Top mods - Total War and Oblivion

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Generally speaking, it is best to look at the mods available for a game after maybe a year or so has elapsed. This gives the die hard and devoted fans enough time to get some serious amounts of work done, it filters out most of the half baked ZOMG I want a giant axe of splat the world! style mods, and it allows those projects that never make it out of the pipe-dream stage time to flourish, die and be cleared out of the link pages. However when a game like Oblivion comes along that manages to be so agonisingly close to perfect, so easy to modify and so damn pretty to boot you just have to shop around and see what's there to be had, regardless of the fact it was only released a couple of months ago.

One of the most common complaints about Oblivion is the level system, and these complaints are pretty well founded. Anybody who has played the game through is aware of the shortcomings. Basically, because the game scales the content to your level, by gaining levels all you are really doing is beefing up the baddies. This means that you can run through much of the game at low level completing supposedly epic quests just by stabbing a few scamps - and also that when you do level up good and high, you spend the rest of your days fighting about the same eight types of enemy.


Obscuro's Oblivion Overhaul version 1.23 is the best mod so far to fix the level system, as well as to tweak the combat AI, add a few sets of armour and some new enemies. It is available, like many hundreds of other Oblivion modifications, from Oblivion Source. Obscuro's Overhaul changes the levels of some NPCs in the game, fixing them at certain levels, meaning that when you are low level the world is a mean and unforgiving place and that when you are high level the place is still mean and unforgiving, but due to some minor adjustments to the spawns you'll still find rats and cute low level monsters to drop kick around the forest. Because it changes NPC levels that are fixed when the game starts up, for Obscuro's mod to work you need to start the game from scratch with it activated. Other notable changes in this mod are that looting has changed with gems, jewellery and fine clothing now worth much more money despite being practically useless.

Naturally with a game like Oblivion it can be tempting to take on a mod job or two yourself. This is not so hard as it might seem, because those lovely people at Bethesda have released the Oblivion map creation toolset for the public and it can be found on the official website. This utility is not for the squeamish, it's a proper hard core game development utility. Thankfully, there is a a brilliantly informative Wiki on how to use it located here.

With the tools and the know-how freely available, it won't be long before we're swimming in a sea of player built areas for Oblivion, but there is also a lot of hands-on modding that can be done to the game itself. Ashton Mills' exhaustive guide at Atomic covers everything you need to know about tailoring the settings manually in-game to optimise the game for your own personal preferences. Since Oblivion doesn't have in-game controls to push the graphics beyond what an Xbox360 can do this needs to be done manually in the config file, but with a little careful tinkering, great results can be achieved and Xbox 360 owners laughing at the fact your graphics card cost more than their console can finally be silenced.

It will be a while before we start to see the fruits of Bethesda's magnanimous release of their tool set, but already some total conversions seem to be in the pipeline, with some of the most promising being a mod set in Middle Earth being developed in German and the Life Of A Slave mod being worked on by Impossible Studios.