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Update One: Awful Beginnings

The game opens with a cinematic. An aging Emperor tells of an evil force about to sweep through the land. The camera sweeps around the imperial capital, zooming in on a dungeon cell...

...and we cut to the interior of a ship.



Welcome to Oblivion, folks. Modded! In the vanilla game, we would be forced to go through a long, boring tutorial dungeon as we created our character. Thanks to the Alternative Start mod, however, we?ll be avoiding all that.



Here, we simply choose our appearance, then pick a class, birthsign, and starting equipment through the scroll on this table. I won?t go through all of the options presented; suffice to say that we are starting off here with a standard sword-and-board warrior.



Here?s our journal; this is where we find our inventory, spells, quests, and current status. Right now we?re looking at our inventory, where we can see our equipment is highlighted in gray. At the moment, pretty much all of the stuff in our inventory comes from the DLC and various mods. We?ll look at them in later updates as they come up.



Meet Ergo the Awful, our current incarnation. Next to his handsome mug we can see our current status. We?re playing a Nord, a warrior race hailing from the freezing north. Our class is custom- mostly the same as the standard warrior class but with the Marksman skill so our warrior doesn?t always have to chase after fleeing enemies with his sword.

Now, Oblivion veterans may note that there are several differences from vanilla present in these screenshots that I haven?t mentioned. The few mods I am running here are enough to already alter the game in major ways. I plan to showcase mods a few at a time as I progress through the LP, but for now, suffice to say that what you are seeing here is not what you?d get out of the box.
After sleeping in the nearby bed, we wake up in the port town of Anvil.



Now what? One of the selling points of The Elder Scrolls series is the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want iwithin the world the game provides you. If we were playing vanilla, we?d be given a quest to provide some direction, but here our options are wide open. We are, however, limited in one respect:



We?re completely broke.

So, our first step will be to acquire money, called gold or septims in this game. A sack nearby contains some armor for us to get started.



Now that we?re suited up for adventure, let?s get some dough!



Just outside of Anvil, we come upon this small farm.



We find this lady working it. Called Maeva the Buxom (smile:, she tells us that her good-for-nothing husband Bjalfi ran off to join some bandits with a family heirloom, a mace called Rockshatter. Evidently trusting a random stranger to retrieve it for her, she marks the place he?s holed up at on our map, promising a reward.

Aha! A quest! A quest to chase after a loser husband, but a quest nonetheless.



Bjafi is apparently hanging with the bandits at a ruin called Fort Strand, a place just a little ways east of Anvil. There are similar forts and ruins dotted all over the game world, and they?re all bursting with baddies and treasure.



There are guards outside of the fort, so we can get our first taste of combat!

Combat in this game is... well, it?s pretty shit. You swing your weapon and hope the thing in front of you ragdolls. Hold down the key for a power attack, use the shield to block attacks. There are other aspects, like magic, that play a part, but our Nord shuns the use of such devilry.

Making short work of the dogs and their owners, we proceed inside to the dungeon.



Welcome to our first dungeon. Dungeons in this game were generated by computer during development via several sets of pieces. This has the effect of making all dungeons of one type feel the exact same. By seeing the above screenshot, you?ve effectively seen about a third of the dungeons in this game!

We go through the dungeon, slaughtering unsuspecting bandits as we go. We also pick up their loot. Some of it, like jewelry and gold, is monetarily useful to us. Other things, like potions, will heal us.



Then there?s stuff like this, which just looks badass.

I wanted to get a good screenshot of the battle with Bjalfi. Who is this man? What is is motivation for running from someone called, ?The Buxom??



Unfortunately, he died like a chump before I even noticed who I was fighting.



Retrieving Rockshatter from Bjalfi?s corpse, our hero decides that he?s murdered enough people today and decides to rest, surrounded by the corpses of his opponents.

And that?s the update. I hope this served well as a quick introduction to Oblivion and its gameplay. Future updates will focus more on exploring various mods, as well as seeing what cool shit we can get up to.

Also, so you all can watch my descent into madness, I have decided to keep a count of how many times I crash to desktop during this plathrough. I probably won?t mention them unless they?re particularly memorable (that is, rage-inducing). And there will be CTDs, believe me. Oblivion is a buggy game when you don?t introduce third-party plugins. I look forward to crashing in the middle of every important moment in the LP!

CTDS: 2