So, I guess no one here is playing Oblivion..
 

Been a couple years since I did much gaming, thought I'd get back in, so Hi, everybody! You've helped me much in the past, and I fancy I may have been helpful a few times myself [though to be honest, I wouldn't swear to that!].

So, I guess no one here is playing Oblivion these days: Pity, I upgraded my laptop, saw the GOTY edition with SI included, bought it on a whim-- I've never played SI.

I was hoping for a little advice as to whether to patch it-- it's 1.1.425 out of the box, my understanding is the official patches bring it up to 1.2 or some such

I'm reluctant as I seem to remember that the upgraded versions were bad if you wanted to use any mods, though from what I can tell over at TES Nexus, this may no longer be the case.

I quit playing last time because I hit a bug of some kind-- don't remember for sure, had to do with a dinner party or something, and the door wouldn't open for me...

So: To patch or not to patch? Both the official and the unofficial at Nexus?

OH, edited to add/ask: my new machine has a 3d score of 4.9, not bad for a laptop, and a 64 bit processor. The auto detect in Oblivion sets all the graphics as low as possible, do you suppose it will run OK turned up? Yeah, I could just play around with it, but was wondering really if/how a 64 bit processor will affect the game, if there's anything special I should know. I'm pretty bad at this stuff...

Re: So, I guess no one here is playing Oblivion..
 

I myself have wondered about this. I played MW on Xbox and fell in love with the game, and now just this week bought a PC version (with TES YAY!!!) 6 years later than everyone else from the look of things...

Seems like there is nobody here. I dunno where someone would go for info on this. Anybody chancing upon this please post some links to forums/sites/ect.

ST

Re: So, I guess no one here is playing Oblivion..
 

AFAIK you should be fine patching it. Any mods that don't work with the expansions and latest patches would be considered outdated. You would sacrifice official bug fixes and tons of content for maybe one or two mods that the author didn't bother to update. If you are really hooked on a particular mod, go to the site and see if it works with the newer versions. Anything worth its salt will be updated or reincarnated by someone else who needs the functionality. In a nutshell, patch it.

Re: So, I guess no one here is playing Oblivion..
 

I run just the official patches and I've had no problems running the game.


As for your laptop and how well the hardware can handle the game. Well, the game is mainly graphics dependant. I'd need to see the specs of what is in your laptop. A 64 bit processor is no indication of whether it can run a game well or not. All 64 bit means is that it can run a 64 bit OS. That being said, I'd imagine that you'd have one of the 45nm Intel CPU's running in your laptop, which should be sufficient. But again, the real determining factor for Oblivion is graphics and RAM.

Re: So, I guess no one here is playing Oblivion..
 

I forgot that I'd posted this, so I'm a little late getting back...

As far as mods and plugins, I've been using TESnexus, successor to TESsource. There's also TESplanet, I think.

The forums linked from there don't seem especially helpful, though...

From what I can learn, if you have the GOTY edition, you have Bethesda's newest patches-- version 1.2.0416 Numbers lower than that should get an official patch, if there was an issue running mods with a patched game, looks like it's been resolved.

Probably a good idea to get the 'official unofficial patch' as well, from one of the above sources. Pretty easy to install, claims to resolve 1800+ bugs, some pretty serious.

To use most mods under Vista, you have to install the game to 'games/oblivion/ or some such, not the default, which puts the game under 'program files', and a security feature in Vista keeps those files from being altered.

My new laptop has 4gigs of memory, an Invidia graphic card with 512 dedicated memory, and a 'windows experience rating' of 5.3 for 3d graphics.

For some reason, Oblivion defaults to the lowest possible resolution, etc., but I'm going to tweak that a bit: I'm hopeful that the game is old enough it isn't recognizing all the resources it has available.

There are some really amazing Mods out there for this game, but I'm having a tough time getting them in and running right. Had it good for a while, added one that screwed up some others, ended up having to re-install, and now none of the mods are working.

So I'm very frustrated: having seen how good this game can be, I'm not really willing to settle for the out of the box version any more.

I'd played most of the way through a couple years ago, was the head of the mages, assasins, theives etc. guildes, but got bored with the sameness. So I'd like to liven things up this time around with a custom race, better looking people and places.