I still use OOO. And a few others for better steathing as the original system is rubbish.

Karl

Francesco's is VERY outdated, I recommend Oscuro's over it
http://devnull.sweetdanger.net/
also the rest of the site is very cool to read, many great mods there :) Just stay away from FCOM, unless you have a few days to experiment with its installation

I do also recommend Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul or OOO as it is also known.

This along with the unofficial patch and something to make the UI better is the only thing you will need. (Though you can add many mods if you want. If you want to add many mods I recommend that you read a bit about it to avoid conflicts. It is easier to just add a few and play.)

OOO fixes the level scaling problem and adds many more things to make the game more interesting and also more challenging. It is like adding many different mods for many things except that they have all been designed to work together, the game is and all the additions are balanced together.

OOO is very easy to install also.

If you want to dedicate a lot of time to Installing and learning to install it, I've heard that FCOM can be the greatest Oblivion experience. It builds upon OOO but adds many things like Martigens monsters, parts of Francesco's mod and more. BUT if you do not want to dedicate a lot of time to setting it up it is better to stay away.

Yes, provided you have some time AND you read readmes and dedicated websites, FCOM is absolutely unavoidable. I wouldn't even try to reinstall Oblivion without it.

Bethesda still sells some DLC for Oblivion, some of which is good, some of which is "meh". The prices they've set for said DLC are very fair, and reflect the amount of content contained in each package. Content packages include Horse Armor, a new Thieves' Den, a couple of fairly large new dungeons, each with unique items in them.

There's a mod series called "Real Swords", and it's basically a collection of new weapons unique to each nation. For example, the Nord package contains weapons based in "real world" Viking swords, the Breton package has English longswords, etc.

"Crossbows of Cyrodiil" is a must.

A couple of personal indulgences are Tyrael Armor (from Diablo II), and the Soul Reaver sword.


www.tesnexus.com is the place for most of the best mods.

seconded. Great compilation of great mods

I also love Francesco's mod; it's the only mod I would consider essential. I prefer it to Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul because Francesco's is modular, and lets you install only those things that you want. If you only want to fix the level scaling (which is the main feature) you can do that and nothing else. If you also want to add some user-made weapons and armor, you can do that. User-made monsters, you can do that too. Level up more slowly, so you're not maxed out before the end? You can add that. How about some day/night cycle tweaks? Each piece is independent and can be mixed and matched to get what you want.

To my knowledge, Oscuro's does not have this modular feature. So you either have to want EVERYTHING in the mod (and it's a big mod) or you can't use it. But I have never used it, so someone please correct me if I am wrong about this.

You might want to get some of the body replacers if you are planning on adding a lot of user-made armor and clothing to the game. A lot of that equipment is designed to fit on the user-made body meshes rather than the original. I think that Robert's Male Body and Robert's Female Body are considered the best, but I have not checked in a while. Beware, these body replacer mods have nude options, but they have clothed versions too.

People have already mentioned the UI mods which are good to have too. I used a really old one called BTMod that kept the same color scheme but made the text smaller and allowed you to view more items at once in the inventory. Most people seem to prefer either DarkUI or DarnUI, neither of which I have tried myself.

I also like Darker Dungeons, which makes dungeons really dark and forces you to use a torch. But it might be a little game-breaking for a sneaky character who would have too easy of a time sneaking around in the dark. So only use it if you're not playing a sneaky character.

On Francesco : yes, the modularity of it is very very enjoyable. The problem is that some of those functionality are now better managed by more recent mods. So I generally install a "barebone" Francesco's i.e. without the day length or leveling options.

OOO is pretty modular too, in its last version. You can now choose if you want or not options like Living Economy or Harvest Flora (a great mod that visually removes parts of plants you harvested, showing you that you harvested them and you don't have to bother about them until the next season). The thing is that, for OOO too, those options are most of the time outdated. That's the problem about compilations mods. But you can still install OOO, canceling the install of those options and then install up-to-date versions of those options later.

Here's my base for Oblivion modding :
- Obilivion Mod Manager
- Wrye Bash (its Bashed Patch feature really helps to solve compatibility problems when you have lots of mods)
- OOO+Francesco+Martigern Monster Mod+Oblivion Warcry+FCOM : the base for the complete Oblivion Overhaul.
- Darnified DarkUI : one of the best interfaces out there.
- Animated Windows and Lighting System : the best lighting overhaul
- All Natural : a complete overhaul of the climate system
- Realisitc Leveling (to manage your XP progression) ; there are other good alternatives, like Oblivion XP, nGCD, Progress, etc...
- Enhanced Economy : complete overhaul of the economy.
- Robert Male's Body and Exnem HGEC female body : two of the best mods for body replacers.
- Map Marker Overhaul : a great overhaul of the functionality of the map system, lets you write your own labels, lets you display exactly the categories you want to see, lets you manage if you want to enable fast travel or not.
- Race Balancing Project : overhaul of the existing races with a complete rebalance, with also a complete rebalance of the zodiac signs and the professions.

That's what I consider as an absolute must. All the other mods, texture packs, etc. are, in my opinion, optional. But lots of them are excellent and deserve your attention too! ^_^

To be fair I haven't played oblivion in some time. I bought it again on steam recently along with the expansions but it won't work properly. All I ever get is the music, no other sounds and it's too loud & can't be rebalanced. It's a known problem and neither of Obsidians pathetic solutions are acceptable to me.

One is to uninstall all 3rd party sound managers... which I won't do because one of them is necessary for decent sound in a few games I own and the other is AC3filter which I am fond of as the rubbish drivers for my soundchip don't let me output 5.1 to SPDIF. Their other solution is to turn hardware acceleration for audio down to minimum. So I guess I'll just wait and see if Skyrim is any good. (I hope it is but given how buggy & consolified Oblivion, Fallout 3, New Vegas etc were I don't hold out much hope...)

So you don't recommend the unofficial patches at all?

Thanks for this. Do you know if the system requirements are much higher for FCOM compared to a base installation?

Ah, sorry, I didn't mention the unofficial patches because I play with french unofficial patches. These french unofficial patches are made from the "original" unofficial patches but her creator found multiple errors in the english ones, sent suggestions to the modders of the unofficial patches and... just got the cold shoulder from them. So she developed her own, french, version, which are much less buggy and much more accurate than the original ones. But yes, unofficial patches are a good addition to my list nevertheless.
Higher, yes. Much higher, not really, as all natural and awls are really polished and thus are not a burden to the system, and the other overhauls are just that: overhauls. So, even if they add content (monsters, clutter, items...), they don't add hypercomplex structures or heavy textures. So you shouldn't see much difference FPS-wise with or without FCOM.

That's also why I didn't mention any texture packs. Those one can really be killers, like Qarl Texture Pack III (I use the "redimized" version, still much more detailed than vanila textures but streamlined to be a little easier to handle by your system).

Maybe I will try FCOM then. Do recommend using the old Martigens Monster Mod 3.7b3 Public Release that this version of FCOM was made for or would a newer version of Martigens work just as fine or better?

Well I got FCOM installed and the game is running fine but I have the big yellow squares of missing meshes... *sigh*