This is pretty much a rant. If you don't want to read it, that's perfectly understandable. I added this line just to be a fair warning.

When I got Oblivion it was pretty new. I played a bit, then shelved it until the modders had enough time to fix it.

Rooting through mods. Long downloads. Incompatibilities. Load order conflict resolution. Days that could have been spent playing games. Hate it.

Well balanced and stable modded Oblivion. Love it.

New machine. Do the whole mod process again. Not any easier. Still hate it.

Well balanced and stable Oblivion, with better graphics. Love it even more.

Another upgrade.

And another. This time I flat refuse to do the mod business and don't install Oblivion.

Until...started looking at Skyrim...asking how it compares to Oblivion. Got Oblivion on the brain. Have to bite the bullet. Waiting out four hours of downloads now. Not looking forward to installation and conflict resolution AT ALL. Really hate it.

But with a state of the art machine this old game will be absolutely beautiful, and I've learned how to hang a great game on these bones. I'm sure I'll love it.

I now have a machine that can handle high resolution textures like a game played on a computer were supposed to have from the jump, so pretty much all the textures are replaced. The entire gameplay ; character leveling, creature spawning, character generation, magic system, user interface...replaced. So what's left that I actually paid for? Why do I find myself considering paying Bethesda yet again?

(For the record:

My Morrowind Journal websites combined for more than a million hits, and I cannot count the number of comments that said it prompted someone to dust off and replay Morrowind.

Fallout 3 is on the shelf. Might install that again someday. It has the exact same crash on exit bug that Oblivion had that gamesas never fixed. Before Fallout 3 was released a modder had fixed that bug in Oblivion, so one would think gamesas would have passed that on. I never really got into Fallout, possibly because that one thing soured it so badly for me.

Star Trek Legacy is deep in a drawer. One of the worst products ever foisted on the market in my opinion.

It's not like I've been stingy in my support of gamesas.

And I'll be getting Skyrim soon. Another bit of cash for gamesas's coffers. Eventually my Morrowind generated customer satisfaction has to wear off, doesn't it?)

Fallout 3 does not crash on exit.

For the rest, back up your data files folders in order to facilitate reinstalls, then it only takes a few minutes to put your mods back on.

There was always just love for me. Only occasional ups and downs when I got bored of OB and played some other game but I always quickly returned to it. It's just like my GF.

This is the wrong way to think about it, in my opinion. What you paid for was the freedom to use mods.

By the time I upgrade the machine pretty much every mod has a new version. I keep a backup folder with all the downloaded files, but have found that something around 90% are obsolete. I tell myself every time that I had a great game and could just put the obsolete versions back on, but there's always that 'better machine opens new doors' effect to contend with. I'm killing time now because some texture packs I've never been able to use before are a truly immense download. Hopefully this time they aren't downloading in vain.

Maybe it was just karma, but Fallout 3 did a COE the very first time I played it. I honestly can't say how many times it happened during my relatively brief Fallout experience, but it was more than just that once. It was brief more because I found the subject matter/environment to be a bit drab and depressing. I got Fallout 3 pretty early and stopped playing/updating, and maybe gamesas actually patched it out rather than leaving it to the modders to fix.

My experience with Fallout 3 was similar to Timsuptonothin's. On my machine, Fallout 3 froze and crashed more than any other Bethesda game I have ever played.

But, that said, you can never predict how software will react to an individual computer. The computer I game on now is one-half of an identical pair. My significant other and I bought components in pairs and built our computers together. In theory, they should be identical in every way. And yet, when we played Oblivion my computer CTD'd practically every time I went through a door. She didn't have this problem at all. Not even once. Same computers, same operating system, same everything.

The conclusion I draw from this is that computers are as temperamental as human beings themselves.

If there is an active script running the game can lock up on exit. It all depends on the mods really. However, Fallout 3 can crash often if you start using the same save slot over and over again, more so than say New Vegas. So, make new slots with each save and delete the excess later is how you deal with that game. CASM (a mod) can make these saves for you.

As PW has said many times, sometimes modding is the game. Before I got my computer I thought I would hate that part too, but it turns out I really enjoy it. But I hear you. it is very timeconsuming. That's what kept me away from modded Oblivion for so long -- I knew it would be time consuming and I thought I would hate it.

Yep. Someone had to create the game engine, construction set, etc.