Topic: The Lost Spires - Oblivion mod

[idolminds]

Lost Spires

Uncover the mysteries of ancient Tamriel as only one can, through the Archeology Guild. Scale the guild's ranks and explore new, exotic locales to unravel a plot of sinister deceit, betrayal, and doom.

    * Single, climactic story-arc supported with 10 highly immersive dungeons
    * New Archeology Guild, filled with dozens of collectable display items
    * Two entire cave retextures
    * Over a dozen retextured creatures
    * 100+ new custom meshes
    * Powerfull new lore-soaked loot
    * Functional bear trap
    * Deep, characterized NPCs
    * Epic, heart-pounding battles
    * Must-have modder's resource
    * Over 15 hours of new gameplay

The IGF put up this years student showcase of games and mods, and this one caught my eye and figured others might like to see it. Archeology Guild sounds right up my alley. I'll definitely give this a play when I next play Oblivion.

Theres some other cool projects on the IGF site, both student and indie. Downloading a couple UT2004 mods and other games.

[Xessive]

Sweet! That sounds pretty cool!

Que ought to be interested in this.

[Quemaqua]

Indeed I am!  I love stuff like this.  I can't tell you how many great mods there were for Morrowind.  I had so many installed I could never have hoped to see them all... but it was great because of the game's freedom.  You just had them installed and they became like part of the game.  If you happened to stumble across them and play them, then cool.  If not, you might just find them later.

[Quemaqua]

Finally got around to trying this today since I re-imported my old Oblivion install to my new XP install.  Man.... it's awesome.  There's all kinds of great stuff in there.  It's a very polished product on the whole, nearly up to the general quality of Bethesda's stuff (possibly exceeding it in some ways).  I highly, highly recommend this to anyone looking to go through Oblivion again.  The lack of voice acting is really the only downside.

[Xessive]

Sweet! I just reinstalled Oblivion a couple of days ago so this will be a good way to freshen it up Though Oblivion hardly needs any 'freshening'

More Plugins I recommend:
Qarl's Texture Pack III - A hi-res revamp of all the architectural textures as well as a parallax.
Exnem's Female Body (Underwear) - Sexy, seamless female body.
Elric's Book Retexture - All the books retextured, most with the titles on the spine.
Book Placement 1.2 - Place books on the bookshelves without losing your mind.
DarNified UI v1.2.6 - A total overhaul of the UI to make it PC-fied.
Slof's Horses - Great restectures of the horses, and now adds saddlebags to the mesh.
Slof's Better Beasts - Adds claws & whiskers to Khajiits and claws & spikes to Argonians.
Slof's Dremora Texture - An excellent texture for the Dremora.
Slof's Khajiit Texture - A funky retexture of Khajiits.

[Quemaqua]

Slof is a fucking freak.  That guy weirds me out.  I also wasn't a fan of Qarl's previous texture packs (they looked gorgeous when staring at a texture, but just looked totally wrong in the game somehow), never looked at any beyond that (his stuff for Morrowind seemed much better to me... plus he also did something to get him banned all over the place, dunno' what that was about).  Exnem's mod is a good one, though there are others... and this is the book retexture you want.  The high-res version of Book Jackets: Oblivion (there was a Morrowind one, too).  I don't know if that's the same one you've got since that came from Elric's site, but it wasn't actually by Elric if that's the case (and I can't imagine any other mod being superior to this one, hence my recommendation).

[Xessive]

I didn't like Qarl's earlier textures either, but TP III is definitely better. The only texture I don't like is the 'city gate' texture, it just looks like it has too much going on the door handles. Otherwise I think it's pretty good. Better blood too! hehe

That's the same book texture I couldn't remember its exact name but I remembered "Elric's..." It is sweet!

Slof is pretty creepy with a lot of stuff, but the textures I mentioned are the more 'normal' and stylish of his/her stuff. I would have also recommended Slof's Dogs (which adds a variety to all the dogs of Oblivion) but it keeps messing with the wolves in my game (they become weird purple ghost heads, with no bodies). I don't have anything else modfying wolves so I'm not sure what's causing the conflict.

I can't believe I never used DarN's UI sooner! I had gone through a combo of BTMod and Immersive Interface to devise essentially the same result DarN already had! hehe

[Xessive]

Here's a mod I think you mgiht find quite interesting. I haven't tried it myself (yet) but it seems to have a very interesting twist on the game mechanics.

Intelligence Overhaul

In vanilla Oblivion, Intelligence is a boring attribute that simply means "Click me for more Magicka points", which does no justice to the single most important characteristic of mankind. So I have decided to overhaul this disappointingly simple attribute into one that is more realistic, provides more roleplaying possibilities, is useful to any character class, and can be obtained by any character. The total affect is added Realism, Roleplaying, Depth, and Strategy.

Intelligence now represents your ability to learn from the world around you. A smarter player will be able to learn skills faster, learn more quickly from trainers, be able to train more per level, and even learn more from skill books.

EDIT:

While you browse and download check out this little Oblivion vid:
Oblivion Domino Day 1.1

[Quemaqua]

Haha, that's pretty hilarious!  Fun use of the physics engine.

Also, I dunno' about that intelligence thing.  Obviously you don't get a whole hell of a lot for what in real life is a much more diverse trait, but I don't want my guy so smart he trains fast... I go out of my way to use one of the mods that slows skill building to a crawl because it moves far too fast for a game that you can spend so much time in.  It's stupid to play a game for 300 hours and max out your character at 150 when you could easily stretch out that sense of accomplishment through so much more of it.

[Xessive]

Haha, that's pretty hilarious!  Fun use of the physics engine.

Also, I dunno' about that intelligence thing.  Obviously you don't get a whole hell of a lot for what in real life is a much more diverse trait, but I don't want my guy so smart he trains fast... I go out of my way to use one of the mods that slows skill building to a crawl because it moves far too fast for a game that you can spend so much time in.  It's stupid to play a game for 300 hours and max out your character at 150 when you could easily stretch out that sense of accomplishment through so much more of it.

Hehe yeah imagine the time that went into setting it up! Pretty neat!

I agree about the undesirable faster leveling, but it is a pretty good concept for a revamped Oblivion Intelligence system. Obviously it can't compare to real life intelligence, but as far as Oblivion goes I think it's on the right track. Though I would have redefined it as Wisdom.

I'm still amazed by how much people can create for Oblivion. It's ironic that it is a strictly singleplayer game that truly unites the community around it.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah... but it's all about immersion and adding to something, which I think is what makes it so fundamentally different from most mod stuff.  The point isn't necessarily to make a TC or do some huge, epic thing that blows everything else out of the water, it's to make a lot of smaller things which end up adding to the same whole.  It's a bit different with Oblivion since some people made sweeping mods to change the leveling systems and the way enemies spawned and all that, but I don't think your average player prefers those methods.  For most, just making the experience not only bigger but more full is what it's all about, just like it was with Morrowind.