» Fri May 04, 2012 7:47 am
I have played with this mod for about 100 hours. Here are some comments which I hope will be helpful.
First, I believe its levelling approach is the right way to go. It is really nice to feel that the environment is there as predefined and is not adapting to you to make the game permanently just beatable (hey dad, how come I could beat you in chess when I was 5 and now I am 15 and much better I still only just beat you?) The levelling makes it difficult to progress a PC at first. For some character builds, just getting to Weynon Priory is impossible until you have earned some money and experience by doing quests inside the Imperial City, which is difficult. But the early challenge is interesting and it feels terrifically realistic. As you get slowly more advanced, it is all the more satisfying. It is also great that after you have killed a lot of rats at an early level you don't suddenly get killed by a level 30 super-rat. In fact, once you are a higher level the rats mostly leave you alone.
The problem of actors spawning and falling to the ground has already been observed. I also noticed them spawning visibly on the ground near me, which also feels unrealistic. I don’t remember seeing any spawning in vanilla or with OOO so there must be a solution. I saw a lot of it during the first 10-20 hours of play but none since. Maybe it gradually stops. It is possible that it hasn’t stopped but it is just that at the beginning I spent a lot of time standing around to see what happened, and that is when the spawning happens. If you stay in the same place for a few minutes in real time, more and more creatures seem to spawn and it feels unrealistic. If you don't stand still you don't seem to see any spawning. The extra spawning seems to happen most near the IC. This could be caused by Safer weye.esp or it may be that I just happened to do my standing around in that region.
I like the wildlife running around in different sizes and I like the way not everything attacks you. I don’t like the slime balls, just a personal view.
I found a couple of bugs which you may already know about. Many of the gigantified creatures are too big to get through passageways, enabling you to slowly kill them with ranged attacks. Many times this made it easy to kill a creature which should have slaughtered me. The problem is easily solved by making the biggest creatures smaller and I think this change is crying out to be made.
Sometimes I would leave a dead actor lying on the ground and come back several days later to find a strange bug. A wasp was stationary in the air. A bear was standing frozen to the spot. Bandits were standing like scarecrows with their arms outstretched. They were dead but looked alive. A single stroke would make them crumple to the ground.
There seems to be a bug making it impossible to complete the Rumare slaughterfish quest. I killed and got scales from the required number of them but the scales were not recognised by the quest Incidentally, finding the right number meant spending about a day of game time looking underwater during which time a huge number of fish spawned, making the lake a weird soup of dead fish.
I found a few conflicts. Brighter Torches wasn’t working in the normal BOSS order. I shoved it down the list and it was fine without any obvious negative consequences. I don't know if this is OI as I am using a long list of mods.
OI stopped Complete Names from working, even though I was using Bash. Putting Complete Names after OI in the load order (contrary to BOSS) made it work again.
Everywhere I go I find only novice alchemical equipment, even in the Arcane University. If there's a conflict I don't know what's causing it. I don’t even know if this is a conflict or fault, or just the way Oblivion plays, or maybe you have shoved the higher equipment into distant dungeons I haven't visited yet. As I got to around level 20, some of the alchemists shops started stocking higher equipment, which suggests OI’s delevelling may not be fully working.
I am getting some crazy meshes on deadric creatures and mage gowns. Again I am not sure this is relevant to OI but it’s worth mentioning. The effect is quite well known. Because of the hinge someone added to the skeleton mesh, the texture file fastens itself to a distant point and the actor walks around as if joined by a long straight ribbon to the wall. The mage gown problem seemed to be a conflict between CNRP (Cyrodiil NPC remodelling project) and Realistic Physics. I solved it by removing Realistic Physics but I haven’t solved the Daedra problem yet.
I have been getting corrupt save games which seem to be linked to horseriding. They occur on games saved either while on horseback or not long after dismounting. When they happen I always have to go back to a savegame prior to getting on horse. This happens both for stolen and bought horses. It may be a conflict with Kuertee’s Horse Command mod. I need to investigate this more.
I hope you will carry on working on this. Oblivion is an old game but has a lot of fans who still play and there is still time for this mod to join the ranks of OOO and Frans. You may not have the time but modularising it a bit would be really good as most people have a ton of favourite mods that overlap.