If you are like me, and play Oblivion on your PC, there are quite a few really good mods/plugins out there you can get. Planet Elder Scrolls has a great list of the ten essentials:
Ten essential Oblivion mods - Planet Elder Scrolls
I am not a fan of all of them, but the top 3 are absolutley must haves.
Elven Cartographer replaces the stock, bland, boring maps with topographically correct maps. It also replaces the plain, boring 2D icons with really slick 3D icons. Just adds a lot of flavor to the map interface.
Natural Environments is probably my favorite of the mods. It changes a bunch of the procedural algorithms that generate Oblivions forests and environments. It raises forest density, makes trees bigger and more life like, raises grass and foliage density, adds rainbows after rain, tweaks the way water looks to be more realistic (less like molten metal, more like water) and tweaks some of the weather effects (including having weather patterns and systems that will actually move across the landscape).
BTMod is a stellar UI mod that makes the UI more "PC friendly". The sad reality is that Oblivion was created for XBox 360 first, then ported to PC, so the UI was designed and optimized for play on a console with a controller. The stock UI is not always real friendly for PC users who tend to have a lot more inputs and a lot more screen space to play with (as we play at higher resolutions). BTMod fixes a lot of that by extending the size of some windows, changing the way lists are rendered and all kinds of other tweaks.
My only word of warning is that if you install Natural Environments and your PC isn't up to snuff, you are going to have to ratchet back your view distances. When I get home tonight, I will post "before" and "after" shots of Waynan Prior with NE turned off, then on, so you can see the difference. It's pretty stunning, but it requires some horsepower to run at max distances with everything turned on.
Ten essential Oblivion mods - Planet Elder Scrolls
I am not a fan of all of them, but the top 3 are absolutley must haves.
Elven Cartographer replaces the stock, bland, boring maps with topographically correct maps. It also replaces the plain, boring 2D icons with really slick 3D icons. Just adds a lot of flavor to the map interface.
Natural Environments is probably my favorite of the mods. It changes a bunch of the procedural algorithms that generate Oblivions forests and environments. It raises forest density, makes trees bigger and more life like, raises grass and foliage density, adds rainbows after rain, tweaks the way water looks to be more realistic (less like molten metal, more like water) and tweaks some of the weather effects (including having weather patterns and systems that will actually move across the landscape).
BTMod is a stellar UI mod that makes the UI more "PC friendly". The sad reality is that Oblivion was created for XBox 360 first, then ported to PC, so the UI was designed and optimized for play on a console with a controller. The stock UI is not always real friendly for PC users who tend to have a lot more inputs and a lot more screen space to play with (as we play at higher resolutions). BTMod fixes a lot of that by extending the size of some windows, changing the way lists are rendered and all kinds of other tweaks.
My only word of warning is that if you install Natural Environments and your PC isn't up to snuff, you are going to have to ratchet back your view distances. When I get home tonight, I will post "before" and "after" shots of Waynan Prior with NE turned off, then on, so you can see the difference. It's pretty stunning, but it requires some horsepower to run at max distances with everything turned on.
