Hi all. This is going to be my fourth time purchasing Oblivion so I am really tempted to try Steam. But I am also hoping to try mods this time and I've heard there are some issues with Steam and mods. Things like Midas Magic, Unecessary Violence and other fancy effects mods are NOT a big deal to me. I am more interested in immersion mods, landscape/city uniquifiers and cleanly built quest mods. I would also like an overhaul (perhaps OOO) for game mechanics. (By the way, thanks to Pheonix for all the great suggestions for mods.) So my question is, do you think steam will get in the way? How badly? How can I tell if a mod will have problems with Steam?

No mods have problems with Steam.

I'm not aware of Steam causing any problems with mods, at least not on Oblivion. (Morrowind is a bit of a different story.) Just be sure you have Steam Community Enabled In-Game active while playing, or OBSE won't properly work, and consequently neither will the many mods that rely on it.

On balance, if you have a halfway-decent Internet connection, I'd say go Steam.

For the most part Steam hasn't been a problem for me. There are workarounds for almost anything that could be a problem, and those are few and far between. The only two big ones I can think of are as follows: If your OS is Vista or Windows7, Steam has to be installed somewhere other than in Program Files, otherwise you run into permission issues when trying to swap out files; Normally, Oblivion is restricted to 1.8GB of memory before it crashes, and with a heavily modded install it WILL reach this cap. There's a Large Address Aware (LAA) patch that is supposed to make it use ~3.5GB. The problem is that Steam detects any changes made to Oblivion.exe and reverts it back to normal. If you don't have more than 2GB of RAM, this second point is moot.

Steam is the only way to go!

I've actually never noticed this problem. I experienced it on Vista a while back, and I've heard a handful of others complain about it, but from what I can tell Steam does a pretty good job of accepting changes made to in-game files without raising too much of a fuss. (Note that I have UAC enabled and am on an administrative account on my computer.)

It affects more than Oblivion itself. The UAC also prevents a number of commonly-used utilities from being fully functional, notably TESCS, OBMM and Bash.


--Tomlong75210

Interesting. I've quite literally never experienced any of these problems. Possibly it's because I have a full administrative account, rather than the watered-down one that's available by default, or possibly I'm just incredibly lucky,

Hmm OK, well I am using Windows 7 and Steam is installed in program files (x86). There are two program files folders, the one with (x86) is where things are normally installed. Where should I move Steam to? Will i also need to have Oblivion installed to this location?

Edit: And if I can't use OBMM, is there a utility that works with steam?

Reinstall Steam to C:\Steam. If Oblivion is installed through Steam, after moving Steam, Oblivion will be reinstalled somewhere in that folder I suppose.

Don't use either Program Files folder. They're both default Windows folders.


--Tomlong54210


Edit: If you're on an administrator and you use the 'Run as administrator' compatibility option on all relevant executables, then you'll probably avoid many such issues. It is also possible to turn the UAC off on a specific folder.

Edit: If Oblivion is not being installed through Steam, many users use C:\Games to store games.

I have all my games, including Steam, installed to their own folders outside of the Program Files.

Ok, thanks all! Steam it is then