Oblivion Mod Review - Sexy Maid of Chorrol

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Sexy Maid of Chorrol (ver 3.2 and crossover with Claudia's Little Secret and HentaiMania 2)
Score: +3/-1

Summary: Short quests, voyeuristic adult content, home expansion.

Why Get This: Humourous quests, masturbating maids for your home in Chorrol (no, really). Significant crossover if you also have Claudia's Little Secret installed.

This is a mod that feels larger and longer than it really is. For actual pornographic interaction, Sexy Maid of falls short of the newer and more sophisticated sexual-content resources and mods but at least there's a story here.

• Definitely get Growlf's Universal Skeleton NIF if you don't already have it. Otherwise there might be issues with stretched textures.
• The basement expansion to your Chorrol home sits in the same place as the teleporter for the Basement for COBL.

+ Humour to the quests.The humour is weak but doesn't sink to cheap and tasteless despite this being a mod with adult content.
+ More than just having quests that don't emphasize killing, the quests here actually immerse you more in the mod and give you more backstory. Too bad there are very few quests.
+ You can choose one a custom race for the maids instead of being stuck with the somewhat ugly Oblivion defaults.
- Unless you get the crossover quest with Claudia's Little Secret, there's no sex with the maids. The crossover quest there is somewhat boring, though, and you can more easily get sexual interaction just about everywhere with something like the basic Lovers Biko. Even with the crossover, you need to get the maid to follow you through a magic portal, then take a long walk to a pedestal, and press the button there -- it's tedious. With Lovers Biko, you just press the "L" key a couple of times.

The additional content from the Claudia's Little Secret crossover also includes a long story filled with sexual encounters. Pornography being so varied, some of this content could become too intense / tasteless / vulgar for you. Fortunately, the story is told in stages, so you can abort at any time and choose not to hear the rest.

Oblivion Mod Review - Giskard's Tales from the Tomb

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Giskard's Tales from the Tomb (ver 1.3)
Score: +2/-1

Summary: Dungeon crawl, character home, companions.

Why Get This: Bug-free dungeon crawl.

This mod starts off with promise of an intriguing experience but ends disappointingly as a pretty basic dungeon crawl. There are elements here that suggest it could have been much more interesting, but weren't followed up on. For example, there is a journal that talks about having to decapitate someone to prevent them from rising as undead, but you don't actually have to do that here. Would have made for a more interesting experience than a straight dungeon crawl with basically two different types of enemy grunts.

The quest starts out with historical Elder Scrolls lore-based data, but that turned out to be disappointingly token as well. At some point, just before you get access to the Reman Fort you are to investigate, you are basically handed the whole story. Whatever sense of mystery that was built up in the early stages of the quest is disappointingly dropped.

The story didn't entirely add up for me, but I would be more concerned about it if it hadn't been so token.
There's also what appears to be a very separate and unrelated Dwemer underground facility nearby. More dungeon crawling, only more aimless. Also FPS intensive on the second level.

The dungeons are not levelled. Level 50 bosses.
+ Player home where you can choose the population to a certain extent. Mostly you end up with a choice of companions and a convenient way to outfit them. If you want companions without too much overhead, then you can try this mod.
+ Decent voiceovers.
- The staff you get at the fort could use some cosmetic work. Even the female altmer dancer you get has the crude an ugly squarish face that comes with Oblivion. Sheesh. This just makes you look elsewhere for companions, and there's no shortage of player homes.

There tends to be integration from other projects, so there's the possibility that this mod will receive an expansion or crossover content. For now, however, there's not much here to see or that you can't get better elsewhere.

Oblivion Mod Review - Heart of the Dead

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Heart of the Dead (ver 6.5)
Score: +8/-1

Summary: Excellent quest and encounters. Possible companion afterwards.

Why Get This: Good quest, interesting puzzles and environments.

This is a long adventure that is DLC-quality in story and scripting.
++ Very good voiceovers, with the exception of the Kat character, which had to use pieced-together voiceovers and therefore sounds kind of odd.
+- Companions that actually do things in the story instead of just following you around. Dialog and romance is very token, however (although the romance itself can play a part in the story if you choose to pursue it; and helps decide which companion you end up with after the story).
+ Some very interesting locations, especially at the start of the story. More dungeon-crawl later on, however.
+ Some very interesting scripted events and animations that enhance the experience instead of just being vanity/show-off scripting exercises.
+ A really decent story with good plot points. No huge text dump of information -- good mix of story progress combined with dialogues, clues and other getting-background-information events gives this quest good pacing alongside giving you backstory to better realize the scope of your involement.
+ A really good escalating ending that takes you step by step to a more dramatic ending each time you think you're at "the end".
+ Some quests have various alternative solutions and you aren't always following a very narrowly defined sequence of events to advance the story. This avoids a common frustration with some mods, especially those that combine do-my-specific-sequence-of-events with no-quest-markers.

Oblivion Mod Review - Bartholm

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Bartholm (ver 7.0)
Score: +3/-3

Summary: Worldspace and a lot of quests.

Why Get This: Quests.

There's a lot of content and quests here, but not a lot of it is really worth playing through.
+ New town. Slartholm isn't that interesting, however.
+ A lot of quests for characters of almost all levels. Only a couple of good ones, however. Probably only the Foreign Legion quest to clear the Moarmer (some good fight setups here) and the murder mystery on Slartholm are worthwhile. Even then, the murder quest is quite flawed and could have used more dialogue to enhance the investigative aspects.
+- Voiceovers. Unfortunately, mostly they are either horrid, annoying, or revoiced lines from vanilla Oblivion.
-- Shamelessly cloned content from vanilla Oblivion, such as the Bartholm Arena, where not only the layout and people are obviously only cosmetically changed if at all, but the sequence of fights is more or less cloned as well, down to the fighter with the magic dagger, the multi-character fights, and the mage with protection from magic. Plus the badly voiced arena announcer. Don't waste your time here.

Oblivion Mod Review - Viconia DeVir - The Underdark Saga

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Viconia DeVir - The Underdark Saga (ver 1.2)
Score: +2/-9

Summary: Companion. Buggy linear quest.

Why Get This: Companion.

This mod somehow hopes to recapture the interest and engagement in the character from the classic Baldur's Gate games, which included a long romance with the dark elf Viconia in Baldur's Gate II.
One of the big problems with this premise is that there is much less investment in companions in Oblivion. In Baldur's Gate II, you could control your companions as if they were a character completely under your control. There was much more tactical control and strategic options, especially with a spellcaster like Viconia.
In Oblivion, companions are typically more troublesome than useful. They typically blow your stealth, get lost, fall off cliffs, etc... They are generally useful only as distractions while you do the killing because the Oblivion AI automatically prioritizes them higher as threats. For this reason, companions are generally set to "Essential" (i.e., not killable, but you can knock them unconscious temporarily), and most companion mods will have a teleport-to-player feature to help them catch up because no creature other than the player can jump to negotiate obstacles, and because they get lost or stuck so easily.
For all these reasons, companions are generally more of a hassle than they're worth.
+ You get a fairly advanced companion with her own horse and straightforward control options through dialogue.
+- Good voiceovers. But they rarely match the subtitles. WTF?
- Part 2 involves a lot of events where the scripting is apparently very fragile. You have to do things in a very precise way sometimes or you will have broken the quest and cannot continue. A walkthrough is pretty much necessary to know when you've accidentally done something wrong.
- Some quests are very easily broken. For example, there are three entrances to the Underdark, but you MUST use the one entrance where the modder has scripted all events to occur. Only there's really nothing telling you that you must do it that way. You can't skip those events, but the story doesn't move to a chokepoint where you have to encounter them.
- She keeps sheathing her weapon and walking away in the middle of combat. The author admits that this has been fixed as much as possible, so don't expect this issue will ever go away.
- It takes about two months worth of linear dialog -- you get one talk with Viconia per day to advance the romance -- to get to the end of part 1. It's also really easy to see what you're supposed to say. You can "roleplay" and give her a snarky response, but that just penalizes you by forcing you to wait another day before getting closer to the quest events that aren't just a talk. Obviously you are playing along with the romance, otherwise you wouldn't bother downloading this mod; but it's really rather boring because we generally haven't built up the same attachment to the character.
In Baldur's Gate II, you really wanted Viconia around because she's powerful and useful -- and she was that way because you could closely control her and use her tactically. Also, there was a balancing act between her, Jaheira, and Aerie since pursing a romance with any one could alienate the others and cause you to lose them from your party -- the possible presence of the other two, and your investment in them, complicated and increased the engagement with Viconia.
In this Oblivion mod, there's just Viconia. And she (and companions in general) are so irritating to have around that you will probably end up not caring if she falls in combat because she's not killable. Besides, if she does fall in combat, you then don't have to worry about restraining yourself when using area effect magic.
TIP: Get a bullet-time mod like the one included in GQ Conveniences when using companions to help you avoid hitting them.
- Part 2 is incredibly boring because of all the running around through vast areas of the Underdark. It just breaks up the momentum/pacing of the story. Everyone and their pet spider is teleporting except you -- Can't they give you a magic item or something? Or get something like the recall-to-shrine spells from Morrowind. The Arcane University can research a Wish spell for Viconia, but they can't research a teleport? Plus, navigation is hard enough in the Underdark. Why can't Viconia actually help you find your way with waypoint quest markers or something like that?
- Finale of part 2 turned out to be broken. Lolth wouldn't show up. I just gave up at that point. You can try a third-party mod that fixes it that was written over a year ago for the merged story version of the mod, or try the separate files version.
- There are a lot of dialogs, but they are very contrived and lame. Some quests are extremely lame, such as the rescue-the-priestess mission where you basically just let Viconia do the talking. The priestess that needs to be rescued then appears out of nowhere and promptly teleports out to safety (!). You then have to leave by killing the single guard in the small prison -- the same guard you were warned against killing because something might look fishy. WTF?
- For the final fight, you are given a supersword scripted to kill 3200 Health spiders (that's not a typo) in the temple of Lolth in one hit. Uh... Why not just reduce the health of the spiders? Especially when your supersword won't work the same way on the priestesses or the smaller spiders with less than a tenth of that Health score.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Underdark

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Underdark (ver 1.1)
Score: +2/-5

Summary: Very large worldspace. Annoying to navigate.

Why Get This: Run around a lot. Kill things sometimes.

This is a large and promising mod that is obviously meant to give you a Dungeons & Dragons Underdark experience. However, the overall difficulties in actually finding anywhere interesting to go make this mod very annoying and a time-waster.
+ Huge worldspace to explore.
+ Quite a few quests that don't emphasize killing or simple "Fedex" style delivery/fetching.
- Irritating autoload feature for area transitions. This makes actually finding area transitions hard as area transitions in vanilla Oblivion are marked with doors on your map.
- No fast-travel map markers, which are important to locate landmarks and to avoid tedious running around. And this mod uses large worldspaces with a heck of a lot of running around.

- Ridiculous Health inflation on creatures. Driders, for example have 85 health per level. A mere level 10 drider therefore has 850! Nowhere as bad as Deathtrap Dungeon's thousands-of-Health, though.
- Vast, repetitive landscapes with not a lot of interesting sites.

- Mostly all that there is to do is kill. Pretty much everything is hostile to you.

Oblivion Mod Review - BladeSong

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - BladeSong (ver 1)
Score: +2/-0

Summary: Romance mod, companion mod. Short quest.

Why Get This: Very nicely done short quest.

If you can get past severe disappointment after the extremely misleading mod advert that promises a heck of a lot more than the mod delivers ("Take part in an epic adventure that slowly unfolds over time and journey across the lands of Cyrodiil to discover new locations and entirely new distant lands.") then this is a nice short adventure. You also have to buy in to the romance part to really make it work.

Read the uninstallation instructions carefully! This mod significantly changes vanilla Oblivions NPCs in Aleswell and replaces them with dead clones. There is a script included to undo changes.
+ Good pacing with some nice plot twists. A bit heavy-handed on the romance, though. Could have used more quests to build attachment to the key NPC.
+ Nicely done story with interesting quests that aren't focussed on just killing X to get Y (except the war at the end).