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).

Oblivion Mod Review - Skyrim Ruins, Tombs, and Creatures in Bruma

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Skyrim Ruins, Tombs, and Creatures in Bruma (ver 1)
Score: +0/-2

Summary: Extra dungeons and tiny worldspaces to explore.

Why Get This: Kill things that looks like they came from TES V: Skyrim.

There is no quest to tie in anything here. You need to find the entrances to reach the small worldspaces. There's some attempt to make the worldspaces different and interesting from the rest of Cyrodiil, but there's not much to see. It doesn't really add anything to your game beyond some cosmetically different gear.
-- Hairless mammoths that skip around like deer. No, I'm not kidding.

Oblivion Mod Review - Gates to Aesgaard Episode 1

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Gates To Aesgaard Episode 1 (ver 1)
Score: +1/-3

Summary: Linear dungeon crawl with "horror" atmosphere.

Why Get This: Dungeon crawl. Some interesting visuals.

This starts out as a promising story-driven mod with "horror" atmosphere, but quickly becomes boring and aimless. Initially you are treated to some backstory, but once you find Ashen Rose's corpse and her final journal update, the gameplay switches to just finding keys in small locations. The "horror" theme drops off sharply and you end up in mundane locations fighting undead.
+ Good attempt at "horror" theme locations very early in the mod.
- Too much immersion/atmosphere breaking. For example, there's an illogical-nightmare feel to the early locations which might have stood on its own just fine, except it was sadly made implausible by Ashen Rose's journal entries which suggest that the location has occupants and purpose -- some method to the madness, as it were. This itself is hinted at by some of the locations you can access (such as a large dining room / throne room). However, there is no cohesion to the place, no sense of purpose. Even the characters you encounter there are simply standing around doing nothing except waiting to be encountered so they can be hostile.
Another example: There's a portal that is labelled as a location 800 years in the past. I'm supposed to know this information? How? Once I'm through the portal, there's nothing obvious to tell me the location is 800 years in the past.
- Boring and aimless once the story elements disappear. Just another dungeon crawl. Going around killing things does not necessarily make a good mod. There's no shortage of things to kill everywhere in Tamriel in vanilla locations and there are far more interesting dungeon crawls around. The enemies here are either vanilla (skeletons, zombies, ghosts, wraiths) or just cosmetically different regular creatures (mages and fighters with a custom head model).
- Implausible clumps of supplies like several healing potions planted right before the exit door. Couldn't they have distributed these more? Or done something else less in-your-face, such as provide alchemy ingredients and apparatus strewn about over several early levels?

Oblivion Mod Review - Cybiades

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Daggerfall Memories - Cybiades (ver 2.1)
Score: +2/-4

Summary: Dungeon crawl. Somewhat interesting locations. Looks horrible.

Why Get This: Kill things.

This mod would be a lot better if it didn't look so ugly and wasn't so irritating to play. Basically a linear kill-things-to-get-out dungeon crawl. NOT lore friendly, and a ridiculous attempt by the modder to justify it with token reference to characters and events from Elder Scrolls games.
+- Has voiceovers, which is typically a plus since it's extra effort to add atmosphere and immersion. However, the recording quality and tone here is extremely annoying that I wished they hadn't done any at all.
+- Interesting dungeon concepts in the second part, but made irritating to play because of the ugly landscape and dungeon design. Garish colours and primitive-looking dungeon layouts that may be "designed" to look like a very old 3D game, but just looks horrid now (and why would you want to play something that looks so primitive?). The words that come to mind are "cartoony" and "LEGO".
- It's boring. Despite the interesting dungeon layout, essentially the gameplay is linear and predictable. The fights are predictable and nothing really novel, especially if you are running Martigen's Monster Mod. It boils down to just arenas with fights.
- Too much boring running around through vast, empty spaces with nothing to do. Also, to trigger the second stage (the solo dungeon) you have to leave the island, come back, leave AGAIN, then come back. And each time you do a heck of a lot of running around. Duh.

Oblivion Mod Review - Windfall

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Windfall (ver 1)
Score: +3/-6

Summary: Worldspace and quest. A lot of annoying elements.

Why Get This: Quests to do, new worldspace.

This is a large and promising mod with a lot of little quests to do. Unfortunately, it is badly written, which makes it annoying to play through.
++ New worldspace (island) and a lot of quests.
+ Quite a few quests that don't emphasize killing or simple "Fedex" style delivery/fetching.
-- Extremely implausible situations. For example, you can stumble onto the supposedly highly secret smuggling route and locations of the "Righteous" faction, and even encounter their key leaders. And they don't even react to your intrusion. Instead, you can talk to them just like anyone else. You can find the leader of the rebels but you can't report your find to the authorities even if you are working for said authorities. There are really so many of these, and some are so bad, that this is worth at least 2 strikes against them. In fact, this is the main reason I dumped the mod without finishing it.
- Too much unnecessarily juvenile dialogue. For example, if you talk to the locals about Windfall, sometimes you will get their opinion. But there is also a good chance you'll get something inane like, "Yes, this is Windfall. Haven't you figured it out?" Or while you are on an intelligence gathering mission, some of the conversations you get are "Shoelace untied -- Made you look."
- Easily broken quests. If you find the skooma-smuggling operation on your own, you can pick up the skooma lying around (WHY such valuables would be carelessly dropped and lying around is just another implausible situation in this mod). If you are later tasked to discover the route, you will no longer have the skooma to pick up and you cannot finish the quest.
-- Some quests are very badly written with no quest markers, leading to a lot of wasted time figuring it out. It's not automatically a strike against a mod to not have quest markers. But when a modder deliberately omits quest markers, then their instructions, objectives, logic, and scripting must all be impeccable. Not so here.
For example, if you join the authorities, you will be tasked to gather intelligence. The quest update says you have discovered a skooma-smuggling operation, and that it would be even better if you knew the route. You can discover the route on your own before or after this quest update. However, you are not credited for it when you report to the quest-giver about the skooma smuggling. Instead, the person will say that your information isn't worth as much because you don't know the route -- even if you do. You are then tasked to find the route, but you must do it in a specific way with specific checkpoints done in a specific order -- which defeats the whole idea of not having quest markers.
Quest markers help you script a quest without having to cover every contingency. When quests do not have markers, you can no longer expect someone to do the quest exactly as you want it to happen, because they can have a perfectly reasonable way of going about it.
Another example:
There is a quest to find a missing painting. At some point the trail directs you to talk to people who may have seen the warehouse workers who were supposed to bring the shipment containing the painting from the ship to the warehouse. The warehouse owner sent 2 persons. 4 showed up at the ship. Can't we just ask the warehouse workers who the other two were? No. That would be too straightforward.
You can ask around town, but no one can give you any useful information (not even the sailors at the cargo ship or anyone at the warehouse). The person you have to ask is the stationary guard outside the Jail. The problem is, if you ask at the wrong time of day, the guard gives you the same response as every other guard -- his route is a patrol and he didn't notice anything. You can ask all off-duty guards and they will say the same. So a plausible conclusion is no one saw anything useful.
The "correct" solution is to ask the jail guard between certain daylight hours. The correct guard is still a generic guard with no name, but stands in a slightly different location. Like the other jail guard (the one who told you his position is a patrol), he doesn't move. Why you would even ask this guard when you have asked every guard, on or off duty, is questionable.
Suppose you did happen to ask him at the right time. He will say that he saw 2 workers slack off early.
Why they would be allowed to "slack off", much less with a crate of cargo, is not explained. You are not told where they went from his location, so somehow you have to infer that they exited through a particular city gate. A broken crate and a note will now have appeared outside the city (why wasn't it there before?) explaining the "correct solution" that is so implausible for various reasons, some of which we have already mentioned.

When you have quests with no quest markers, then you have to do things the Deus Ex way -- set the quest objective to be something at a certain location, and allow the player to use any approach that works to get there -- instead of a specific sequence of actions that you think is the only solution plausible/possible.

If you have OCD and absolutely must finish this mod, you can try this forum for help.

Fallout New Vegas Mod - GQ Partial Unlock

Fallout: New Vegas Mod - GQ Partial Unlock
--Download (version: August 10th, 2012)--
Alternate Download Link
--Requires the New Vegas Script Extender (NVSE)--


Use the console to additem xx000ADE and bind it to a hotkey.

Equip the item (via hotkey) when looking at a door, container, or terminal that is locked. Each time you do this, the lock level is reduced by 5 and one Bobby Pin is removed from inventory to represent an incremental lockpicking or hacking attempt. No karma penalty or hostility is triggered.

If the lock level is 5 or less, the object being looked at will be unlocked.

If a key is required, nothing happens (and no Bobby Pins are lost).

Fallout New Vegas Mod Review: New Vegas Bounties

Fallout: New Vegas Mod Review - New Vegas Bounties - Part I (ver 1.3) and Part II (ver 1.25)
Alternate download links: Part I, Part II

Score: +7/-1

Summary: Someone gives you missions to kill bad guys for money.

Why Get This: The writing / story.

At its most basic, New Vegas Bounties involves you being a bounty hunter -- you go and capture (but mostly kill) bad guys for money. However, there are story threads that bind everything together or at least give you a sense of a longer quest.
+ Story for each bounty. This may not seem to be a big deal, but when the writing is good, it really adds to the overall experience. New Vegas Bounties doesn't simply give you text dumps, but more like text snippets that help you add things up. Each bounty has a bit of a story about why they are criminals, and there are sometimes notes / communications here and there to bring things alive and to give you a sense of a world that's alive and active beyond your own actions.
+ Foreshadowing. This is related to having a good story, but also ties in to there being a sense of a big picture story around your otherwise pointless kill missions. There is a reason why foreshadowing is a literary device -- it whets the appetite, sets up anticipation or trepidation. It's used somewhat in Part I (because that is a linear quest), and to much better effect in Part II.
++- Encounters. You get genuine "encounters" here, which might be dialogue with the bad guy, specific tasks to do (such as crippling them to force surrender), or combat setups that make it more interesting than simply sneaking up and sniping everyone from far away. Although these are often scripted cheats where you read a note and bad guys magically appear all around (used way too often in part 2, hence the point taken off), it does break up the monotony and tries to counter the whole stealth-and-snipe combat cure-all in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.
+ Voiceovers. Any attempt at this tends to immediately add more atmosphere and immersion.
++ Interesting side quests. There's a good range of these if you can find them, such as a search for a hidden cache of legion gold, or telling an old man what became of his kidnapped daughter. Plus for dialogue-resolved quests, there are often several options or different outcomes.