Oblivion
Main parent category for all posts about playing Oblivion
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Getting up and running on the new Steam Deck
As I reported in my previous post, I got a surprise new Steam Deck when my original one decided its battery was going to turn into a spicy danger pillow! So over the last day or so, I’ve been working on setting up the new device with all the games and playthroughs I had active on the previous one.
This post is about that, and about my overall impressions of this new Deck in general. It’s an OLED model, and yeah, there are some distinct differences between it and its predecessor.
This is not going to be a full review post. If you want an in-depth review of the OLED Steam Deck, there are plenty to choose from all over the web. As I’m a regular follower of Ars Technica, I’ll commend their review in particular to you.
What I want to talk about here instead are my overall personal impressions, what I’ve noticed so far that’s different from my original Deck, and what I had to do to get all my previous games and playthroughs back up and running.
Deets behind the fold. This’ll be a long post.
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In Which Ganniwer Does Battle in the Imperial City Arena
Oh hey look another post for my Oblivion playthrough! Not much to this, just enough to let me remind myself of how the game works, and to try to push my activity in the Arena along a little further.
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In Which Ganniwer Joins the Arena
Back over in my Oblivion playthrough, I made the foolish choice of trying to move the main plot along at level 3! Those of you who know what happens when you try to go to Kvatch to find Martin Septim will know to what degree I had my ass handed to me by this decision. Snerk.
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In Which Ganniwer Solves a Merchant Problem
Hey, remember that playthrough I started in Oblivion? Well, I finally nudged it a little further along in this session! Main action: checking out the Imperial City, and running a minor plot there involving a problematic merchant and where he’s getting his inventory from.
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In Which Ganniwer Tracks Down Weynon Priory
My second official actual Oblivion post, several days after the fact, but hey, that’s what taking notes is for! So I can make blog posts later and remember what I actually did!
Main action of what I played here: exploring the lay of the land, and reaching Weynon Priory and getting help in the search for the dead Emperor’s son. But also getting a few basic mods installed, and getting controller support working on the Steam Deck!
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Issue with no controller buttons on screen SOLVED
A little while ago today I did a post lamenting a problem I was having with my Oblivion install on my Steam Deck showing me keyboard prompts on screen rather than controller button prompts. I am delighted to report, as of this post, that this issue is solved.
A helpful user on Mastodon (all hail @blake) told me that the issue was that the controller config I had on the Deck was sending keyboard inputs, not controller inputs. And that what I had to do was to change to a configuration that sent controller inputs instead.
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No controller button prompts on screen in Oblivion
EDITING TO ADD 1/22/2023 8:25pm, for anybody that lands on this post: I’ve actually found a solution to this issue. Please have a look at this later post.
So once I got Oblivion running on my Steam Deck, I thought I’d try to do the same thing with it that I did with Shenner’s run in Skyrim: i.e., go ahead and mod it, but very lightly, sticking to just bug fix mods, or ones that provide critical enhancements to just improve the game’s quality of play on a modern device.
However, I’m running into an issue I need help with.
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In Which Ganniwer Witnesses the Death of the Emperor
Welcome to the first official session post of my brand new Oblivion playthrough! I didn’t intend to start an Oblivion playthrough quite yet, but I was inspired by the Skyblivion team finally announcing a release date for their mod. And since I’d really like to get a full Oblivion playthrough done before Skyblivion finally drops (hopefully targeting 2025 now), I figured it was high time I got started!
See the intro post I wrote yesterday, which includes an embed of the trailer for Skyblivion on YouTube, and also a bit of discussion about what I had to do to get Oblivion running. This post is about the actual playing I did after!
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Skyblivion’s Release Date, and Also, a Playthrough for Oblivion
Exciting news in the world of Skyrim modding today, as the Skyblivion released a new trailer, and have announced a target release date for their work finally: 2025!
The trailer looks quite good!
But now that they have at least a tentative release date, this put me in the mood to finally start poking at Oblivion. I want to do the same thing with this game that I’m doing with Morrowind: get to know the game in its vanilla form before its makeover mod drops, so I’ll be in a position to properly appreciate all the changes they’ve done!
So with that in mind, I finally attempted to start an Oblivion game. I tried this twice, first on my Win11 VM, and then on my Steam Deck.
On the VM, the game loaded, but it was not in a good state. I was able to go through the character creation flow, but as soon as I was out of that, I got stuck in this loop where the game was acting like a key was stuck. It kept making noises and trying to load the same dialog over and over.
I did manage to save my game though so I wouldn’t have to redo it on the Deck.
Loading it on the Deck worked a lot better. I was able to open up the save I’d done on my computer and see my character as I designed her. And Steam on the device already had a good controller layout mapped, so I just had to get familiar with it to try to navigate in the game.
I made one minor change to it, remapping the D-Pad so that I could have access to mouse wheel scrolling events, and also taking screenshots. I want to doublecheck what I set there; it’d be nice to have those actions completely match what I custom-set over in Morrowind.
I only went so far as to finish the character creation process; I am not trying to play yet. But this was enough to let me confirm that yes, I can run Oblivion just fine on the Deck, apparently!
And now I have a character. Check it out, y’all! Ganniwer the Bosmer!
Ganniwer the Bosmer 1Test screenshot of my new Oblivion character, Ganniwer the Bosmer.Ganniwer the Bosmer 2Second screenshot of character, from a slightly different angle, as I experiment with learning the camera view controls.Editing to add
- 11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.
