Oblivion Mod Review - Realistic Leveling v1.13

Mod Review - Realistic Leveling (v1.13)
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13879
Requires Oblivion Script Extender.

Overall:Takes over skill and attribute leveling in an intuitive way. Many options for customizing. Uses in-game resources (Global Settings that already exist in vanilla Oblivion) to control many aspects, resulting in very little scripting load.

Why You Would Download This: To stop worrying about levelling efficiently and just get on with playing the game.

This review is separated into four parts: Introduction, Warnings, Features, and Static Oblivion Experience.

Introduction

In many ways, Realistic Leveling is one of the most intuitive and least complicated levelling mods. The core of it is very simple: Skills control attribute gains. When all skills related to an attribute are at 100, that attribute reaches a cap that you decide (typically 100).
This is essentially the only author-controlled aspect that you need to worry about, and it replaces how attributes are gained in Oblivion. If you don't like how this part works, and you can't tweak it with the settings in the INI file, then this mod isn't for you.

Warnings

Because Global Settings are changed, and changes to Global Settings are not permanent within any savegame, Realistic Levelling must re-set them every time a game is loaded. There are consequences to this which we will detail as we examine various features, but for the moment, probably the most important things you need to know are:

• Do not save while your character is in motion. Athletics and Sneak increase when you are moving, and Acrobatics can increase when you jump and land. If you gain experience in these skills before Realistic Levelling changes the necessary Global Settings, you may gain more experience than you mean to, and abruptly gain skill levels.
• Do not immediately take any action when you load a savegame. You should wait about 1-2 seconds if possible to let background scripts -- including Realistic Leveling -- finish running, for the same reason as above.

EDIT (July 14/2011): Per mod author's notes in the Comments -- "Thanks for the very informative and flattering review of my mod :-) Note that the warning about unexpected skill advances from actions on loading savegames only applies if you have changed skill advancement game settings. The default RL settings if you install with OBMM do not change any skill advancement settings, and will thus not have this problem. Only if you edit the settings manually and change the advanced skill experience settings as you describe that you risk experiencing this problem. Also, this problem will probably affect any mod that changes skill advancement settings from a *.ini config file, including progress."

Features
You can probably use Realistic Levelling straight out of the box, but there are some features you may wish to consider:

Maximum Level
The recommendations for a character who has brought all 21 skills to 100 is a level of 65 and attributes of 100. The maximum possible level under vanilla Oblivion is closer to between 45 and 53, and mods like Martigens Monster Mod claims to have challenging monsters for characters level 40+.

Something you can do here is deliberately increase this amount to x2 or even x5 of the calculated amount. The concept of "level" in Oblivion is actually a very vague one, as a character with major skills in Security and Persuasion may have inadvertantly reached a high level (and triggered correspondingly high combat challenges in the world around them) without having increased their odds of combat survival. The use of Fast Travel will avoid unnecessary fights, but there will still be quests that require quite a lot of combat.

Conversely, once you start using Realistic Leveling and are no longer concerned with which skills level at what time, you may find that a combat-intensive style of play causes you to increase in combat ability a lot faster than the levelled creatures around you.
What you can then do is artificially increase the levelMax setting in the INI file by a factor of x2 to x5 or even more. You might have a calculated level of 10 but the resources of a level 50 character (through efficient magic or inventory cheats). Now you can also have the increased challenge by artificially assigning your character a level of 50.

With RealisticLeveling, unless you use leveling mode 4 (Sleep levelup) or 0 (don't change anything), you cannot simply use the console command "setlevel" since this mod will periodically recalculate your stats and reset your level.

If you do increase this, remember to slow your Health down to your "actual" level by the inverse factor. So, if you used approximately a x4 factor and set levelMax to about 200, you will want to consider changing fStatsHealthLevelMult from the default of 0.1 to 0.025.

Calculated Health
Realistic Leveling uses the average of your base Endurance and your current Endurance (increased by skill level gains) to calculate your Health. Try a default factor of 0.125 to simulate using current Endurance.

Skill Experience Gain

Some mods like Francesco's directly change the per-use experience. Realistic Leveling does not change individual skills, but instead makes global changes to all skills by using different Global Settings. This means it will stack as long as those mods don't change the same settings.

The easy way to slow down skill progression is to change fSkillUseFactor, as suggested in the INI. Basically, this means you learn less per skill use.

The other way under "Advanced Settings" may actually be a more intuitive way to do it. By increasing fSkillUseExp (normally 1.5), you make increasing skills harder as you get better. Vanilla Oblivion already does this, but you can magnify the effects.
The advantage of changing this setting is that it won't take forever to get to Apprentice level when your skill starts at 5 even if you do slow down your skill gains.
By increasing this setting from 1.5 to 2.0, It takes an additional 145% skill experience to move from skill 5 to 6, but +900% experience to move from 99 to 100. Overall, to get a skill from 5 to 100 will take +736% experience.
The slowdown factors (considering moving a skill from 5 to 100) are:

XP multiple	fSkillUseExp
x1	1.5
x2	1.6641
x3	1.75965
x4	1.8273
x5	1.87966
x10	2.0419

If you remember the earlier warning about not saving the game doing anything that might get you skill experience, or starting a loaded game using a skill, here's the reason: If you have changed the skill experience rate, Realistic Levelling needs to change the Global Setting first and the game needs to refresh that data. Before it gets a chance to do that, a skill might be sitting at over 100% experience necessary to gain a level, and any skill gain will trigger a skill level up. Once that happens, Realistic Leveling no longer has the necessary information to de-level your skill.

Example: You have slowed your skill gain by a factor of 5 by using fSkillUseFactor, and at the time you saved your game, your Athletics skill was 50% to the next skill level.
When you load your game, if you look at your skills before Realistic Levelling has updated the Global Settings, it will show 250% to the next skill level. But the way Oblivion works, you will not immediately get a skill up -- the game only checks for that when you gain skill experience. Any gain in Athletics skill will cause you to get a level.
You need to wait a bit for Realistic Levelling to update your character. Once it has done that, you will see the correct reduced amount at 50% to the next skill level.

Static Oblivion Experience - Minimum Level

There is the possibility of setting your minimum possible level with the levelMin setting. This essentially works like a flat level offset, and there is an interesting possibility here for a Static Oblivion Experience.

Various mods like Sagerbliv's, Francesco's, and Martigen's use tweaked levelled lists so that weaker or less-well-equipped NPCs are not dropped from encounters when the player advances past a certain level.
Other mods like Quest Award Leveller make sure you are not penalized for doing quests too early by swapping out lower-levelled rewards for higher-level versions once you are of an appropriate level.

These are examples of trying to get a more static Oblivion experience -- That is, the world simply exists, and doesn't magically become a more dangerous or more rewarding place simply because you became more proficient. Goods of a better quality do not simply magically appear.

Also consider that by the time you are around level 10-15, depending on your resources and fighting skill, you may find you have reached a certain plateau where even NPCs that are levelled to be 10 or 20 levels higher than you do not present a significantly harder challenge unless they are given more gear (e.g., healing potions) or specific irritating abilities (e.g., spell reflection), or they happen to exploit a particular weakness you haven't covered (e.g., altmer or Apprentice birthsign Weakness to Magic).

In order to do this, you will want to set levelMin and levelMax to the same value, and at least 30 -- the minimum level that will get you the best Levelled Quest Rewards.
If you set it to about 50, you will also see the full array of creatures available in Martigen's Monster Mod.
If you do set the level to 50 or 60, change fStatsHealthLevelMult to 0.05 so that you are for practical purposes no more than level 25 or 30.

You will also probably want to use Francesco's or Martigens because they tweak the levelled lists so that you will not always encounter the strongest foes decked out in the best gear. Not every Marauder will be level 50 and in Daedric Armour, for example.
There will still be an excess of good gear, but for practical purposes limited by your ability to haul it.

You can do this at any time, but it is best if you start a new game for the initial challenge and grow into it. If you do start a new game, set levelMin to 1 until you are past the character generation stage, then exit and tweak the .ini file.

If you do this in the early game, you will probably need to amass resources doing non-violent quests first, and use Fast Travel to skip past unnecessary combat on the roads, which will be deadly to a character not properly equipped. Your Health (even at fStatsHealthLevelMult 0.05) should be adequate that you won't die from one hit by anything.
Potions and poisons will probably figure prominently in early survival until magical gear catches up.

10 Tries to get past Samantha Swift and the Fountains of Fate

If you're a fan of hidden object games from Big Fish Games Homepage, you may have noticed that some of their third-party partnership games have been buggy. I have just done the match-2 crate puzzle in Samantha Swift and the Fountains of Fate about ten times. Each time, I encountered a "negative time delta" error message and crash to desktop. Finally, it seemed that switching to full screen fixed it.

Apprently the previous games were similarly buggy, although I did not experience it as severely as others have (possibly playing in full screen does help in general).

If you're not keen on struggling through intermittent crashes, you may want to hold off buying a game and instead keep an eye on the Big Fish Games forums. Here's the technical issues forum for Samantha Swift and the Fountains of Fate.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Halls of Fortitude

Mod Review - The Halls of Fortitude
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29565 )

Overall:Interesting sights to see. Layout designed to waste your time. Use a teleport-spell mod like SN Mark Recall.

Why You Would Download This: Curious sights here and there give interestingness to an otherwise tedious dungeon. Adventure design elements can be interesting if you are in the mood for the challenges that it provides, otherwise just tedious and you are best to skip it.

The mod starts in the classic way some adventures do in order to provide a challenge for high-level adventurers -- You take away their gear. In a game like Oblivion, you really need to be in the mood for it (or happen to be the right build for it) for this to work. For example, if you are a proficient mage, you can possibly breeze through it because your resources are innate rather than inventory-based.
If you can get past this stage -- That is, you are in the mood for this sort of stunt -- You will find a dungeon that actually has a wealth of resources once you get past the first few monsters.

Depending on the mods you use, the Halls of Fortitude may actually present little or no challenge. You can also stealth it if you can sustain enough invisibility magic to get you through hotspots and the sheer amount of running around this mod will require. This is quite rare as mods go, as typically bosses will hold the necessary keys, making combat inevitable.

There are many good points in this mod. First, there are curious things to see to keep your experience fresh (at least on your first time through each location). The overall structure is, if think about it, pretty boring: Monsters amid Ayleid style architecture and you go around killing things. What lends the locations "interestingness" is the assorted random things you will see, such as giant carrots or a sudden fungus garden.

Another good point is that the resources are varied (for a change, a modder has put in repair hammers and soul gems aplenty, plus Welkynds to support Atronachs) so it's viable for the extended expedition it's supposed to be. At the same time, it doesn't necessarily change the innate challenge in this mod, which is that you start with basic resources, and the core enemies have outright immunities to certain types of attack.

(TIP: Although the mod suggests there are four main types of attack -- weapon, fire, frost, shock -- There are more. You can get around having to think by using mind-affecting spells from Illusion, poison, and "pure magic" spells like Drain Health or Damage Health.)

In fact, you will more than likely come out of this mod with a haul of magic staves, Welkynd Stones, and Varla Stones. If you're not paying attention (or if you already amassed a lot of resources) you may think the whole dungeon crawl to be a thankless one.

As dungeon crawl, Halls of Fortitude does very nicely except for its layout.
Before I get into this, I should explain my point of view on these things. If you don't agree with my direction of thought at this point, you may not necessarily agree with my assessment of the mod's dungeon layout.

A lot of people don't like the concept of Fast Travel because it lets you skip all travelling in between. I feel this is very flawed thinking. While I rarely use it because I do want to do some harvesting for alchemical ingredients and exploration to find locations, the concept of Fast Travel is really to get you to the action and skip the boring bits.
If you look at the history of entertainment, the best of them don't waste your time. If they show you anything, it is because there is a reason for it, usually a plot-related or character-development reason. If there is neither, you won't see it.

In keeping with this paradigm, you will notice that most of the vanilla dungeons in Oblivion have a handy short-cut to the exit (prominent examples being Vilverin and Fort Blueblood) once you have gone the length of the dungeon.

With Halls of Fortitude, none of the doors are marked except to say you are entering the Halls of Fortitude. You'll need to take notes about which one you've gone through. After that, you will probably notice that there are a lot of dead ends. Some of them have a useful resource like a mortar and pestle. Others seem completely useless except for you to haul in more Welkynds.
The problem isn't that you don't do anything except collect loot. The problem is that there is a tedious amount of backtracking to try another exit, sometimes through multiple areas. Assuming you've completely cleared the path and no new enemies spawn, you could still be wasting several minutes going back and forth until you find an area you haven't gone through. It's even worse if you didn't kill everything and are choosing to stealth it -- So much so that killing your way through will probably save you time in the long run.

My problem with this is that it wastes time. Real-life time. Instead of time spent actually progressing through Oblivion doing interesting or exciting things, this mod took much longer than it really should have, much of it filled with a lot of nothing.

You might argue that the mod thrusts you into a nightmarish place constructed by Vaermina and the aimless running around is part of it.
But that is very risky mod design. Would you go to a movie where they spend a third of it rewinding the film and showing it to you again and again? Oblivion is a GAME. It is meant to be entertainment. Wasting my time isn't entertainment.

One quick fix might be to have a door at the end of various routes leading back to your gravestone, and making that location a hub from which to explore outward until you find the exit.

At the very end, you get all your gear back plus some loot, if all the Welkynds and Varla Stones and Soul Gems you're hauling around isn't enough reward already. You also get a somewhat disappointing glowing green orb as a trophy.

I personally thought a small 0-weight Vaermina statue (e.g., from the Black Cat collection) discretely tucked in among the rest of the adventurer's gear, might have been a better choice. That way, they'll probably pick it up without even knowing it (with the "Take All" button) and find this "pleasant surprise" later. It could be scripted so that Vaermina spanks the player if they drop it, or gives a brief blessing if they pray to it (activate it).

Oblivion Mod Review - Frostcrag Reborn

Mod Review - Frostcrag Reborn
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9769 )

Overall: Nicely fleshes out FrostCrag Spire. Disappointing quests and tedious dungeons.

Why You Would Download This: To flesh out Frostcrag Spire if you are committed to using it as your base.

Hundreds of high-quality screenshots of Frostcrag Reborn here.



Frostcrag Reborn has two parts to it: Expanding on the official add-on Frostcrag Spire, a short quest to unlock some areas, and a longer dungeon crawl into "Avalon".

As a Frostcrag Spire expansion, this mod does very nicely with some eye candy and interesting additions, such as boosts to your Alchemy and Armorer skills at the appropriate stations (which may or may not work depending on what skill levelling mods you have). I feel it still needs polish and updating, however. For example, the housekeeper could have been given dialogue to acknowledge you, give you directions, or just talk about the Spire.
Also, the Female Students area could have been cleaned up after that particular quest (one wonders why the area hadn't been cleaned up before, and why the dead bodies there weren't rotting corpses yet).

The first quest to unlock some of the areas in Frostcrag Spire is extremely boring. There is some cosmetic backstory that doesn't all add up and mixes in with a story of ambition and betrayal. It would have been better if the author chose just one of the two instead of trying to weave in both, which come out quite separate and somewhere along the way, the first story about storing items in the realm of the dead simply gets lost.

There are also tons of quite powerful items to simply pick up here and there in Frostcrag, all with no risk. Then you go into a long linear dungeon and fight basically the same enemies over and over. This is a theme of Frostcrag Reborn: Repetition. We'll touch on it again later in Avalon.
(Note that you can actually enter that area without going through FrostCrag Spire at all, if you can find the mountainside entrance).

The implausibility of Frostcrag Spire just happening to sit on an obscure series of tunnels and a very long spiralling staircase with a side door to a magical realm called Avalong is just too much. But if Jauffre can buy your story about the Emperor handing over the Amulet of Kings to a no-name prisoner, I guess we can handle this too.

The Avalon quest starts after you get past the liches and unlock the rest of Frostcrag. The initial areas look very promising as an epic landscape laid out in interesting ways. Subsequent areas have a "Star Wars" feel to it and worth a look (extensive screenshots here).
However, it all becomes extremely boring extremely fast. Here's why:

1. There are lot of medium-large dungeons in which you need to enter and get keys from bosses. The enemies are the same. They are ALL THE SAME. From start to finish (except at the very, very, end), you fight the same mix of enemies, wearing the same thing, over and over again. I tried it with a character at level 10 and a character at level 50. And it was the same monsters with the same gear.

2. In the second half, there is a lot of running around and not a lot of direction. There are places to go, but you might end up spending hours running everywhere because you have no idea where to go or what to do -- if you are even supposed to do anything in particular other than just walk around.
The places are epic, but without a sense of direction or purpose, you're really just looking for the exit.

3. Finally, you meet the uber boss. You're supposed to have a special ring or as soon as he takes damage, you are scripted to die. Once he's dead, you get a suit of heavy armor. Great. Did I mention I got Frostcrag Spire, a.k.a. The Wizard's Tower Official Plug-in because, uh, I'm a wizard?

My recommendation is to activate FrostCrag Spire and just use it as your base. Unless you're extremely bored and have time to waste, don't bother with Avalon. For the liches, just use the console to blast by them so you can access the rest of FrostCrag Spire.

Oblivion Mod Review - Wells of Cyrodiil

Mod Review - Wells of Cyrodiil - Cities
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22105 )

Overall: Interesting idea for an otherwise overlooked aspect of the game. Horrible execution.

Why You Would Download This: Uber items for comparatively negligible risk.

If this mod were done better, it would have made an excellent addition to Oblivion, on par with Let The People Drink, which truly adds something to the atmosphere of the game. Instead, the guts of this mod are really badly thought out. For example, you have highly implausible "wells", like the one in Leyawiin, which was, literally, someone's basement. And the one in the Imperial City Bastion/Prison, which look like a partially flooded cell block that has actively used living space (furniture, tables with food, etcetera).

Also, for very little risk (except for a tricky encounter in the first mission in Anvil), you start getting some really uber items. Some missions are no more than no-risk "Fedex" quests where you go to the well and pick up something. An example of an item you can get in the later missions:

Shield of Wells (heavy armor) - Armor Rating 20, Armor Health 2000, Weight 5, Reflect Spell 20%, Reflect Damage 20%, Resist Normal Damage 20%, Feather 100, Shield 20%.

You might possibly play through this mod for the novelty of short episodes of underwater adventuring, but otherwise, it's a badly thought out series of Fedex quests with uber rewards. If you want the godly magic items, using ToggleGodMode is easier.

Something's Not Right in Oblivion

When you download an Oblivion mod, there's always the risk of something screwed up, some oversight on the part of the modder, or some obscure conflict.

Here's a shot showing something strange in a creature introduced by a mod -- Level 65535, and only 3 Health. Hmm...

Oblivion Mod Review - Dragon Invasion II

Mod Review - Dragon Invasion II
( http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13453 )

Overall: Needs a lot of polish. First dragon quest is fine but second one is broken.

Why You Would Download This: Short dungeon crawls with lots of enemies for a variety of character levels. Kill overpowered dragons, possibly with cheesy tactics.

Dragon Invasion II offers two short adventures that end in killing dragons based off the Akatosh Mount mod. The action is very simple: Kill hordes of minions, then you enter a big cave to fight the dragon one-on-one. In both cases, there are hiding places to rest and raised locations to fight with bow or spells.

The novelty in the mod comes from fighting dragons. Both dragons are grossly powerful with irritating abilities (high damage reflection and spell reflection), but otherwise play as tanks. One good thing about the dragons is that they are not stacked with immunities (so in general you can try various tactics on them or use any character build on them) or excessive healing (which can make fights endlessly long). You can also cheese them or use indirect tactics: e.g., Wabbajack or multiple doses of poison, such as combination Damage Fatigue and Damage Health.

Not that with enough Damage Fatigue you can put a dragon (or almost any other creature) down as if it were paralyzed long enough for you to kill it some other way. A Master-level poison using Master-level alchemical gear inflicts 12 Fatigue x 47 seconds. Fatigue regenerates at a flat 10/second for all creatures, but can be damaged to a very high negative value. Whenever fatigue is at a negative value, a creature drops. The fall and recovery animations are much faster than paralysis so you can't really rely on short-term "fatigue paralysis" but must instead do a lot of fatigue damage.
Also note that once the dragon is down, you can literally walk inside of it. You will also have to position and angle yourself properly to hit its collision box. Otherwise, you can strike at the visible body but actually not land any blows.

The mod suffers from missing textures (e.g., you will probably find your mage contact Arrathol has an invisible body and a purple "missing-texture" hood) and it looks like support for this mod is long since dead.

The first dragon is Nazagear, and his minions are goblins. It is interesting to do this part of the quest at level 10 or less because many of the goblins are then level 1 and can be killed in one shot in many ways. (Warning: The last goblin level has so many goblins that some of the bodies may be removed by the game engine before you can loot them.) This can be fun if you are in the mood for it, and the goblin bosses are still very tough. (And something odd about the goblin bosses is the insane speed at which they run.)

The treasure is quite boring, although there are two "gatekeeper" goblins that carry unlevelled Daedric Shields. If you can get past them at a low level, you can get the best unenchanted shields in the game right away.

Nazagear has a sizable horde that can take a long time to pick up. You may want to try the Grab Nearby Loot key in this mod, which grabs just about everything visible to the camera instead of picking up one gem at a time. The treasure is rich, but probably boring and insignificant for a character who has progressed to the stage where they have the power and resources to defeat Nazagear.

The Nazagear quest generally proceeds without a hitch until the after-quest wrap-up. Countess Narina Carvain tells you to see the wizard Arrathol again about the dragon scale, but your journal tells you to go to Anvil. You need to see Arrathol first as he will swap out your inventory item for another one.
And once Morvayn in Anvil finishes the armour for you, you get almost a full set -- No boots. Probably a script typo somewhere.

If you have Elsweyr Leyawiin Topal Bay Walkabout, the entrance to the second dragon lair is completely concealed and you may have to use TCL to walk through the boulders. The rest of the quest is in interior cells and should play out fine.

The second quest is very broken toward the end. For most of the lair you fight endless amounts of necromancer clones and a few clumps of vampires. Then there is a lich boss based off Lorgren Benirus, except his body and clothing is completely invisible. You only see his staff. Once he dies, his body exists in the game, but because it is invisible you cannot activate it to loot the required key from him to unlock the cavern containing Xazagrax, the second dragon. You can still unlock the cavern using the unlock console command. If you use RefScope, you can examine the invisible body's inventory, find the key's Form ID, and use player.additem to give it to yourself.

After Xazagrax dies, there was no quest update (possibly because we used the Unlock command on the door) so you cannot continue. There are reports that you can manually set the quest stage, however.

Overall, the mod could use a lot of bugfixing, but as it stands, for characters of all levels it can be enjoyable as a dungeon crawl or if you like killing hordes of enemies. Nazagear's goblin dungeon (but not Nazagear himself) can mostly be done at any level, although the goblin bosses might be challenging or impossible if your level is very low. Xazagrax's necromancer/vampire lair probably needs a moderate or higher level as every necromancer has potions and fights can drag.