My Oblivion Mod

...doesn't exist yet.

But it's in the works, and really, that's what matters.

Why am I making a mod? Because I'd like to be a game designer someday, preferrably before I turn 27, so it's high time I got off my tookus (sp?) and do something. I've had long enough to recover from NaNoWriMo and it's time to start a new project.

So what's the mod, then? You might ask. Well, I might tell you, it's kind of complicated, so allow me to start from the beginning.

I played Oblivion for about 85 hours - I finished the game, completed every side quest (except collecting shadowbanish wine - I've never collected bugs in Zelda either), bought every house, finished the game the right way and the stab Dagon until he melts ending, I even looked up how to min/max stats and magic items so that if I played through again, I wouldn't have to keep turning the difficulty down every few hours.

When it was done, I was very, very sad. It was the same separation syndrome that anyone gets when they finish a really good game, but this one hit a little harder. I was still wandering around in the world. I still had stats to max out, but I had no reason to do so.

I had literally solved every problem in the world.

IN THE WORLD.


I was head of the Fighter's guild, and told them to do a balance between recruiting and making money. That seemed like a good way to keep the giant rat population down indefinitely.

I was head of the Assassin's guild, so I could just neglect my duties and the death rate of the realm would plummet.

I was head of the Mages' guild, and had Mannimarco's soul trapped in a soul stone. And since I don't age, he was pretty much going to be trapped forever.

So I watched the clouds go by for awhile, then installed a mod that added new cloud textures and watched those for a bit.

I installed a couple other mods, but both of them did strange things to my character. (Like deleting all of my possessions one by one.)

I bought all of the currently available Bethesda mods, and realized that although they were lovely, they were extraordinarily light on the content front. Sure I had gotten the Razor (and mad cow disease), and seen some very cool level design, graphics, and AI interactions. But it didn't actually make the game much better. It had hardly any of the character-character interaction that had made me play every single damn quest. I simply didn't want or need another sword.

So I took one of the common gripes about the game: there is no romance, and intend to change that.

Now, I'm a big softy. So my first idea was this whole big thing about actually getting some girl to fall in love with your character (I'll bother with the reversals later.) It was this whole big thing that, while cool, is probably too much work for me to do right now.

Instead, I'm going to do something far less extravagant, and far less complicated. I'm going to have some Nord chick that likes strong guys, and if you can prove how very very strong you are, she'll marry you.

No, I don't know exactly what marriage will mean in the game yet. For now you'll just be engaged, and she'll travel around with you or sit at home. I think it's important that she level along with you, so that you don't consider her a burden after a few quests.

And for right now, I'll just be working on the wooing angle. Everyone loves to woo, am I right?

So that's the plan. More later, but there'll be at least a bit related to the arena, the fighter's guild, a side quest or two, and a part of it will probably involve killing that semi-invisible thing in the North whose quest seems to have been canceled.

-s