Old Elder Scrolls

[Havik79]

So I got an email from humble bundle, with Morrowind, and Oblivion on sale.

 

What are peoples thoughts of these games, I never played them.

 

I see nexus mod manager support both of them, so I assume mods are easy to upgrade.

 

I also see sex mods for Oblivion, is there any for Morrowind, or at least something like cbbe for either of them.

[Nazzzgul666]

Imho Morrowind was the best, i loved both the main and side quests, very well done. The biggest problem i have now is that it's not very well balanced, so knowing the three steps to get imba is a problem for replayability, i suggest you don't spoiler yourself.

 

I didn't like Oblivion that much, mostly because you can't just ignore the main story and do everything else or it'll become at least annoying to do so. But otherwise it was still a pretty good game, i still can recommend that one too. But back in the days i played them i didn't even know about mods so i can't tell or recommend anything in this respect.

[Guest]

Morrowind is the best TES game and well worth playing. It has great mods in general but is lacking in sex mod department, there is Romance mod https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/6932 that lets you romance others, go on dates, have sex, get married and have children or just prostitute yourself.

 

There was also two big quest mods http://mw.modhistory.com/download-70-5116 http://mw.modhistory.com/download-70-11514 with romances.

 

In my opinion Oblivion is a horrible game and only worth playing for adult mods, but all of them Skyrim does better so there is no real reason to play it or waste dozens of hours installing mods.

[Zillier]

Morrowind is one of the best as you have been told lots of good mods

Oblivion Is also fun not the best but I do suggest trying it again lots of good mods one I like is Enhanced Daedric Invasion https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/9858/

Deadly Reflex - Combat  https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/8273/

But I do recommend to play both without mods first

[Just Checking]

I fully recommend both games, and I'll lay out why below, but I'll spoiler it so it doesn't take up too much space.  I'll do a pros and cons of both games and a small summary of my thoughts on them so you can decide for yourself if it sounds like it'll be worth it.  Just keep in mind a lot of this is my opinion, others may have a different take on it.

 

Morrowind Pros

 

 

 

 

1.  I too am a massive Morrowind fanboy, and for good reason.  It had the most unique world I had ever seen when I first played it, and it is still the most unique Elder Scrolls experience.  The world is alien and chock full of an unbelievable amount of lore, the guilds feel like organizations trying to make money and further their agendas with you being a member of that system, rather than in later games where you a hero that would save said guild from ruin at the hands of whoever didn't like them that time.  Morrowind had a very distincive feeling to it.  Everything from architecture, to armor and weapons, to the unique Dunmer culture the game revolves around.  There is a huge amount to discover, and if you like, or at least don't mind old school style games where there aren't waypoints and you have to follow directions and look at your map once in a while, you'll find an enormous land full of hidden treasures and quests.  You can also sequence break damn near everything if you find things like artifacts and certain quest locations before you're supposed to and just skip huge swathes of the game, though consequences be on you for whatever you missed and can no longer go back for.  Oh also remember when I mentioned lore?  You will absolutely never find weirder or more unique lore in a game than what was written to flesh out Morrowind.  The whole thing reads like a peyote fueled fever nightmare and it's actually pretty cool shit.  If you played Skyrim and thought the world was in depth, I humbly posit that you're straight up wrong because there's so much attention to detail and care put into building Morrowind that you'd be forgiven for thinking Dunmer culture was copied straight from a real thing. 

 

2.  Spellmaking exists in this game and is very, very readily available.  There's a huge number of spell effects, not all useful perhaps but there for you to use nonetheless.  If you're like me you'll want to look into these because they can save you a lot of hassle when trying to wrestle with this game's older systems.  And the spell making is pretty fun, and very cheeseable.  Same with enchanting, though any worthwhile enchantment has to be made using an actual enchanter, who will make the item for you with no chance of failure at an exorbitant price.  Still, by the time you're done you'll probably have crazy amounts of wealth so why no make that full suit of armor that makes you totally immune to nearly all forms of damage and lets you jump across the planet, right?

 

3.  Both DLCs were fantastic and added onto the game in delightful ways, except for one potentially serious nuisance that I will touch on later.  Each section of the game, in terms of DLC and base game, also has its own feeling and look.  Vvardenfel, the island the main game takes place on, merges swamplands, sub-tropical wetlands, wide grassy plains and ash choked, volcanic hellholes into a land that feels and looks very diverse, with guilds and great houses each staking claim in certain areas where you can see that factions influence coming through more prominently.  The almost paradise like city of Mournhold in which the Tribunal DLC takes place is meant to be the capitol of Morrowind, and it's big and grand enough to really feel like it.  Fancy stone, imposing guards, an enormous temple, a royal palace and the quintessential sewers no self respecting RPG would be caught without make it feel like a real DnD style adventure through a twisting city where the idyllic appearance belies the intrigue, treachery and power jockeying lurking just beneath the surface, a prime example of dark elven culture as laid out in the base game.  Finally, Bloodmoon takes the player to Solstheim, an island north of Morrowind you might be somewhat familiar with if you played the Dragonborne DLC in Skyrim.  This Soltheim won't be what you remember though.  Since this game takes place long before the Red Year, there's no ash fall that far north, and by extension the island is much closer to Skyrim's climate, with alpine forests along the southern reaches and frozen wastes and mountains as you move north.  You'd probably think it'd feel like a return to the atmosphere in Skyrim, but I always found Solstheim much more brutal and savage.  The creatures in this one are distinctly designed for a higher level character to be fighting and even low level enemies can be a problem if you're not too well prepared.  Each segment of the game feels very much like its own and all have fun aspects you don't find in the others.

 

4.  Lots of mods exist for this game, the modding community is old as hell, after all.  Some of them are genuinely very impressive given the limited technology of Morrowind, and I await the day Tamriel Rebuilt finally gets finished with bated breath.  I myself don't use many mods, mostly small quality of life things.  The reason for this is because I play Elder Scrolls 3, 4 and 5 for all different, respective reasons, and Morrowind is the ES title I play when I want to play the game Bethesda designed and gave us.  However, I have looked at a lot of Morrowind's best mods and there is a lot to be found there, they're really cool was to just add onto the game in not too over the top ways.  

 

5.  Small one, but Morrowind has a lot more character building options than later games.  It has more skills, more weapon types, a large variety of armor and a lot more armor slots.  Everything you can equip can be enchanted either to be cast like a spell or to provide a constant effect like in later games and it adds a lot of options for your early playstyle before you figure out the games quirks and steamroll your way into becoming an unstoppable wall of impenetrable enchantments with a backpack full of seven thousand different magic rings.

 

6.  This game is super full of fun little bits and pieces to learn how to exploit.  If you've ever played a game with that one broken ass feature that can be used to bulldoze through the whole thing if you learn how to do it, Morrowind will be your favourite game because there's at least a dozen different ways to do that.

 
 

 

 

Morrowind Cons

 

 

 

 

1.  Shit tons of reading.  A lot of voiced lines in the game, and off the top of my head maybe 14 of them are story related, all the rest is combat taunts, ambient nonsense dialogue and NPC greetings when you walk close.  Everything else is written and you need to read it in text boxes.  And remember when I said there was a lot of lore and world building?  All text.  Books and conversations with NPCs.  Crazy, crazy amounts of reading.  To the point that if they could cram any more in, it would have been a text based game.  Not a problem for me because I've always been a massive nerd who read a lot anyway, but I understand no everyone is happy to stare at squiggles on a page for entire days of their life at a time.  Community patches exist to make the writing more legible, though, as newer computers with more pixels let you clear up some of the fuzz those dialogue boxes came with back in the day.

 

2. This game is broken as fuck.  The balance is honestly shot to all shit, it's riddled with little bugs that won't break the game but will be noticeable at times (I've gotten enough characters stuck inside barrels and crates over the years I now ALWAYS carry teleportation means on me, and have fallen through floors while jumping around indoors more than once), and you better get used to scumbag tactics because you're going to either use them or be destroyed by them because the enemy AI is sure as hell not sophisticated enough to have moral qualms over stabbing you ten thousand times with the weakest dagger in the game enchanted to paralyze you for ten seconds at a time until you either die in the game of the damage or in real life from old age.  There are patches to remove a lot of these issues, but I'm gonna be real here I don't use very many of them because for me the jank is part of the experience.  But a lot of people aren't me, and a lot of people don't like the jank.  If there's a problem you have with Morrowind, there's almost for sure a mod to fix it, so this can be compensated for, but it is still something to keep in mind.

 

3.  This is an old game, and there's no getting around that.  Graphics, engine, even controls to an extent, are dated.  The whole thing runs on a DnD style dice roll system where everything is chance based, even shooting a stationary enemy you're aiming straight at.  Training low level skills requires you to either pay for training to get them to a semi-usable level for you to grind up from there, or for you to have the patience of a saint and try to raise yourself.  Luckily there are ways to cheese that but I'll leave those magnificent discoveries to you.  While playing this game you will have moments where you go "What the fuck, I was swinging at him for like ten minutes and I didn't hit him once, who balanced this shit".  Once again, mods exist to change basically all of this, to an extent, but if you want an Skyrim experience, you will not find it here.  The old dice roll system is even kind of necessary in this game as all weapons and most spells deal a RANGE of damage, rather than a flat number, on each hit.  A lot of weapons at the beginning of the game have the potential to kill most starting classes in only one or two hits IF YOU ARE UNLUCKY.  However, those exact numbers also work for you so in that sense there is some balance there.  The thing that lets your poor starting theif or mage or hybrid class (pure warriors will have the health to take a few hits but they come with their own problems) survive the first hit in a fight is that the enemy has the same chance to miss that you do, so I personally recommend not modding the combat much.

 

4.  Slowness.  This game doesn't have the same fast travel all the other TES games have.  They removed it in favor of a more roleplay friendly paid transport service system, and teleporting spells.  Also a lot of starting characters will have fairly low speed attribute and athletics skill, both determining your movement speed.  This makes getting around for a while kind of slow going and can be frustrating if you're playing a heavy armor warrior as you'll always be weighed down and moving slower.  Three kinds of teleport spells exist in the game, two take you to the nearest place of worship relevant to the faith they're from, and one is a combo spell, requiring you to first "mark" a location that you can then "recall" to from nearly anywhere else in the game.  These and the transport systems are super important for cutting travel time, and the game being as large as it is, there's a lot of travel time.  I don't think there's a mod to add proper fast travel, but you can probably find one that tweaks base movement speed to be something a little less painful.

 

5.  Stealth basically doesn't work.  Not in any meaningful way, at least.  you can sneak around, but the best you can get for the beginning of the game is maybe avoiding enemy attention at a distance, or getting a crit off with a bow, assuming the hit lands.  With magic effects you can breeze through the game with stealth, but on its own it just isn't viable unless you know how the game works and how to make it work for you.  Even pickpocketing wasn't implemented properly and anything worth stealing will either not be on a person to pick from them, or will be too heavy or valuable for the game's pickpocket algorithm to generate even a single percent chance of success.

 6. I had to add this last point in an edit because I got so wrapped up writing this thing that I totally forgot about it until some 24 hours later.  Remember when I said the DLC was amazing except for one nuisance?  The Tribunal DLC starts when an assassin tries to kill you and you have to find out why.  That assassin can and will attack you any time you sleep from the moment you start the game, he has game-breakingly good armor and can easily kill you at the start of the game.  Near as I can tell they will stop spawning once you start looking into the attacks, but until then you can be attacked any time you rest.  There's nothing worse than resting because you're injured, getting attacked, resting again because you were injured by the assassin, and then getting attacked by another one.  They are a good source of money, though, because that mid-late game armor they all wear can sell for a decent price, so if you want you can just farm them for gold.  Mods exist to make them not appear until certain conditions are met, but none of the ones I've ever used seemed to work for me.  My answer is if you don't want the hassle, turn Tribunal's esp off until you're ready to play with it.
 

 

 

Verdict on Morrowind.  This is the only game you will ever play in your life that lets you drink seven hundred strength potions at once and then punch god in the face so hard he's unconscious for three real time months, then walk out of his temple and cast a spell that makes you jump so high you crash the game.  It is also a magnificent experience for it's unique world and lore, but if you don't like older, clumsier systems you might find it more frustrating than it's worth to you.  This is my all time favourite video game, but I understand why other people might not like it.  Give it a try because it's cheap as dirt these days, but keep an open mind that it certainly won't be Skyrim.  To answer your sex mods question, yes they exist, no they are not very good.  Animation wasn't amazing back in those days and it's a system held together with popsicle sticks and tree sap, so adding new ones isn't easy or pretty.  There is the Better Bodies mod, though, and it's various counterparts, for basic, simple body improving functions.  Don't expect to have the kind of variety in that regard that Skyrim has given you, as far as I know there's that one body replacer and it's pretty much just an attempt to smooth out the vanilla body kinks and add a little nudity.

 

Ok onward.

 

Oblivion Pros

 

 

 

 

1.  This game is significantly faster than other TES games.  You and the enemies all move much faster, even in heavy armor, making fights very dynamic with a lot of ducking in and out of range to hit and run.  I honestly like this game's combat more than all others because I found Skyrim's so slow and clunky and as I mentioned with Morrowind, it's arbitrary and chance based.  A lot of enemies in oblivion, mostly animal enemies or monsters that don't used weapons, have a lot of attacks that move them around, so they'll be charging and backstepping a lot too.  Movement is even part of the power attacks, as you get new effects on certain directional power attacks as you level a weapon skill.  Some of them were pretty fun, too.  I mentioned above I play each TES game for a different reason, this one I play when I want to fight things and loot dungeons.

 

2.  This game is visually quite pretty to look at.  Old, yes, but very vivid, has a real high fantasy feeling to the landscape.  This is honestly a small point, but one I always liked.  I always liked the look of Oblivion's landscape more than Skyrim's.

 

3.  Magic, again.  This game also has a wider variety of spells than Skyrim did, as well as spellmaking, though this needs to be done at spell altars in TES4, and those are only available either after a string of quests to join the mages guild or in a DLC player house after you've invested a decent chunk of money into upgrading it.  However, the magic in this game is AT LEAST as wild as Morrowind's.  You can do some wacky shit with it, and honestly I don't think Bethesda's playtesters ever really looked too deep into it because you can break the game in some truly wonderful ways.

 

4. The physics engine in this is not really all that good in the strictest sense.  It does not mimic real life physics in any way.  However it is positively amazing in that you can have a lot of fun with it.  Knocking enemies and items around, positioning stuff like with skyrim's grab function but much more fluid and closing doors and gates on dead bodies make for a very strange kind of surreal experience that you didn't get in other games as arms stretch and bodies twist trying to get free but ultimately be unable to.

 

5.  This game has a lot of "Oh cool" moments.  This is important because I'll touch on the counterpoint in the cons, but Oblivion had a lot of moments where you'd see something cool and unique and it'd feel very fresh.  A lot of this is in the form of oddball quests that don't have anything to do with the story but make the world feel like it's had some care put into it.

 

6.  If you've played Skyrim and liked it, you'll feel much more at home with this one than earlier games.  It uses the same style of combat as Skyrim, just faster paced and with more running around.  Traps in dungeons work much the same, stealth is actually USABLE, alchemy has both potion and poison making aspects, unlike Morrowind where everything is a potion, even if it's only effect is literally poison.  It also has fewer weapon skills and more compacted armor and weapon options, so if you don't like having to collect like ten pieces of gear to make your suit complete you don't have to.  This last part could be a con if you like the options Morrowind's variety afforded you.

 

7.  I liked how this game handled loot much more than others.  At first it's all worthless but after a few levels you start to see the better gear show up, and it just feels nicer, to me at least, than Skyrim did with it's near endless amount of worthless loot that you can't even sell because vendors don't have enough gold to make it worth it, and in Morrowind by the time you're finding any decent loot in chests you'll have already killed your preferred build out of the enemies you fought five levels ago.  Oblivion's vendors also don't run out of gold, they just have a maximum they can pay you for any single item.  Unless you mod that out.

 

8.  This game also has a shit ton of mods, a lot more technical than Morrowind's ones.  You'll find a lot of impressive ones here, and a lot of others on the Nexus.  Many of the top mods on there are top for a good reason.  A lot can be added to this title, and I've found an amazing number of ways to make this decently good game damn near amazing with some dedication to sorting your load order and setting it up right.

 
 

 

 

Oblivion Cons

 

 

 

 

1. This game is less stable than Morrowind.  It's arguably less stable than a house of straw with a very hungry wolf trying to get at the pig hiding inside.  Even the vanilla game crashes for positively no reason more often than I'd like, and it only gets less and less stable the more you add to it.

 

2.  It's extremely generic almost all the time.  This is what I meant I'd touch on in the pros when I mentioned the "oh cool" moments.  Most of this game is about as cookie cutter high fantasy as you can get, so if you don't think you'll like that you'll probably have trouble with it.  Now that being said, it does, as previously mentioned, have very good moments and even the generic stuff is enjoyable as long as you're not looking for something revolutionary.  Perhaps the best part of this game in terms of that is the Shivering Isles DLC, which is honestly really, really good and recaptures some of that wild innovative world building that made Morrowind so cool, so if nothing else, play Oblivion just for that DLC.

 

3.  Bows and arrows are kind of bad in this game.  Stealth archery is the name of the game in Skyrim, and it works in Oblivion too, but only for about five levels.  After that, enemies will have too much health to one shot them, and before much longer they shrug off the arrow piercing their throat like you blew a straw wrapper at them from across the room.  Archery is a means of delivering poison to a guy too far away for you to reach with your knife, and little more unless you find some cool enchanted arrows.

 

4.  Sorting your mods can be hell on earth, because if something's not in the right order, or you haven't bashed your patch correctly, or you accidentally overwrite the wrong file, you've reduced your game stability at best, stopped it from launching at all at worst, until you can fix the problem.  The way around this is to be very careful and meticulous about adding or removing mods from your game, which can make the setting up process, between actually installing the mod, and then testing your game to make sure you didn't break anything, a several hours long process.

 

5.  Shit breaks in this, and I'm not talking about programming-wise this time.  Weapon and armor degradation was a thing in Morrowind, requiring you to occasionally repair or replace your gear.  In this, things break fast and they break hard.  Armor and weapons become significantly less effective as their conditions wear down, and then totally useless when they break.  Either invest in the repair skill and keep some hammers on you, abuse glitches to keep your weapons in good shape, or do what I did and play mage.

 

6.  Remember when I said it was a visually pretty game?  I was referring to things like landscape, armor and buildings.  Faces are horrible because Oblivion supports a crazy number of sliders for designing faces.  The face builder in this game is perhaps the most powerful to come out of that entire console generation, and it would be a pro if not for the unfortunate side effect of like 80% of the characters looking like they have alcohol fetal syndrome or something.  The average head shapes in Oblivion are perfectly round or weirdly tall with sunken features.  To fix this, I recommend the Oblivion Character Overhaul, which not only makes the head meshes look really good, but also respects the established facial characteristics of each race by the standard of the other games and adds a bunch of features to the skin textures depending on where the "age" slider is set, for example many races will have small scars, stubble or marks on the face depending on the age, while others like dark elves and nords get tattoos or ritual scarification patterns.  

 

7.  Voice acting in this game's honestly pretty bad for the most part but I've found I stop noticing after a little while.  Like if you listen to it, you'll probably want to cringe a little at the delivery of a lot of lines, but if you just play the game and not pay too close attention to the lines it's not even a problem.

 
 

 

 

Verdict for Oblivion.  Oblivion is, in my opinion, a fun dungeon crawling, hack and slashing, magic exploiting RPG that didn't always leave the same kind of impression Morrowind did, but did manage to improve on many of TES3's more annoying functions.  It also lets you chain paralyze a helpless victim several times in a row as they try to stand, until you break their skeleton and their bodies loose all cohesion, dissolving into a puddle of body parts that their head slowly rolls away from.  I've never played another game where I could, simply by training my speed through totally normal means and no exploits, run so fast down a mountain that my guy simply flies off the side of it and covers almost seventy feel from my start point before I finally hit the ground and die on impact.  This game is going to be much more familiar to someone who began with Skyrim, and might be a better starting point before going to Morrowind.  This game has sex mods and body mods positively falling off of it, and you'll have options for just about anything within reason.  It doesn't have quite as much as Skyrim, but there's still plenty to work with, just keep what I mentioned in the cons about game stability in mind.

[afa]

In the sex mods end, Morrowind is lacking if things haven't moved from when I last checked. There are body replacers. there are some text/number based sexual theme mods. There should be an animation mod, but I was never able to get it working, it was already the time of Oblivion, so I didn't spent much time on tinkering around with it either.

 

Oblivion is...interesting. In some respects I might still consider parts of Oblivion's sex mods to be even more advance than Skyrim even back then, although a little bit of a scattershot, also it seems like some of the mods splintered into multiple directions and they don't fully integrated each other's features losing out on some of the depth it could have. There's an entire forum section dedicated to it.

 

As for the games.

Morrowind has a good world space, but the NPCs could feel lifeless. The leveling system is exploitable as with all with TES systems, but it is a huge chore, and you have to know what you are doing beforehand or else you might just have wasted hours. The dice roll combat isn't too terrible except in the beginning, I kind of misses it after all the action oriented games that came after. The text boxes readings are interesting once. The whole branching paths and questionable quests directions will be a question of rather you want to put up with "experience" it or just look it up online.

 

Oblivion on the other hand has a pretty cramped world space, it isn't really smaller, but just felt dense and game-y, it looks kind of samey, Imperial City is the biggest and the baddest right off the mark, the more interesting visuals don't appear until late or in DLC. The NPCs are more lively and closer to Skyrim with actual AI pattern along with their weirdness. The leveling system is brutal if you don't know how to exploit it, it is also still a chore, if you fucked up you will know in a few levels. Oblivion questing kind of cuts right between Morrowind and Skyrim, between the journal, voice acting, and actually not all the way terrible dialog like Skyrim it is actually pretty decent.

[Havik79]

Given I am a stealth based archer class, and gotten fed up with reading from so many years of it in older games, sounds like I should pass on both.

[DeadSomething]

On 3/30/2019 at 11:04 AM, Just Checking said:

...

 

  Hide contents

 

4.  Sorting your mods can be hell on earth, because if something's not in the right order, or you haven't bashed your patch correctly, or you accidentally overwrite the wrong file, you've reduced your game stability at best, stopped it from launching at all at worst, until you can fix the problem.  The way around this is to be very careful and meticulous about adding or removing mods from your game, which can make the setting up process, between actually installing the mod, and then testing your game to make sure you didn't break anything, a several hours long process.

to me it always was a few days long withthe first day being installation of the basegame, DLCs, official patches, community patches, basic gameplay tweaks.

the second day was installing bodyreplacers and LLmods.

the third day was goofing around, testing as much as possible and tweaking some of the mods, even changing textures/fixing meshes myself.

after that i always already messed up my game because you cannot possibly ever install more than 3 mods and actually playtest all possible incompatibilities or gameplaybreaking issues just because the game is too big.

[Just Checking]

15 hours ago, DeadSomething said:

to me it always was a few days long withthe first day being installation of the basegame, DLCs, official patches, community patches, basic gameplay tweaks.

the second day was installing bodyreplacers and LLmods.

the third day was goofing around, testing as much as possible and tweaking some of the mods, even changing textures/fixing meshes myself.

after that i always already messed up my game because you cannot possibly ever install more than 3 mods and actually playtest all possible incompatibilities or gameplaybreaking issues just because the game is too big.

I'll be honest I have a not overly large selection of mods I play with, I install the ones I know will work fine all in one chunk, test the game for a little bit to make sure I didn't screw any of the steps up and if I did I just sort of do it again but with smaller chunks to pin down where I went wrong.  After that I install things one by one, and if it doesn't break my game within a couple minutes of testing I figure it's good enough, considering how long my playthroughs usually last anyway.  That said, any time I do try to play for extended periods the game practically tears itself apart, so clearly my method isn't exactly bulletproof.

[Just Checking]

16 hours ago, Havik79 said:

Given I am a stealth based archer class, and gotten fed up with reading from so many years of it in older games, sounds like I should pass on both.

The thing about stealth archery is that it works in Morrowind, it's not as braindead powerful as it is in Skyrim but it is a viable way to play the game, you just have to accept that given it's old dice roll system your sneak attack won't always work until you have decent marksman skill.  Sneaking around to avoid enemies or get melee crits is horrible in Morrowind but stealth archery works decently enough.  Personally I prefer something a bit more in your face when playing TES games, so I usually ignore stealth for most situations so I can just have a fight.

 

In Oblivion, like I mentioned in my other post, stealth archery is pretty bad, and that's because bows and arrows fall off super hard as the enemies get stronger.  Without the easy damage exploits of Morrowind's weapons or Skyrim's perks it just can't hold up to the power potential of magic or the faster attacks from melee.  So if you're truly dead set deep at the core of your being on being a stealth archer Oblivion probably isn't the game for you.

[Karis_Wettiams]

Oblivion is old now...

I remember articles in magazines and sets of walpappers in extra cd.

[DeadSomething]

I just hate going in the front door and running through the game as if it were good old DOOM.

So following my instinct, no matter how i plan my char to be, i end up being a thief-assasin-archer-mage-cleric. and even as it isn't that effective in Oblivion, i can't fight against that. So installing some mods that fix the many blatantly inyourface-stupid illogical things about archery is essential:

1. bows made from hard materials like iron, ebony, glass would just break. steel could work in certain cases though, but why not use different kinds of wood?!

2. a typical civillian hunting bow has about 40lbs and can kill a hare (you would even need to use arrows without a point, because otherwise it would go straight through and still be able to run away) or even a roedeer with one hit/cause enough bleeding to wound it deadly.

3. it's nearly impossible to hold a bow of 40lbs, or in case of a warbow 120lbs and more pulled all the way for longer than maybe a few seconds and everything longer than a few milliseconds will make you miss your target.

4. even a 40lbs bow has a ballistic curve that doesnt begin within the first 15 meters of flight.

5. Hitting something the size and weight of a living person with such an arrow doesn't send it flying 50 meters at the speed of 50km/h bouncing off walls.

 

[Just Checking]

15 hours ago, DeadSomething said:

So installing some mods that fix the many blatantly inyourface-stupid illogical things about archery is essential

I had a brief look on the nexus for archery focused mods, the top ones seemed to be Archery Balance and Realistic Marksman.  AB is pretty simple, arrows fly faster, bows do more damage and arrows are recovered more often.  RM is barely more in depth, with arrows also flying faster, bows also doing more damage, but instead of arrow recovery the last major change was bows draw slower.  Doesn't look like anything that changes bow material or adds realism to bow poundage being taxing on the user.

 

HOWEVER, a brief search along the lines of "how to make archery in oblivion less shit" turned up a number of threads from various message boards asking that exact thing, and a common recommendation was Duke Patricks Combat Archery, hosted off the nexus here.  From what people in those threads said about it, it brings archery much more in line with how it is in Skyrim, and one guy even claimed it inspired some of the archery changes the devs used when setting up Skyrim's system (totally unverifiable but if we can't trust random strangers on the internet, who can we trust?).  So if you're of the bow using inclination I guess give it a look.  Of course, there were other people saying bows worked perfectly fine in vanilla oblivion as long as you were upgrading your bow when needed and using stronger arrows, so maybe the archery problem is more of an opinion based one.  Still, my opinion is, like your own, the archery in Oblivion is shit, so Duke Patrick has us covered I guess.

 

I should note that my brief glance at the mod page didn't tell me much about the mod itself, all seems to be in readme's bundled with the download that I didn't bother with, so specifics are lost to me.  Hell, for all I know the download may not even work anymore since I didn't exactly try to check.  However I didn't see any indication the creator of the mod felt they needed to change Bethesda's perfectly reasonable system that has been in place since Morrowind and alter the materials the bows are made out of.  Why a person would in the first place is totally beyond me, as everyone knows the body of the bow needs to be as strong as possible so that when you hit something with the arrow, it just tears straight through it with the impact of a large hammer fired from the world's most gigantic slingshot.  Using wood to construct your bow in a game about trolls, interdimensional gates and literal magic is actually far less realistic than using materials like glass, rocks and whatever the hell elven is even meant to be.  

[DeadSomething]

thanks for the reminder of that mod from duke. but i'm not sure if i actually used that one back then.

what makes a bow sostrong is its flexibility and not all types of wood are capable of being strong as a bow and not break - you wouldn't use ebony as it is even harder than oak and the properties "hard" and "flexible" are excluding eachother.

the harder, the less flexible.

there was some mod that changed the different bows to different wood types to create hunting bows and warbows, but it messed up something else i guess.

[Just Checking]

9 hours ago, DeadSomething said:

what makes a bow sostrong is its flexibility and not all types of wood are capable of being strong as a bow and not break - you wouldn't use ebony as it is even harder than oak and the properties "hard" and "flexible" are excluding eachother.

I know, I was being silly.  TES3, 4 and 5 all use non-realistic bow making materials, it just how Bethesda does things.  From their standpoint, it makes it easier to communicate where in the power scale the bow sits without having to come up with a supposed real world counterpart or making up an arbitrary new type of wood that equates to "this bow is on par with Orcish equipment in terms of game balance".  Or if you've got daedric tier weapons, what kind of bow equates to that level of power in a realistic way?  And in Skyrim that's a whole new resource you need to add to the game for collection just for the sake of bow making.  I think for the sake of just making everything match up and having a nice, understandable weapon progression they went with a "it just works" approach and classified it all as the same thing.  Given more time they might have changed it for Skyrim, but as many might know a lot of corners got cut when making that game so they could hit the release date they wanted.  I think I heard somewhere the devs had intended to work on Skyrim for a whole year more but they were told to get it out for 11.11.11, this the lackluster civil war and such.

[DeadSomething]

i understand their POV, but it would be quite easy to just make the stronger bows thicker/bigger and it would be self-explaining by that point.

also even though in RL i cannot see how strong a bow is by just looking at it, one might just add in not being able to pull a stronger bow to ful lextend when having low strength. just by trying to pull the bow, one might see that a low lbs bow goes way faster than a high lbs bow.

one might jsut take some bows into hand, fire a few arrows and see which one is stronger very obviously.