francesco's leveled creatures/items mod
  2. BTmod
  3. Quest Award Leveling
  4. Immersive Interface
  5. Wilderness Creatures List Mod
  6. Lighter Arrows
  7. New Save Game Manager
  8. Ariana Trudeaux
  9. Dragon Knight Armor & Talon of the Silver Hawk Longsword
  10. Mountain Tower
  11. Elven Cartographers

• 13 Oblivion mods that should not have been mods. They should have been part of the game, Pixelrage thinks.

  1. Natural Environments
  2. Better Imperfect Water
  3. Texians' Window Lighting System
  4. Elven Cartographers Color Map
  5. Inebriation
  6. Silence
  7. BTMod
  8. wz_Inventory
  9. Spell Icon Replacer by Forsaken32
  10. Louder Nirnroots
  11. Update my statue
  12. Extended Death Camera
  13. Vanity Camera Smoother

General Sites

Due to the high modability of Oblivion, the first mods were out in a matter of days (some even say hours) after the release of the game, and most general sites have a large section dedicated to them.

• Oblivion Source is a community dedicated to the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game and TES games in general, with forums and an impressive mod library.
• The Elder Scrolls Construction Set Wiki
• Cyrodiil Chronicles
• Oblivion Portal
• Elderscrolls Oblivion
• Planet Elder Scrolls has a large database for Oblivion plugins and mods.

Specific Mods

• Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul

  Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul seeks to erode the hard-caps placed on the possibility of encountering content in the game world. Essentially, it makes almost all content available at any given time. The hierarchy of item quality, quest and creature difficulty is preserved by balancing the difficulty in acquiring, completing and defeating them, respectively. The result is a world with less boundaries, more diverse and mysterious, where excelling in exploration, skill, wit and resourcefulness leads to higher kinds of rewards for the effort spent in attaining them. The world does not reward you, or place difficulty against you, solely based on chance or a solidified scale based on level, which tends to equate to how much time you have invested in the game. Now you can experience at any time the thrill of facing almost unsurmountable odds and receiving a well deserved reward for your courage and skill.

  Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the game I hoped it would be, Clint Mullins concluded on Quandaryland:

  Many fans of the series feel the game has been designed and changed with the console market in mind. This is probably so and the interface design reflects this, but, in truth, it is easier to use than in previous Elder Scrolls games. One key press brings up a menu from which you can access maps, your inventory, spells and your character statistics. At times you will need to scroll through a long list rather than select an object from an open 'backpack'.

• One of the most broken and monotonous RPG's of recent memory, Jeffrey Graw thinks:

  The hundreds of hours of gameplay almost exclusively consists of roaming dark dungeons that consist of the same textures, and most of the dungeons consist of copied segments from other dungeons. After the first dozen or so dungeons this becomes oh so not fun. Worse yet, there is a huge disparity between the amount of equipment there is to find and the sheer number of dungeons in the game. You won't finish a tenth of the dungeons in the game before the rest have pretty much nothing to offer you, making the dungeon crawling as pointless as it is boring and repetitive.

Radiant A.I.

• Ctrl+Alt+Del on radiant A.I.
• Interview with Gavin Carter