On TES-Online

The game sites are weaving narration,
Of doom and/or maybe salvation.
It seems in their haste,
they’re suffering a case,
Of premature TES-speculation.

Well, unless they paid to read the Game Informer article. Looking forward to getting my hands on some REAL details about the The Elder Scrolls Online.

Fallout Online is announced

A website for Fallout Online has materialised, complete with the old time music that I always associate with the Fallout games. There’s no actual information about the game as yet; just a form for signing up to a mailing list and beta access, which I have duly filled out.

The uncharitable might say that there already is an online version of Fallout, called Fallen Earth. There’s certainly a lot of similarities in the setting, even if the storyline is a bit different. Who would have expected there’d be more than one major MMO with a post-apocalyptic US setting? With the backing of Bethesda and Interplay, Fallout Online ought to have every chance of being the better game, but the tiny Icarus Studios has set the bar pretty high.

I was a huge fan of Fallout and Fallout 2, though I skipped Fallout 3, mostly due to still being utterly irritated at the disappointment of Oblivion. I’m looking forward to seeing how Fallout Online pans out. Something to build a dream on? We’ll see.

My old Oblivion mods

I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my logs that look like they’re trying to track down some of my mods. With my mind once again turned towards modding, this post is here to help. These are all the ones I can still find available on the net. Some of my Oblivion mods, and all of my Morrowind ones (which were rather better) seem to have vanished without a trace, and I’m a couple of hard-drive crashes along since then. I no longer have Oblivion, so can’t offer much in the way of support for any of them.

These were all made in the first few weeks of Oblivion being out (I lost interest rather quickly. Oblivion was not half as fun to mod for as Morrowind), so are a bit primitive compared with what’s available now, but still, people still seem to be searching for them, so here you go. You can find full readme files on the hosting site and in the zip package.

I like to name my mods like old school D&D spell names :)

Ark’s Rock’em Sock’em Wristirons Oblivion Modding Tutorial
A little introductory level modding tutorial I put together, complete with example mod that give a little bonus to hand to hand fighting to the wristirons you begin with.

Ark’s Tutorial Terminator Plugin for Oblivion
My most popular work, and was a lot more complicated than it sounds, involving a lot of gentle pruning of dialogue trees and scripts if I remember rightly. This one is included in a lot of larger mods now, including the Tamriel Immersion Experience.
It removes all those annoying tutorial pop-ups. Don’t use this unless they have nothing more to teach you.

Ark’s Multiple Multiplier Mod
Apparently there were about a million mods that set multipliers to 5, but none for lower numbers. Five minutes later:
Simply sets your stat multiplier to a flat rate of two, three, or four, depending on which esp you use.

Ark’s Problematic Potions Plugin for Oblivion
Warning: This mod makes Oblivion more difficult.
Makes it so that the number of potions effects you can be under at once depends upon your ranking in Alchemy.
Without this mod, anyone can be under the effects of 4 potions at once. This mod changes things, so that Novices can only be under one effect at once, Apprentices 2, Journeymen and Experts 3, and Masters 4.

Ark’s Little Guys
This mod adds Gnomes, Dremi, Khajii, Argoni, and Dwarves (and as a bonus, Dremora) as playable races. Needless to say, this isn’t very canon, but some folks love playing those little guys. Don’t blame me if you have trouble reaching the cookie jar! There’s reports that the Dremora can make you crash so stick to the little guys! (It was a pre-existing NPC race I enabled for players. Unwisely as it turned out.)
This was one of the earliest mods to try to create a new race. Once I got the hang of shrinking and stretching them, I made a few, all with their own racial abilities. The most popular were the little cat guys, the Khajii.

Gnomes in Oblivion! Ark's Little Guys in action.

Gnomes in Oblivion! Ark's Little Guys in action.

Ark’s Toasty Torch
A little test mod I didn’t release to the public at the time. Adds a flaming torch to your starting cell. Unlike ordinary flaming torches in Oblivion, it can be used as a weapon. Unfortunately in gaining that feature, it stopped creating a light radius, and I never got around to figuring out how to fix that. Still, it was quite a fun bit of kit to play with.

Ark’s Tribute to Leeroy Jenkins Plugin for Oblivion
In a moment of madness, I created this horror. Complete with sound files sampled from the original Leeroy, I still wake up at night cursing myself for unleashing it upon the world. For some reason, some people actually like it.
It adds a wonderfully magical spell, Summon Leeroy, to Trayvond in Cheydinhal’s Mages guild, and Edgar, of Edgar’s Discount Spells.
I have tried to contain Leeroy’s greatness as best I can, and yet I still could not call this mod well balanced. But then neither is Leeroy, so it is fitting. Pick either the balancedish Leeroy or Uber-Leeroy esp. Don’t use both. That would be too much Leeroy for anyone to handle.

Tamriel Immersion Experience also Terminates Tutorials!

Just a quick shout out for the Tamriel Immersion Experience mod, which greatly enhances the feel of Oblivion.

Why do I think this mod is so great? Because its creator incorporated my Ark’s Tutorial Terminator mod, and actually asked before he did so! That, and it’s also pretty darn awesome in its own right.

Here’s the extremely impressive feature list:

– 600 added NPCs with TNR faces!
– CorePC’s Tamriel Travelers and Arkenor’s Tutorial Terminator mods merged!
– Increased weapons and ammo damage – without NPCs having excessively high levels of health.
– No more fancy armor wearing bandits.
– All enemies and loot items unlocked at game start.
– Secret entrances into all cities and castles that do not show on maps.
– Heavily tweaked and more natural wildlife behaviour.
– Far greater rarity of high end weapons and loot.
– Deadlier traps (wall darts, gas emitters, spiked floors, logs, etc).
– Decreased thieving sounds (Hear-Me-Not).
– Many Morrowind ingredients and food items.
– Better and more lethal archery.
– Imperial City underground is now fully interconnected via tunnels and trapdoors.
– Greater chance of contracting various diseases in battle.
– Vampires no longer affected by normal weapons.
– Larger population of underwater Argonians.
– Books such as the extremely handy “Tactics and Maneuvers: The Field Tactician’s Handbook” providing useful hints on staying alive in T.I.E. More books will be added for future releases.
– Safer roads. For those who like to “just walk around, see the sunsets, and pick the beautiful flowers”. Just don’t venture off the roads. Still pack some weaponry and potions though, simply because you never know…
– Bandit steeds that can be stolen and ridden if you get close enough to them.
– Undercover Imperial Legion Officers that have full authority to arrest and kill intruders, murderers, and thieves.
– All High to Mid level Inns and Stores as well as castles now have “restricted areas” within them (courtesy of Duggedank), so players venturing out of authorized areas will be warned either by the NPC commoners and storekeepers – or by the Guards themselves. Three strikes and you’ll find yourself either being pursued, or in jail, so be careful.

You can find it here.

Oblivion!

Oblivion has been released in the UK.

I am proud to say that Master Maboroshi Daikon has planted the first Oblivion mod in our collection.

Many moons ago, back in the days of Morrowind, I was part of a thriving modding community over at Dragonsight.com. Sadly, that site is no longer covering modding, so I am trying to recreate the feel of it down in our galley. It’ll never be the same, but it might just do the job.

Ideally, it will be a haven for modders, where we can trade advice and ideas, help eachother out with debugging, and generally gain from eachothers wisdom.