As well as the enormous visual glow-up, Oblivion Remastered went out of its way to tweak elements of the original game that were just a little annoying. So you don’t have to grind minor skills anymore in order to level efficiently, and praise the Nine can now actually run through this vast open world. But one crime remained: levelled loot.
Levelled loot has always been a pain for Oblivion players, who over the years have come up with various ways to mitigate this element of the game. The long and short is that Oblivion made certain non-random drops, usually quest rewards, into a levelled version of that item that roughly aligned to your character’s level.
Which would be all well and good, except the gear then stays at that level: So pick up Chillrend at a low level, for example, and you’ve just ensured that one of the game’s best weapons will now be useless once you’ve levelled up further. Some mods fix this by simply making every item the best possible version it can be, but modder TheOneTrueRy now offers a slightly more elegant solution.
The Auto Upgrade Levelled Items mod is one of those that does what it says on the tin. The description says it “automatically replaces leveled unique items obtained as quest rewards with a version fitting for your level as your character progresses. No more worrying about what level you should or shouldn’t complete certain quests at!”
TheOneTrueRy clearly felt that he was doing god’s work (not Todd’s work) after “a 10 hour long hyperfixation where I forgot to eat or sleep” and instead got deep in the guts of Oblivion’s tools and scripting. The result now happily means that “the days of waiting tens of levels to tell Farmer Odiil that you actually saved his farm and both his sons years ago so you can get the strongest version of Chillrend are now overrrrrrrrr!”
The mod comes in three different flavours that will automatically upgrade the items in slightly different ways, such as a variant where you cast your own spell to trigger the upgrades. The mod covers over 100 different levelled items and two levelled spells across the base game and all DLCs. The only items currently not supported are those that came with the deluxe edition, but they’re to be added in the next update.
The levelled loot system always felt like a clumsy solution that just made playthroughs worse, and it says everything that you’ll easily find a million guides and videos on how to game it effectively. It’s kind of surprising that this isn’t one of the things Oblivion Remastered tried to fix itself but, as ever, the Elder Scrolls modders have delivered.
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