What is Super's Oblivion Overhaul?

SOO is a gameplay overhaul mod that, in a nutshell, removes RPG mechanics in exchange for Strategic Roguelike and Action-Adventure elements!

This particular mod is vastly different in concept and scope compared to the other popular overhauls, so please read this entire page carefully before deciding if this is for you. I wanted to address several problems I personally have with the game and make a case for a new type of mod. Read on if this sounds interesting!

    What are the main goals?

1. Total elimination of numerical character progression in nearly every capacity
2. Requirement of strategizing between melee, bows, magic and item use
3. Increased value of items and magic through severe limitations
4. Increased randomization of many scenarios to promote improvisational gameplay
5. Fixed various quality-of-life issues and overall less focus on boring concepts
and most importantly...
6. Proof that Oblivion is not in need of new content or heavy-handed mechanic changes, but rather thoughtful and clever redesigning of what's already there.

These are all vague promises and may sound too good to be true for some of you, and perhaps they are, but I'll be getting into how I accomplished all this (or at least tried to) in the next section.

    What are the differences?

ROLE PLAYING ELEMENTS

Oblivion is, in a sense, no longer an RPG. You don't level up and your stuck at level 1. Every single item, creature and mechanic in the game has been balanced to allow this. Your attributes and skills are far more static values that almost never change. The game feels less like a grind-fest and more like an action adventure game.

Your skills are predetermined are not really important to pay attention to. Some diseases can drain skills and you can still damage them from prison time. Alcohol can buff some skills. Attributes start at 50 and almost never change unless damaged or buffed with magic.

Character creation is far more streamlined. Every race / gender has the same attributes and skills. The only difference is 1 passive race ability. This ensures that you are picking a race that you like as opposed to the race that is most likely to result in the strongest possible character. Similarly, classes still exist simply to aid in role playing your character; they have no effect on gameplay.

The difficulty of the game is considerably higher (think Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul). The health values are balanced so that every individual fight is a fight to the death. The ability to cheat death by saving and reloading constantly is now a requirement rather than an exploit. There is no difficulty slider. More on this later...

QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS

This mod features health and fatigue regeneration outside of combat. No more waiting an hour to restore your health! Also, feel free to jump around as much as you'd like. Got hit by a trap? No problem... unless you're in combat of course.

Your equipped weapons & armor no longer slow your character down. The speed that your character moves at has been fine tuned to be fast enough to explore happily but not too fast so as to be able to easily escape encounters. I'll probably shave a few hours off your total game time with this simple change!

There are several other minor changes, such as night eye's intense blue effect being darkened to reduce eye strain, NPCs for some quests running instead of walking slowly, map markers revealing slightly earlier and the ability to skip the tutorial.

COMBAT

There is a much larger focus on melee combat. Ranged magic and bows are greatly reduced in usefulness and meant to be seen more as side-weapons or last resorts. This is because ranged combat is extremely exploitable and forcing close-up encounters ensures an intense fight.

Magicka doesn't regenerate at all. You can use quite a few spells before having to refill. It also won't come back by waiting, sleeping or using an altar, you MUST use items. In addition, you start with 50% magic resistance, which isn't super important, it's just for combat balance.

There's a few additional small changes such as not being able to recharge magic equipment during combat, no special abilities from power attacks (no disarming, paralysis etc.), and armor not affecting magic effectiveness.

REPAIRING

There is NO more repairing in the game at all. No smiths and no hammers. When your armor or weapons break, it's time to throw them away and find new ones. You'll be scrounging for new equipment constantly and will likely use things you've never even paid attention to.

What about artifacts and unique equipment? When they break, they break for good! Use them wisely. I feel some people may not like this change, but it adds so much value to them and makes them feel special in a way they just can't feel in vanilla. No more god items!

Also, weapon and armor rating is NOT affected by condition. You can use everything at peak efficiency until it breaks for good. Stuff breaks pretty fast, too.

ENEMIES

All creatures in Oblivion are present from the very beginning! You'll be fighting everything from mudcrabs to land dreughs to headless zombies to Xivilai. Some of them also spawn in groups, most notably wolf packs.

I also created a new system from scratch that applies randomized stat bonuses to most creatures in the game. You'll know what a creature is capable of based on magic radiating from their bodies (ex. a wolf will be electrified, see the screenshots!).

All variants of humanoid enemies will also appear, sometimes with different equipment and items in tow. All diseases in the game have been re-balanced.

ACQUIRING SPELLS

Spells can no longer be purchased or made with spellmaking altars. They are received through questing or by a completely new system. There are way less spells in the game, but they are all effective and vastly different. They are almost exclusively touch spells as well.

To get a new spell outside of questing, You must acquire a sigil stone. They can be found in Oblivion realms as usual or by bringing 5 varla stones to an ayleid well and exchanging them. Bring the sigil stone (which by itself does nothing) to a Doomstone and receive a new spell!

There are some new abilities too, such as Ayleid Sleep, which allows you to restore a small bit of magicka by sleeping, and a bound all armor spell, among others.

ENCHANTMENTS

Artifacts and unique equipment are the only enchanted items in the game. They are extremely limited and break permanently (as described in the "repair" section.) Sigil stones no longer enchant items and the enchanting altars are disabled.

Enchanted jewelry is available through questing or by visiting Runestones. They will grant you new jewelry after completing questlines. This includes Master Training quests (ex. completing 3 quests involving skills governed by the same attribute), house upgrade questlines, and guild questlines (including upgrading the DLC themed houses).

There ARE enchanted clothes acquired through questing or for sale by vendors, however they contain negative as well as positive effects. This clothing as well as the jewelry described earlier are the ONLY available examples in the entire game.

INVENTORY

One of the defining features of this mod is the extremely limited weight system. You'll have to make difficult decisions when deciding what to carry: Do you want to run into a dungeon lean in order to carry more items back at the risk of death, or run in stacked and risk missing out on loot?

Don't think you're going to carry a ridiculous amount of potions and lockpicks to save yourself from a difficult situation. Almost every item in the game is significantly heavier so you'll have to strategize and carry only the important stuff.

Your base allowance is 250 pts. There are still some feather effects to take advantage of.

ITEMS

Every type of weapon and armor as well as every variant of potion, scroll, staff etc. is available from the start of the game. You'll find rare weapons in loot and in the hands of various creatures and enemies. Rare armor can be found worn by boss NPCs and some major characters.

The basic equipment is fur, leather, iron and steel. The other types of equipment (such as dwarven, elven etc.).  have differences based on weight, health and ghost effectiveness. Artifacts and unique equipment have altered stats including higher damage in some cases.

Potions and poisons are weighted differently based on effectiveness. Staves are one-shot last-resort type weapons and are weighted based on number of uses (1 to 4). Scrolls have the same weight values but will "recoil" on the user.

Soul gems will refill any magical item completely regardless of the type of soul. Putting a bigger soul in a gem increases it's resale value significantly. In addition, gemstones, skill books and unenchanted jewelry have been revalued for selling.

Some new items include the Potion of Redemption, which restores skills damaged by prison time, and the Voidcall scroll, which summons a random monster. There are also some unique scrolls including spell effects based on Oblivion players' favorite custom spells.

VENDORS

Vendors do not recharge or repair. Their inventories are significantly nerfed and their gold level is low. This was done in order to incentivize the sale of low-ticket items as opposed to big-ticket armor and weapons (which you won't be able to carry much of). It also incentivizes exploring and finding much-needed items on your own over potentially cheesing and bypassing quests and game mechanics.

STEALTH

There is no sneak attack multiplier anymore. Attacking somebody before they see you is already too powerful, especially given the general effectiveness of sneaking in this mod.

As explained before, bows are significantly nerfed. Arrows are heavy, they are not retrieved through being hit and they disappear much quicker. There ARE some magical arrows that are very powerful retrieved through exploration that come in handy.

Also, pickpocketing cannot be performed unless the target is paralyzed. This eliminates what is essentially an arbitrary and exploitable luck-based mechanic and gives it a downside.

ALCHEMY

Almost all plant / monster ingredients in the game now only restores damaged attributes. Making potions is the only way to achieve this, making alchemy extremely important for every character's survival.

Eating the ingredients has no effect. High-tier alchemy apparatuses are not more effective than the standard stuff.

Also, only 1 potion can be consumed at a time.

DLC

The DLC player houses are unlocked after completing the corresponding questline (ex. completion of the Fighters Guild unlocks access to Battlehorn castle).

The DLC quests begin at different levels of fame as opposed to right at the start of the game.

There are some new features here, such as the Orrery giving a map of all Doomstone locations and the Spell Tomes giving you varla stones.

ANYTHING ELSE?

uhh... vampirism was re-balanced. Yeah.

    What is this mod compatible with?

You may have guessed this already: This mod requires all official DLC and is fully compatible with all of it. This is the only requirement, you don't need a mod organizer or OBSE. This mod is three small ESPs; just drag it into the Oblivion folder, check it and you're good to go!

As far as other mods go, it should be compatible with anything 100% aesthetic in nature. Anything else is highly unlikely due to how much this mod actually changes. Any mod that adds equipment, spells, new races, characters, vendors, enemies etc. will be extremely unbalanced with this and will cause problems.

    Any gameplay tips so I don't get destroyed?

Yes: Get the beginner Mage's Guild fire spell. Also, get the Orrery spell as quickly as you can. The Orrery gives 1 of 8 summon monster spells which are extremely useful in combat with multiple enemies. The Knights of the Nine, when completed, gives you 1 of 8 bound equip spells from the tombs in the undercroft; these are extremely useful when your weapon breaks at a bad time! It also saves on weight!

The Wayward Knight and Paradise are by far the hardest quests in the game. Be prepared! Save your best equipment for these quests!

Save CONSTANTLY, PLEASE. This game is seriously really hard. Make many, many saves. Don't be afraid to reload if you get stuck in a tough cave; re-assess your strategy, ready up and try again!

    Can I help you out?

This mod took over a year of conceptualization and planning and an additional several months of implementation and testing. I have not 100% completed the game with this mod as of writing, although I feel I have kinked out most of the bugs. There WILL be issues, so please report them!

I also created this mod in parts and have not extensively tested the merged version (parts 1, 2 and 3). If you see something that looks broken or are confused about something, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.

In general, I'm always looking to hear about people's experiences and feedback. If you have comments or criticisms about the ideas or the implementation of them, again, reach out.

    Any final thoughts?

Obviously, thanks to Bethesda for creating a timeless piece of art that will never be superseded or forgotten, that has also taken thousands of hours of my time away and was the source of unfathomable enjoyment and laughter for many for over a decade. They deserve another hand for the Construction Set, a tool that allows smoothbrains such as myself to be game designers.

I also want to shout out the UESP wiki and the Construction Set wiki. The amount of game knowledge required for this mod to work was staggering and it would have been impossible without these resources.

And of course, The Nexus and all of it's users. I was surprised so many people liked my mods and it made me want to do this. I hope you enjoy!