Oblivion Remastered fixes many of the original game’s crimes. You no longer have to grind your minor skills to level efficiently, for instance. Alas, it’s left one of them intact: levelled loot. Fortunately, modder Trainwiz—who you probably know either from adding working trains to New Vegas or turning all of Skyrim’s dragons into Ohio—has already put in the work to fix it
If you don’t have a clue what ‘levelled loot’ even is, here’s the skinny. Time was, RPGs (like Morrowind, Oblivion’s beautiful predecessor) didn’t tiptoe around trying to make sure you only ever got loot that was appropriate for your level. Outside of random gear on dead enemies and in certain barrels and chests, which was pulled from levelled loot tables, if a cave or quest was meant to have a Ring of Reflect All Damage and Win Every Fight at the end of it, that ring would be there whether you were level 1 or level 100.
In an attempt to make itself more accessible and slightly harder to break over your knee, Oblivion changed that kind of loot to also be levelled. Take the Blade of Woe, for example: if you get it at level 1 to 4, its enchantment will do a piddling 5 points of damage to health, willpower, and magicka while demoralising enemies up to level 2. Get it when you’re over level 30, and it’ll do 35 points of damage and demoralise enemies up to level 10.
It’s a frustrating and clumsy system that can make quest rewards feel a bit naff, or else force certain kinds of brains (mine) to plan out a particular route through the game’s quests in order to optimise the rewards you get at the end, and it’s still in the remaster. That’s where Trainwiz comes in. Their mod, Unleveled Item Rewards, fixes the issue by just making every quest reward the best possible version of itself, regardless of your level when you get it. Just as God intended, even if it’s not as Todd intended.
Trainwiz really gets into the fire and brimstone in the mod description for this one. “When I learned that quest rewards STILL pull from a leveled pool like some sort of troglodyte moron game made for idiots, I was overcome with an impossible incomprehensible fury,” they write, calmly. “I blacked out, but when I awoke this mod suddenly existed, along with a cocoon of trainlike matter that seems to contain the now drained body of the original person who made the executive decision to have quest rewards. It was a fate they deserved.”
Just to be clear, Trainwiz clarifies that they’re joking about their boundless rage, but I do pretty much agree when they call Oblivion’s default loot system “heinous and unacceptable.” There are some things on this Earth we shouldn’t brook. Levelled loot is one of them.
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