Here’s the text from the introductory Readme, posted because I tried to give a nice shoutout to the site here and those who inspired the creation of POOP.
A Brief History Of POOP:
Coming up with a community-distributed mod package is nothing new. The popular “Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul” is rather the same thing. Going back to the days of Morrowind, a brilliant fellow named Blackhawk came up with a DVD’s worth of essential mods that could be burned to DVD for ease of install.
For me, I picked up Oblivion the day it came out, and was immediately enthralled by the possibilities. The game world was beautiful, the possibilities for gaming goodness seemed limitless…and then like any cranky gamer, after a few hours I started to notice some warts. My Athlon 3000+ CPU and Nvidia 6800 GT video card—not slouches by 2006 standards—struggled with the graphics at times. There were framerate stutters, as well as anomalies with popup trees and blurry distant landscapes. Leaving the graphics aside, I think (and so do a lot of folks) that the designers of Oblivion made one of the most questionable game design decisions in modern history with the game’s leveling system. In an un-modded game of Oblivion, the monsters and NPC’s level with you, and it was entirely possible to level up based on non-combat skills and find yourself at level 20 getting slaughtered by water rats and mud crabs if you weren’t careful. (I exaggerate, but you get the picture).
Enter Lum, a poster at Quarter To Three. Lum put together the first unified pack of Oblivion mods—in the OMOD format (more on that in a sec) that I’d seen. Sadly, my problems with not having the hardware horses to run the game with all the mods Lum included was frustrating and I dropped the game again. A few months later Shivering Isles came out and rendered some of the mods in that pack obsolete.
Along came Jason McCullough, another Qt3 poster. He had the next unified pack of Mods I’d seen all ready to go…and then Bethesda patched Oblivion to version 1.2, again breaking a lot of the mods. Ouch.
And so here we are. I figure this is a good time for this for the following reasons:
- Lots of us have the hardware horses to handle Oblivion now—an E8400 dual-core CPU will only set you back $180 if you shop around.
- I think Bethesda is done with new versions or patches for Oblivion, so no need to worry that a new version of the game or expansion will break these.
The Tao of POOP: Why These Mods And Not Those?
Ask ten hardcore Oblivion players who sling mods around their game which of those are essential and you’ll get ten different lists. The lists change, too, as newer mods come out that build on what previous mods were able to accomplish. Worth considering too is the advice of Blackhawk, creator of the GoneGold/Octopus Overlords Morrowind Mods DVD. Many of us have pestered BH over the years for his list of Oblivion mods, and every time he’s demurred by explaining that Oblivion is a totally different animal from Morrowind. With Morrowind, things were a bit more cut and dried, but Oblivion is so open-ended and moddable that mods make it possible to play the game however it suits your individual taste.
That’s a great philosophy, but it sucks for me and players like me. After upgrading my rig, I’d set aside an entire empty weekend to really get into Oblivion…only to be paralyzed by the sheer freedom of choice the thousands of mods out there offer. I’d read about a mod and think “That sounds kind of cool”, only to install it and have someone with more game experience than I say “Sweet Moses, no! That mod conflicts with This Mod, and This Mod is essential!” I’d end up never getting the game off the ground, honestly.
A few months ago, though thread at the late(?), lamented Octopus Overlords forum on Oblivion Mods finally coaxed Blackhawk into posting his loadout. Others posted their respective loadouts as well, and it became obvious that, 2 years after release, there was actually some consensus forming on which mods were worth using. Over the next few months, with a ton of trial and mostly error, a group of a half-dozen or so of us at OO and Popehat’s forums came up with a list of mods, and I stupidly decided to try to put them together in an omnibus fashion.
So what mods made the cut and why? You can put these mods into several categories, but my biggest yen here was to come up with a list of mods that made Oblivion really sing, graphically, for modern dual-core CPU’s and GPU’s. I’m a fan of “gameplay”, and love old-style games from the day…but face it: anyone who owns an Nvidia 8xxx card or higher is a graphics whore at heart. First and foremost, many of the mods in POOP will help you embrace your inner graphics slut. Having shlupped around Tamriel for hours through a variety of weather and terrain, I think the mods here make a pretty game look downright gorgeous. The world of Cyrodiil, post-modding, will fire your imagination, like almost nothing else in gaming.
The next big category of mods were mods to address gameplay issues. The biggest of these involves stuff that changes the odd and (in my opinion anyway) rather dysfunctional experience/leveling mechanic. There are mods for NPC behavior, mods that fix un-fixed and unpatched areas of the game, and even a few housekeeping tasks.
Finally, there are some very involving, very, very enjoyable side-quests included. Install them all, or install none, as you like. The quests are well-written, graphically stunning, and don’t break the play balance of the game.
The other goal I had for this was to make installation as easy as possible. I found that even if you had a list of mods and a central location to find them all, that you’d still spend hours upon hours upon hours loading them, rearranging them, fixing botched installs, etc. Etc. One of the things I wanted to do with this was to make it so that a person, given maybe a free evening or two could get a vanilla installation of Oblivion modded up heavily and still have time to, you know, play the dadgum game. Thankfully, a third-party utility called the Oblivion Mod Manager (hereafter known as OBMM) makes installing a snap, thanks to using proprietary files called OMODs which, if scripted by someone correctly, should install with the click of a mouse. For everything in this big pile of POOP, push-button installation was a must.
As Marty DiBergi would say, enough of my yakkin’. Let’s rock.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
The whole crew at OO and Popehat who encouraged and contributed and tested to get this done, especially Brian_HBZ at Popehat who did some of the most awesome scripting for OMODS I’ve ever seen. Blackhawk, rrmorton, RunningBrian, Ken, and so many others I’ve forgotten to thank did yeoman work to put this POOP in your hands.
Thanks too to the crew at QuarterToThree. Still the most thoughtful and braniacal gaming forum I know of, even if you do have to wear a flame-retardant suit at times. Lum and Jason McCullough and Kunikos (who is probably even right now typing up a post there bemoaning that there aren’t at least 75 other “essential” mods included in POOP…;)) especially for original inspiration here.
Thanks also to Dev_AKM. His site at http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/home is amazing, and was a tremendous resource in explaining how to get this solid mass of POOP to run, and suggesting the best in texture mods.
Finally, most importantly, thanks to the Modders. The pieces that make up this splendidly large POOP are as professionally done as any professional developers, and almost all of these were done with people’s spare time, and for free. Thanks a ton guys, the fun I (and hopefully soon, others) will have playing with their own POOP can’t ever be repaid.
