Oblivion [1] was only released a couple of weeks ago, but it has already spawned a number of hacks, innumerable tips and hint commentaries, and one (two more to follow) “official” add on.
The “hacks” are a normal part of the Elder Scrolls community- Bethesda (the developer) includes a construction kit as part of the the PC release of Oblivion specifically with the intent of allowing people to make modifications to the game if they like
- Hacks, mods, and such: You can upgrade the speed of your horse [2], increase the rate that your health regens [3], make torches burn forever [4], add to your carrying
capacity…or make the moon in Oblivion look like the death star [5]. All of these (and many more) come from one site- GameSpot [6], and presumably there are other sites hosting even more mods - Activate screen captures: Find your oblivion config file (My Documents/My Games/Oblivion/Oblivion.ini); Open that file with your favorite text editor (or Notepad if you must). Find the property “bAllowScreenShot”. If you’ve never edited this before, it should be set to zero (E.G.: bAllowScreenShot=0). Change the “0” to a “1”. Now when you press the print screen button (PrtScn) button on your keyboard a BMP file will
be captured in your game directory (where the executables are: E.G.: “C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\“. You can find more hints and cheat codes on GameSpot [7] - Official optional plugins: You can currently add armour for your horse for a mere US$1.99 [8]. Coming soon at the same price will be two small “extensions”- basically a couple of extra adventures, one involving the Orrery at the Arcane University, the other being a wizards tower which I think you can buy/own and use as your home. Note that the only currently available download, the horse armour one, currently uses copy protection that doesn’t work with Windows XP 64 (the 64 bit version of Windows). It just so happens I use that version…sigh
I haven’t installed/downloaded any hacks yet, although I have turned on screen shots. Once they fix the problem with the plugin installer not working with Windows XP 64, I might pick up one or two of those. I don’t need new content, but my horse could use some barding 😉