I am not a modder but thought this might be a helpfull thing for someone to attempt.

I was just thinking about how dual wielding could be implemented and controlled in Oblivion/Skyrim and had an odd thought.

Is it odd for a left handed person, using left handed controlls to see a right hand manipulating items in responce? Particularly in 1st person combat. Less so with bows staves and magic.

Oblivion sold 4 million copies according to one source so that means there are 400,000 left handed players of oblivion.

would they apreciate a mod that makes the player left handed?

I thought that with collision and physics and spellcasting involved an animation replacer might not do the trick but now I think it might be all that's needed as far as 1 handed combat is concearned.

would anyone want to take a crack at making a mod that changes the melee anims so it looks like the left hand is wielding a sword and the right a shield? (even if the game thinks otherwise?)

I think a mod just changing anims related to 1handed weapon wielding might be all that is needed. But such a thing would have to affect:

1 handed swords
Shields
torches and lanterns
spellcasting while holding a sword.
spellcasting while holding a sword and shield.
Spells that specifically use the right hand even when empty handed.

It might not be neccessary to change 2 handed weapons, bows, staffs and appropriate empty handed spell casting anims.

ps the dual wielding controlls I was thinking about was:

LMB=right hand strike,
RMB=right hand parry,
LMB+Shift=Left hand strike
RMB+shift=left hand parry

It's more tricky than regular 1handed or 2handed combat but wielding 2 weapons at the same time is more tricky in real life too. That control configuration addresses the fact that in 2 weapon sword and daggar fighting the right handed weapon is often used to distract or deflect an attack while the left hand weapon makes an unexpected strike. That is to say both weapons can be used to feign, deflect or strike.

It's a more realistic implementation of dual wielding but still not perfect because even if you could implement it in oblivion we'd still see the character deflecting 2 handed war hammer attacks with a dagger but waddayagonnado.

The dual wield mods I have seen are either animation replacers or use the offhand weapon as a shield only.

Being a southpaw myself, I have no trouble with Oblivion preferring the right hand.

As for modding the animations to allow the player to be a lefty, feel very free to do so, just grab a copy of Blender, Nifskope, and PyFFI and you're all set.

All you would really need to do is mirror the current animations, and that would make a perfectly reasonable left-handed experience.

Thanks for the quick responce and feeback. I believe the elderscrolls is one of the very few games where it might matter. I did a google search and only found pages and posting about controlls and one mention of one shooter that allowed you to switch to left handed shooting. I figured that meant it wasn't a problem or that it was a problem nobody had ever noticed (as stupid as that sounds). LIke that we only know qwerty because way back it was a way to slow typing but now better layouts would allow us to type faster. That kind of problem nobody noticed. A left handed 1st person avatar might allow for better left handed gameplay as gameplay is all about eye hand co-ordination.

I have zilch modding experience though. Perhaps after Skyrim comes out I'll take a crack at those programs you suggested.

Yeah my brothers left handed but he uses the mouse with his right hand. I'm pretty sure 99% of left handers have no problems with the game being right handed.

I can tell you that left handed players such as myself do notice that everybody in Cyrodiil is right handed - but I've never let it bother me too much. I figured the work needed to transform the player - and roughly 10% of the total NPC population - to be left-handed just wouldn't be worthwhile.

That said, here's hoping southpaws will be represented in Skyrim...

BFG99- actually it turns out to be simple but potentially time consuming. a modder told me all that was needed was to flip the animations of the player character, using blender, nifscope and something called pfyy. but I have no modding expeience.

Even if its a lot of work, there are potentially 400,000 people who might use such a mod. Probably not financially worthwhile to the company but still worthwhile to the ego of the modder who makes such a mod. It seems like the sort of thing that would be in an essential mods list.

BFG99 I have a funny little ancedote about that gun.

I was in one of the first cyber cafes in cambridge mass one time.
A little kid was playing doom II.
While shooting stuff with the BFG, he asked his father what BFG meant.
The dad looked at me like "uh oh".
Thinking quickly, I said to the kid "it's german".
To the releif of the father, it was a good enough answer for his son.
Thank god he was busy playing a game as good as Doom II or he might have asked "german for what?"