This is only my personal opinion and I don't think any less of people with another opinion than mine.

I think, this game is extremely boring and almost unplayable without any mods, and I mean mods which changes the core gameplay (overhauls), adds creatures and weapons and items and makes the HUD better.

This game is in the top 3 of my favourite games, but ONLY because of the mods, which, IMO, makes the game so much better.

Why do you play this game Vanilla? I am only curious, nothing more.

It is fun with mods. Vanilla is fun also. I find using mods only after at least beating the main quest. (and the shivering isles)

I play it Vanilla. I'm doing fine without mods, honestly.

Well, i′ve been playing this game for 2 years, and untill a month ago, when i found this forum, I had no idea there were mods for the game! It has always been one of my favorite games beacuse, well, there′s nothing quite like it. But since stumbling upon this place i′ve gotten curious about some mods, and i′ll probably get some stuff shortly. So, for me, the vanilla′s been simply ′cus i didn′t know that there were mods′, but it was still one of the greatest games i′ve ever played!

I just believe that people who has never tried mods are really cheating themselfs from a great experience with this game. I understand if people are a bit lost when I comes to installing mods, because it can be quite overwhelming, but it is worth the trouble tenfold, in my opinion.

I am not here to try to make people install mods or anything at all, I am just curious if any people actually plays the game Vanilla, I wonder how many % of the players actually do.

Well, if you take your time and want to invest the time it takes to understand how to install mods, you will experience the game you love, become SO much better. You can just start with very small and extremely easy mods and not big overhauls, just to get started. When you get better at installing mods you can try bigger ones which changes the whole game and makes it much more immersive, but it does take some time and a lot of reading to really understanding. Installing mods the wrong way can/will make you game really unstable. You can get all the help you want from the modding forum, people are really nice, just remember to search for your questions before asking.

I played the game on PS3 first so I didn't have a choice. I borrowed a copy of it for PC so I could try some mods but haven't got round to buying my own copy yet, I will one day though.

I play on xbox so I can't get mods, I love Oblivion how it is. It's my number 1 game, has been for some time. If I had a computer that was capable of playing Oblivion as well as (or better than) my xbox then it would be a different story. :brokencomputer:

I'm a PS3 player and I just love the game as Bethesda created it. :shrug:

I played 'vanilla' for a long time before using any mods. It is a testament to the game's quality that it is so enjoyable without any mods. Console players don't have a choice. With that being said, now that I do use mods, I can't imagine playing without them. They just make the game that much better.

I play on PC, played it a long time without mods and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Then I slowly began adding mods. Discounting utilities (Wrye, OBMM, OBSE, UOPs, etc) I am using about 20 mods. At this point, most of my mods are simply cosmetic for my elf and her horse. A portable campsite is one of our faves, as is DarN's dark user interface.

We also use the command console quite a bit for things that range from making some of my elf's friends essential, to naming her horse, naming her saves, bringing her horse into town, or getting unstuck between rocks. It can also be very helpful to assist with screenshots. Currently, we thoroughly enjoy the game with mods that only nibble around the edges - no overhauls or added quest content.

Part of that is that my character posts a detailed Journal of her travels and adventures. We like her world to seem very familiar to all Oblivion players, so we don't change it around too much.

With 600 hours under her belt, I would not be surprised if my character does eventually ask for some additional content. I expect she would very much enjoy helping Savlian Matius rebuild Kvatch some day for example. In the mean time, imagination goes a long way for us in expanding what already exists in the game or even creating new quests from what is in the game.

Xbox 360 since release. Still playing. It's my number one game, even crossing genres and trumping shooters I also play.

I played it vanilla for quite awhile before delving into mods. I didn't add any because I had any huge problems with the game, they simply enhanced an already addictive game. And because I play on a (non gamer) laptop, the mods I do have are sparse--they don't change anything in the game significantly, they just add a few things. That said, I have a difficult time imagining my game without those few mods I do have, but then, I added them some time ago.

i played it at first on the PS3.i liked it but it was somewhat boring.now that i have it on my laptop i play with mods.using wrye bash,obmm,obse,boss as my main utilities,i now have the fcom setup rolling with a number of cosmetic mods and deadly reflex mixed with dmc stylish and unnecessary violence.mods definately made this game more enjoyable and playable for the long run.being new to pc gaming it took me a minute to figure out how to set it up right,but now that i have its soooooo much more than the vanilla experience.

It is certainly not boring vanilla, although I can understand why some want mods after a few hundred hrs. I′m not one of them however

On note, I do have one mod. Spell Delete, and I tried a mod that alters the environment in the Jeralls and Bruma, though it was a disaster so it had to go. What I could get rid of that is :shakehead:

No more mods for this bird

For me the beauty of mods is that they allow the player to craft their own game. In effect, you become a kind of junior game developer in your own right. With mods, Oblivion is never quite the same from one game to the next. The Oblivion I played in 2006 is not the same Oblivion I played in 2008 and the Oblivion I played in 2008 is not the same Oblivion I play in 2010. It is always changing, always fresh, always full of surprises, thanks to mods.

It all depends what you want out of the game. Some players want to be guided, other players want to guide themselves; some want to be told a story, others want to tell their own stories; some want the "game experience as the developers intended it," others want to make their own game.

More importantly, mods are critical to my roleplaying. I would have a very hard time roleplaying some of my characters without the aid of mods.

One of my more recent characters is a race, Dea Obscura, that, because of their hideous appearance, is hated and feared in Cyrodiil. They are sold on the black market to the Arena. This character stays permanently inside the Arena until she wins her freedom by becoming Champion. I use about ten mods to make this character and her story come alive for me.

She starts life inside the Bloodworks. Because I use an overhaul mod becoming Champion cannot be accomplished at level 1. A new chaindoll and a mod making chaindolls useable allows her to train her weapon skill between fights. A Blacksmith in the Bloodworks will repair her raiment and train her armor skill between fights. Yellow Team gear is lootable, so she can afford to pay training and repair bills.

I added slave quarters off the Bloodworks. I also added a second Dea Obscura NPC to the Bloodworks for atmosphere. This slave sleeps in the new slave quarters and trains at the new chain doll in the Bloodworks the rest of the time. She does not leave the Arena.

It takes me about 15 to 20 levels to make it to Champion. At that point my character is free and can leave the Arena for the first time. After that, My character and I play a variety of quest mods for the remainder of that character's life. This is just one roleplaying experience that's possible with mods.

As I said once in another thread, Oblivion is one of my favorite games; modded Oblivion is my favorite game.

Since I play the game on console; yeah. I play Vanilla. Have been for over 4 years now, still love the game to death. But I do know that with mods I would love it a million times more..

Mods make a great game, a perfect game.

(And a good game, a great game. And a mediocre game a good game, and so on and so forth..)

I love Oblivion in Vanilla heck just today I never realized that Moranda was a 3 level dungeon I completely missed out on the 2nd level beceause I always would unlock the door at the beginning of the dungeon. Its still my all time favorite game and the fact that you can do whatever you want in the game is why this game is awesome.

I play on a PS3, so I have to. I'm not really interested in cheating or altering the game.

Mods for the win with me. Like Pseron Wyrd I find myself often creating little mods to alter gameplay that I do not like. Whether it is to make conjuration level slower, make a version of Iron armor that is Light instead of Heavy so I can go from it to Elven later in the game without needed to raise two armor skills, or make new races like Nibeneans and Colovians - because the vanilla Imperials are just blah, make Dark Seducers playable with all their gear, and so on. Mods really add a lot of replayablity to the game.

Mods are great for the most part, but I never download anything lore-unfriendly. It just sort-of wrecks my roleplaying. I played on the PS3 for a long time though, and it was great, but mods, as others have said, enhance the experience.

I tend to play elder scrolls without mods since my PC crashes the game and when I put it on the lowest settings it goes to fast and when I put on the average settings it slows down on me again until I enter a building then it goes to fast :facepalm:

although mods do enhances the experience it pains me to see time after time "oblivion is unplayable without mods unlike morrowind " in these boards they are truly forgetting what makes elder scrolls a great game that is why I am willing to defend most people who get flamed no matter what the idea but these people do need to learn to mod.

I am a vivid imaginer so I tend to get a lot of aesthetically mods for my characters but lore unfriendly mods like the mountable dragon mods or any nudity packs I stick far away from those but mods like the one that add more variety to beast by giving them different color or character packs I am OK with.

But I don't think mods will stop me from playing the console version more as it is easier to pick up and play But for my more serious characters who I spend time writting the back stories and find tuning there design like my argonian assassin Gone I generally chose PC.

I originally got this game for the Xbox 360 about 3 years back, that was before I even started any form of serious PC gaming, actually to be honest, that was my first ever serious gaming experience! Wow, I've missed quite a lot. D:

Anyway... I enjoyed the game a lot and I would constantly make new characters when my previous ones got to a high level (around level 30-ish) and I started to realise that there's not much challenge in the game, even with the slider all the way - it's just increased health pools. Earlier this year I got a fairly decent PC to play games on, nothing fancy mind you but it did the trick, and after I got Oblivion I decided to try out some mods such as FCOM in order to see how the mods preformed and I was instantly amazed by them, what would usually be a quick and easy dungeon crawl turned into a fight for survival as I actually had to THINK, huh, imagine that. After that I decided to get some 'eye candy' mods that give the environment unique propertied, which I loved... obviously.

So, I'm not the type of person that goes over the top with mods, I usually pick ones that are gameplay changing in some way rather than something like a new race or different hairstyles.

I played the vanilla game with several characters (beat main quest with all of them) before I realized there was a huge modding community for this game. I don't think I'd still be playing this game years down the road if it weren't for mods.

I play GOTY on the PS3, and Im completely happy.