Exilian

I made a specific thread for my Skyrim stuff, but realised we didn't have a more general Elder Scrolls thread.

The reason I realised this is that I'm now tackling Oblivion as a game, with a stabby lil Wood Elf vaguely bardic kinda guy. Not planning to start the main quest for a while, I want to bumble around a bit first. Wish me luck!

Well, been attempting to Oblivion as a fun break from thesis editing. It's my first playthrough. This was an error, it has not been a fun break, I had grossly underestimated how broken the game actually is (or possibly how broken I am in lacking the specific skills of Elder Scrolls combat). I've hit level ten, feel like I've barely started the game, and the combat is getting impossibly grindy and brutal for me. :(

Time to go look for mods maybe? Advice welcome.

So eventually I just turned the difficulty way down and got on with things, going from the 50% to ca 25% difficulty mark has mostly shifted the difficulty to be very very easy, except in very occasional circumstances. I'm one mission off the end of the main quest now, have done Knights of the Nine and a bunch of the local city sidequests. Some thoughts in no very good order:

• The run of closing local Oblivion gates got quite a drag. Babysitting the knights of the Thorn in Cheydinhal was annoying and required a couple of reloads and a lot of slow spellcasting, and I had a grim moment in Leyawiin when I emerged from closing their Oblivion gate to realise there was another Oblivion gate within eyesight and I'd closed the wrong one for the quest. I eventually started speed-running them, which included at one point successfully skipping half a level by going lava diving: I think I had about 1hp left afterwards, but kept going and eventually healed up (restoration, the best spell school).
• I did Peryite's quest when I needed a Daedric artefact, and was really disappointed by Peryite's plane of Oblivion. He's the Prince of Order - why does it look exactly the same as any of Mehrunes Dagon's planes?
• The other big annoyance getting allies for Bruma was who I couldn't ask. Having done Knights of the Nine, my character is literally the grandmaster of an order of knights who could have basically doubled the numbers of the defenders at Bruma AND YET. Also, the number of competent wizards in Cyrodiil and I can take precisely zero of them into the battle under any circumstances? What's with that. I went to try and talk to the Blackwood Company too, on account of them being literal professional mercenaries, but no dice.
• The quest to close the big Bruma gate was the one I nearly failed. I had to look up what to do at one point because I would have taken several runs to find the gate levers otherwise, they were not obvious to me at all and it was all on a timer. Making it more exciting/worse, my sword then broke halfway up the last tower, I just ran for it, then found there was a sigil keeper waiting, I was being chased by several Dremora and had do do a duck and weave FISTFIGHT with the sigil keeper: I was convinced I was dead but with liberal use of potions and the pilgrim's bonus power I did actually manage to knock him out with sixty seconds on the clock, then legged it into the Sigillum and closed the gate with thirty or forty seconds to go. It felt dramatic even if most of the drama was caused by my own incompetence.
• I think every named character who could die without causing a game-over did die at Bruma: not sure if Baurus made it but the Bruma guard captain was downed, as was Jauffre so my guy is never joining the Blades whether he wants to or not.
• Mankar Camoran meanwhile, besides being an elf and a mage not a man and a car which feels like false advertising, went down like a sack of potatoes. The Paradise mission was kind of fun, and I did like Camoran's ranting, but wow was he wildly overestimating his competence in a stand-up fight with someone whose main skills involve running fast and waving a pointy object around. Specifically a pointy object with silencing poison on it, which probably helped: I was on him and had him down in a few hits before he could get much in the way of spells fired off.
• My single absolute favourite discovery in the game is that as "block of cheese" and "wheel of cheese" count as different items for potion ingredients but with the same properties, you can simply combine them in the alchemy menu and make a cheese potion that is 100% made of cheese.

Right, I think I've probably mostly concluded this character's "run": I completed the main quest, did the mage guild storyline (which, amusingly, I did without being a decent spellcaster at all), and a few minor quests like Meridia and Azura's.

• The final main quest mission was honestly annoying, Martin kept getting himself killed SO many times. Couldn't he put on some armour before running out of the tower to go fight things?
• I started and then rowed back on two things and accidentally started a third: for some reason, killing a character in the Mage guild questline was counted as a murder despite the fact it, well, wasn't, he was trying to stab me to death at the time. So I got visited by Lucien LaChance for the Brotherhood, but didn't want to go murdery. I also got annoyed with the Thieves' Guild stuff because it raises infamy and everyone reacts badly to it so I gave up on that and did the whole pilgrimage again to get rid of it. Also poked my nose into the Shivering Isles and... eh, I can see how it might be fun for the right character but it feels like something you'd almost want to throw a whole character at.
• The lockpicking minigame was very annoying, I much preferred Skyrim's. Maybe it's better with a controller?
• The Mage Guild storyline was... sort of fine, but Mannimarco wasn't built up enough as a threat narratively (I know he appears in other Elder Scrolls stuff but the name held no weight for me personally). I'd have found Falcar being the Big Bad much more satisfying because his presence was there through the whole plotline. Also Mannimarco went down about as fast as Mankar Camoran so that gave a sense of anticlimax too.
• Traven could also have been dealt with a bit more as a character. I'd have liked to actually have the PC there at the diastrous council meeting even if you can't change the outcome, and all the rumours we hear about Traven as this personal vendettas and politicking type in the guilds don't really square with the very literally self-sacrificing man you meet.
• Azura and Meridia's quests were both dull, which I was disappointed by. "Go into a hole in the ground and kill undead" is something I might do anyway in this game, with zero resonance to it.
• It felt like there were lots of places I was finding that could or should have had attached events and quests, but I just wasn't finding them, so I'm not sure if Oblivion has a lot more "neutral" locations you can't do anything at than I think, or conversely if there are tons of quest starts that I was just never managing to find.

I'm late to this party, but if anyone's still playing Oblivion, to me, the mods that make it liveable are Better Cities and Unique Landscapes - they really flesh out the world. I also usually played with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. (That said, I'm not sure all these mods are playing nice with each other these days due to updates in some but not others)

Beyond that, I liked the slow plotline of the Stranded: Integration mod (which might not be ideal for a first-time playthrough) and I found it worthwhile to play through Tales of the Fiend, even though it felt more like a standalone game.

I also preferred the guild quests or individual adventuring to the actual main quest.

In my view, TES games in general suffer from lack of character development, which is compensated by the expansive world. It would be nice to have both at once!

Late but still very welcome :)

And ooh, thanks for the recommendations. I haven't picked up Oblivion since I finished my core run of the game, though there's still tons I haven't done: I tried the Shivering Isles stuff a bit but kind of bounced off it, it didn't feel right for my character. I should really try a modded run sometime (indeed I should try a Skyrim run with better mods sometime as well).

What does Stranded: Integration do?

I am back in Tamriel, playing Morrowind! It is as promised which is to say a) why don't more games have the sense of creativity that Morrowind achieves it's a real pity there isn't more pushing the boat with fictional settings, but also b) wow 2002 game design was a different world, I'd be crucified as a solo indie for making some of these game design decisions in 2024.

My character is Tskhova, she's a Bosmer (Wood Elf) battlemage with a penchant for wearing nice dresses along with armour and a talent for alchemy. Having arrived in Morrowind she decided to refuse immediate association with the Blades, given her recent release from prison by the Empire itself, and go straight for plying her trade and working through the ranks of the mages' guild, with the slight disadvantage that the mage's guild actually doesn't pay very well and most of its tasks offered few side-benefits. As such, the life of a low paid research and adventuring assistant developed, which involved considerable danger, occasional grubbing around in the understories of cantons in Vivec, a few nice moments like helping free slaves, and very little coin.

Eventually, after getting some standing in the guild but still with few coins to her name, she has returned to the Blades out of a mix of curiosity and hope for better opportunities, and has been starting to uncover the Nerevarine prophecies, most notably recently learning that they might actually involve her directly.

Other observations:

• Lots of people hate Tskhova because of her earnest attempts to compliment them falling worse than flat. Tskhova might be the most neurodivergent-coded character I've ever played in a game thanks to this dynamic.
• I like the fact she can wear a skirt over greaves. Solid look.
• I am levelling with extremely poor optimisation, in part because speed skills keep levelling uncontrollably because there is SO MUCH WALKING.
• I continue to love the Dwemer stuff in the Elder Scrolls, looking forward to seeing more of it later in this game.
• I love the ecology of Morrowind, it's very alien but in a way that still clicks with the particular fantasy culture around it.
• I am having to look stuff up often, I have no idea what this game was like for early players before that was possible. Annoyingly this means I now know much of how the main quest develops because other articles reference it so often :(