Too Fast For Love

[zoatebix]

I mentioned that I was enjoying the built-in extensibility of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The variety and quality of the free, user-made modifications for the PC version of the game are astounding. Here's a brief overview:

• Oblivion was released on multiple platforms, and its user-interface is identical across all versions of the game. This is unfortunate, because it's clearly designed for legibility from a distance -across a living room, say- and not at the distances one usually finds between oneself and one's computer monitor. To address this (and to add additional functionality to the UI), several User-Interface mods have come out.
• Because of crazy degree of freedom afforded by Oblivion's face generation system (which is professional-quality stuff licensed from Singular Inversions), There are dozens of mods out there to help users make good looking characters, ranging from tweaks to the face generating system, new hairstyles, new eye textures, even several complete body replacement mods. There's also a way to import head models created in SI Facegen into one's game, but that's part of a more ambitious tool.
• There are high resolution texture replacements to make the game look even better on high-end hardware, and mesh replacements to reduce the polygon count while retaining the game's gorgeous look.
• "The Leveling Problem" is addressed by the awesome AF Leveling Mod, by my personal favorite: Realistic Leveling, and by maybe a half dozen others. I also like the Legendary Mastery mod, which lets you increase your skills and attributes above 100 - the "cap" in the original game.
• Then there are the humongous Overhaul mods. FCOM: Convergence combines four of the most popular overhauls (which are normally incompatible) and a bunch of additional content. I think I prefer the more conservative approach of one of FCOM's constituent parts, Francesco's Leveled creatures/items mod, even though it's no longer actively developed.
• Then there are the users who've re-imagined how the game world works or replaced various sub-systems, let alone the hundreds of mods that add new items, new NPCs, new locations, and new quests to the game, or the mods that enable other, more complicated, mods.

There are, of course, limits to what can be done with modifications, and the skills and labor necessary to make modifications cannot be ignored. Role-playing games and other low-tech games invite modification because the barriers to entry are so deliciously low. In fact, they more than invite it, but more on that later. This entry, about James Wyatt's son, warms my heart. "I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft with my son the last few months. He's getting really into it-so into it that it's beginning to frustrate him." That's certainly how I caught the game design bug, Gentle Reader. Wyatt's answer to his son? "'We should play D&D.'" Given what he's been up to lately, I'm sure he meant 4th Edition. And when they did, they threw together a pair of custom classes. Rock on!

I think that the Neo-Old-School Do-It-Yourself spirit of designers like James Maliszewski (maliszew - and be sure to check out his blog about Pulp-Fantasy D&D Grognardia), and hacks of recent, Dirty-Hippy RPGs are glorious extensions of what happens as part of all RPG play. "To Play is to Create" has been rolling around in my head for months, and I think I like it. "All Play is Design" has been sounding in there, too, but I think the former is more true than the latter.

Finally, I've got my first play-testing credit!