I played Oblivion, briefly, a couple of years back and never really liked it. Still, I enjoyed Skyrim and thought “what the heck” when it came up as a GOTY for $4.99 recently (unfortunately, I didn’t know about the Steam super-secret “GOTY deluxe” edition that includes several of the missing DLCs, but I digress). The fact that my “gaming” computer is down for the count and I’m stuck on a crappy laptop that doesn’t have a dedicated video card explains part of my willingness to explore old ground, as well.
However, there were two problems I knew I’d be facing out of the box. First of all, Dead Island killed any interest I might have had left in a “leveled” world that centers around the player. It flat-out doesn’t make sense and leads to weird swings in difficulty where the player’s gear+stats don’t keep up with what the game thinks of their combat abilities. Why should things like your skill as a merchant make monster stronger?
The second problem with Oblivion is that its leveling system was apparently designed by a drunken monkey. The stat bonuses you get from leveling depend on the skills points that gain you a level. So, if you want to be a trader and pick Mercantile as a major skill, then level a couple of times based on just mercantile, you’ll get a lot of bumps to Personality, but few to Endurance and Strength, which actually keep you alive in battle. This is made worse by the fact that your enemies level along with you and they aren’t gaining their levels from tradesmanship.
The main method for getting around this in the past was a method called “minors as majors” whereby a player would choose their preferred skills as minors rather than majors and control their leveling until they had gained precise levels of skills to get their desired stat bonuses. Really, that’s stupid.
So, with the GOTY on sale, I decided to give Oblivion another shot. Before I did, I knew I was going to mod the heck out of it, but I wanted to keep the scope of the mods to addressing the two above problems. To that end, I decided to install FCOM (which is a massive set of mods and a mod on top of those to make them play nice) and Oblivion XP. FCOM changes the monsters of the world completely, adding new ones, making their spawns more numerous, but most importantly, making their levels not depend on the player’s level. Oblivion XP (specifically, Oblivion XP Update) simply rips out the entire Oblivion leveling system and replaces it with an XP based system.
Most of what you need to know about FCOM is here. The rest is here (including the updated data on how to install MMM).
Despite the length of the process (it took several hours to get everything loaded), it was relatively simple to install everything, provided you can follow directions carefully. If you’re not familiar with modding Bethesda games, this process will be a whole lot harder than if you are.
So… it was time to start things up. I clicked “new” and got a character face I could live with (a wood elf, as I’m going with a stealth type) and the tutorial went the way the tutorial goes… up until I realized that running up to fight the mystic dawn guys was actually kind of dangerous. Two rats knocked me to half health and I pushed on. More rats, a stubborn zombie, and some goblins later, I’d reached the conclusion that marksmanship was definitely the way to go. Fighting in melee was dangerous and hitting from range seemed to be head and shoulders above it in terms of effectiveness.
At a certain point, I rejoined the guards as they fought through the mystic dawn guys and I hung back. When they left me alone with the emperor… I managed to get killed by the guy that assassinated him. Yeah. I died in the tutorial.
Fortunately, I’d become quite a believer in the quicksave button by that point so I was out only a few minutes of playtime.
Still, that is a lesson that stayed with me through the rest of that first level. The player is fragile. The player has to be smarter than his foes to survive.
This was only reinforced when the first thing I encountered on the starting island (in the shadow of the imperial city’s walls) was a pair of red skinned goblins called Fallen. It took quite a bit of work to bring them down as they were clearly my betters in melee and only careful use of a bow and evasion saw me through to victory.
Inside the city, things were calmer. I found refuge within the walls and did a bit of nosing around. A lot of the garbage I was carrying became coin and I found a few useful supplies for the road ahead. One thing was clear, though, that road was not going to be following the main quest for a while.
A quick fight in the arena proved again the usefulness of the bow, as the level 3 gladiator trying to kill me eventually fell over. It was well worth the cash, at least, and the free armor was nicer than the sack cloth I’d been wearing. Eventually, though, the road called and I headed outside the city… but not off the island. Instead, I went to Dzonot cave on the west side. After three reloads, I had to admit that the Amazons there were simply too strong and took myself to the north side of the island and the Sinkhole Cave.
A couple of giant rats fell to my blade (yay, something that dies!) and I spotted the fire of the camp outside the cave in the distance. Again, quicksave is the single most important button in the game as the two or three bandits I expected turned out to be half a dozen that turned into a dozen once one ran for help. Another attempt at the camp worked better, using a combination of stealth sniping and hit and run tactics. Afterward, I pressed on into the cave, finding it depleted of bandits (they must have run out to kill me, earlier). The last section of the cave has plenty of bandits, but hit-and-run again proved successful. The boss was a level 3 wizard, which figures. A wizard did it.
Annoyingly, I can’t open one of the treasure chests, but the other provides lots of nice loot for my war coffers. On the way out, I find out that those bandits that were missing? Well, they’re back. Another wizard and three outlaws bar my path and I have to resort to hit and run attacks and stealth again to get past them.
I manage to get back to town, broken and bloody… but enriched by murder. And I’m still 20% or so short of level 2. A bit of snooping around in the Imperial City (and a fight in a locked room with a level 5 warrior) later, I managed my first level up.
After that, I hit Sideways Cave (also in the shadow of the Imperial City) and took on the foes there much more easily. I’m still not level 3, but I think I’ve seen enough of FCOM to give you an idea of whether or not it’s worthwhile.
I did make a few side-trips to other areas, and I can say that getting between cities is a harrowing ordeal. Even getting to the first fence for the Thieve’s Guild is likely to take several attempts. Oddly enough, running through the wilderness is safer than following the roads as you have a greater chance of avoiding monster spawns altogether.
So… is FCOM worth the painstaking hours of installation?
I think so, yes. It definitely makes the game harder, but it also gives you a greater sense of accomplishment for succeeding. Every dungeon is exciting because it’s filled with hostile creatures just waiting to eat your face off.
On the down side, all of those monsters can really eat up your CPU cycles and the gameplay seems to reward stealth and hit-and-run tactics over anything else. If you like to charge in to battle, it may be unplayable. Some of the custom items and monsters added by the mods are also kind of ugly.
Oblivion XP Update was the other major mod I tried and I like it, in general. You lose the cool part of Oblivion’s leveling system (which is that using a skill makes it better), but you trade that for ease of leveling certain skills which you don’t want to have to level that way (mercantile being a big one) and a removal of the parts of the leveling system that don’t make much sense.
In the end, I don’t think FCOM is for me, though. 0
Next up, I’m going to try the game with just OOO and Realistic Leveling.