I can completely identify with what you're saying - and that's just ONE mod ! When you have several mods installed you don't know whether a bug might be caused by a single mod or by a conflict between mods. Patience is definitely a virtue when you're trying to get these things to work, especially for inexperienced modders like me. I usually persevere though and some of the mods are so good that the effort is worth it. Nexus : that's where I found all my mods too, thanks for reminding me of that.

I'm not a modder, but I know how to install and use mods for most of the games. I just didn't expect problems that huge from a mod that only adds extra horse inventory...

on a sidenote, I can't believe noone at Bethesda thought horses should have more uses than just to speed up the speed travel.

Especially when my character on foot is already faster than a horse.

Oh yeah, this is very true. Whatever team is responsible for world building, they clearly know what they're doing. It's not only cities, but many of the caves and ruins are designed perfectly. They tell their own story, like a vampires cave I stumbled upon, with bloody altair, dug up graves and shit. Very good designing indeed.

It is called environmental storytelling, and it is where both Oblivion and Skyrim excels. Fallout 3 was also good at this, New Vegas not as much...

You tend to find that games typically favors one over the other, it depends on what the developers are good at. I think I prefer environmental to narrative storytelling, then it is more up to the player what s/he takes out of it, and not so much what the writer wants to tell you.

It is also more difficult to get right, I feel.

The best thing is when they manage to combine both, but I agree with you, this "environmental storytelling" is pretty impressive in Oblivion.

which also made Oblivion very immersive, in my opinion. :)

It makes you much more discover things, places and stories. You are exploring. Not just told to go there because a NPC in some storyline tells you to go there and what you will find.

In this regard Oblivion is better than Skyrim, actually.

edit - having considered a little I retract the last statement, Skyrim does just as well as Oblivion. :)

Eeeh... Yeah, you need patience for modding, and some mods are just more stable / working than others. You just have to be good at searching and you have to read documentation carefuly (that bug you have encoutered might even have been triggered by first turning the mod on and then installing dependencies). At any case, when I have been playing Oblivion, I've had about 60 mods installed (about half of those from mod compilations) and the game worked perfectly fine for dozens of hours that I have played it. And it weren't small modifications either - it were massive changes to the landscape to make it more varied and interesting, complete overhaul of levelled lists, addition of completely new mechanics (basic needs mechanics for instance) and a graphics injector running on top of all of that. And it all worked quite simply by me following the readme files to the letter.

My disliking for this particular actor's voice is not strong and in any case it's just my subjective opinion - others will disagree I'm sure - but in any case using the same person over and over again for many different NPCs is anti-immersive and not a great idea in my view : it's just another way of making NPCs more generic. This was a VERY big budget game if I'm not mistaken but they seem to me to have cut corners with the voice acting somewhat. I will have to play it again to confirm or disconfirm my vague recollections though ..

I do agree that the dialogue system and the voice acting in Oblivion were a step up from those used in Morrowind. I think there is still a lot of room for improvement though. I haven't played Skyrim yet so I don't know how it compares with the earlier games.

This thread seems to be becoming more and more positive towards Oblivion, with a lot of caveats however, despite keeveek's original post, but I can definitely see why he started the thread because my experience of playing TES games has always been a love / hate thing, but ultimately I think they are both flawed masterpieces.

Personally I find the voice acting to be a mixed bag. The actual voicing was all professionally done, but there were only eleven actual voice actors for the entire array of characters. When you add in that the act of voicing anything AT ALL greatly reduces the depth of the dialog compared to text, it becomes a lot murkier. I greatly enjoyed being able to get detailed cultural and geographical information about Morrowind, for example. In Oblivion, if you ask someone about a town, you generally get a single blurb and nothing more. Yes, the blurbs were unique to each character, but you ended up having to interrogate virtually every citizen of a town just to figure out what was going on there.

So while it's nice to actually hear more voiced dialog than "I have a feeling that you and I are about to become VERY CLOSE" and "Move along, citizen," I find that I greatly prefer text-based dialog systems to voiced ones. If a wordy game like PS:T was made today, it would be fully voiced and would lose at least half of its depth in exchange for brevity.

Considering they hired Patrick Stewart to provide the voice of Uriel Septim VII, I wouldn't be suprised if that ended up eating a significant chunk of the VA budget.

Anyway, speaking for myself, I could have pointed out the numerous flaws that Oblivion has. However, I decided not to, simply beacuse the game's failings have been well detailed and explained by numerous individuals at this point (as proven by the videos that have been linked). Plus, the OP already opened this thread on a negative note, so I thought that pointing out some of Oblivion's more positive parts would make for a good counterbalance and thus make for a more interesting discussion.

Since we are on the subject of mods, I think anyone interested in playing (open world) RPGs (even those who aren't interested in mods) should consider it almost mandatory to apply fan-made patches/fix packs. The fact is that, in spite of the best efforts of the development team, the sheer scale of such games practically ensures that numerous bugs and glitches will remain unresolved by official patches (not that bugs are necessarilly a bad thing in every case, but still). Applying fan-made patches/fix packs from the get go ensures that you will have a much smoother and enjoyable experience.

As a former modder, Oblivion included, I can tell you that you are not alone. There are lots of players who have major issues because they did not read the readme included with the mod. I don't know what other games you have used mods for but I can tell you first hand that Bethesda games can be much more complex than simply checking a box or copy pasitng a folder. Modders create the readmes to answer all common questions, but no matter how well we spell things out there are always people leaving comments about how terrible the mod is because it doesn't do what it's supposed to. As a caring modder should we rush to the aid of this poor soul who is denegrating our work only to find that all their problems could have been solved had the simply read the readme. Eventually a modder gets jaded and refuses to answer any questions that are already covered in the readme. I know of one mod that had at the end of the readme a line of code for the player to put in the console command. It was something like "Set IReadTheReadRMe to 1" If you didn't do this then your character would be instantly killed a short while later. I thought this was kind of overboard at first, but sure enough the comments section was filled with people saying that they keep dieing and don't know why. They would swear up and down that they read everything, but still didn't understand what was happening. On the other hand there were almost no "I can't figure out what this button does" or "This part isn't working for me" questions because people who got that far had fully read the readme.

If you want to swear off all mods then that is up to you, it makes no difference to me how you play. But I would suggest that you don't judge all modding based on this one mod that you installed wrong.

Sorry, but if someone makes a mod and doesn't care enough to inform me before I install the mod (yes, I read the entire mod description) that it requires some additional DLLs that are not included in the package (because probably some other elitist prick a.k.a. pro modder forbid him from including it in the zip), I couldn't care less.

It's my game, it's my time, and I don't have time to spend 1 hour on finding, installing, entering command lines and other shit to make mod to work.

People here said Oblivion engine is superior when it comes to mod implementation. If something as simple as additional storage for horse requires so much hassle, I don't want to know more about it, and I will be fine playing vanilla.

Just because someone made some mod that barely works (even after correct installation), it doesn't mean I should kneel before him and praise him for his work.

But yeah, I believe because you are a modder, a pack mentality kicks into you and passive aggressive behaviour by default.

And I'm not saying all modders are bad, I never even implied it. What I meant was this engine is buggy as it is in vannila, so I don't need more bugs in my game. I blame the buggy engine, not the modders. I may be also an incopeten fool who after 13 years of intensive PC gaming doesn't know how to install mods for the game. Whatever makes you feel better about yourself.

Ps. If you're a professional modder, I appreacieate your work, but don't make me praise you for it.

It is fantastic when it comes to mods implementation actually, I don't think I have ever seen a game which can be modified this much. The fact that there are mods which require other mods is... Well, I would say it's unfortunate, but there are so many fantastic mods which require script extender that I just can't do anything but say 'Yay!' At any rate, while I agree that it should have been included in the description, the readme file is usually there for a reason you know. And there are actually mods to fix the engine as well :-p

Did you play Dragon Ball or Worms 3D on Half-Life engine? Because I did :P

By the way, I was more infuriated by Bethesda than on the mod creator. First, when something as basic as using horses for carrying your shit didn't cross their minds, and then their engine is so wrong it requires so much extra work to add extra inventory on a horse...