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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Reviving Oblivion

This blog has so far suffered from all work no play. That is hardly reflective of my real life. So let's talk about about Oblivion. This game is Bethesda Softworks to a T - monumental, beautiful, engaging, virtually limitless in depth, and a crash king. It is so Bethesda that even the console versions crash with regularity. The last official patch was ages ago (well, 4/30/07, ancient history for a PC game).

Fortunately some dedicated folks (Quarn & Kivan) have put together the UOP - the Unofficial Oblivion Patch. If you have played Oblivion on the PC, you will be more than amazed at the way crashes are minimized. I have now played days without crashing during the game. Admittedly, the game crashes to desktop on exit on my PC almost every time, but it never freezes the whole system like it used to. What amazes me most is that you can open and play games that were saved on pre-UOP versions of Oblivion - lots of times big patches are not backward compatible.

If you have played Oblivion before and took it out of your rotation because of the crashes, you should download this patch and give it another try. You can get the patch at (among other places) PlanetElderScrolls.

Have fun. Meanwhile, I'm heading back to my house on the waterfront to soultrap conjured creatures and recharge my Shadowhunt bow.

1 comment:

Charles said...

Cool blog - surfed over from charlesjeter.com...

One aggravating bug I keep finding on the XBox 360 version is sometimes when you put items into chests, they just simply vanish. Frustrating when you save over a previous game, maddening when you actually had enough time to play for a few hours and have to redo everything.

The real crazy maker? reloading the game makes the items missing sometimes come back.

Of course then other items are missing...

Workaround: don't be tidy. Leave stuff laying about in one of your houses... or in a guild.