Oblivion Mod talk:Order of the Dragon

Just wondering if anyone has opinions on this mod. Having played about 2/3 of the way through this mod, I have some thoughts that I was hoping to share.

This mod is either great or terrible, but nowhere in between. There are many pluses, but also some (depending on the player's tastes) terrible deficiencies. One (well, I) would like to see a version that takes out the latter and keeps the former, it's probably not the kind of thing that the original modders would approve.

The good things:

1) I think this is the prettiest mod that I've seen. The modding team did an amazing job putting the world of Mephala's realm together.

2) This is a very "well made" mod in multiple senses. First, the new realm is genuinely well crafted: the locations and their associated lores are intriguing and enticing; the NPCs have interesting back stories. It is a very nice place to visit and to travel around in as an RPG player character. Second, the "worksmanship" of the mod is very good. In spite of a lot of new moving parts (more on this below), the mod is remarkably stable--I'd rate this as at least as stable as the base game. Very good job at quality control to have very few bugs.

3) The translation by WalkerinShadows is quite good, even heroic. It's not perfect, but that'd be too much for a single person to do, given how many moving parts there are in this game. At minimum, this is highly playable...up to a point.

The bad things.

1) This may actually count as a "good" thing for the more hard core gamers, but not for me (who likes to play a tourist rather than a riddle solver in wide open sandbox type RPG.). Solving the main quest involves a lot of very long and, tbh, rather tedious quests. There are tons of puzzles you have to go through that are not very forgiving. There are a lot of ways to get instant deaths in the mod and many of them are not obvious. You just have learn by doing and save/reload a lot. Some puzzles, even if they don't kill you right away for not solving them, cannot be re-attempted. And, finally, complex as the mod is, a fair chunk of the puzzles seem bugged. (But given the complexity of many of the puzzles, one can't be sure if you are dealing with a bug or you are missing some requirements that you missed.)

2) As heroic as WalkerinShadows' translation is, there are serious limitations that get in the way of enjoying the mod. I'm convinced that background conversations among NPCs are important for at least some of the puzzles and riddles. There is no translation for them and, to be honest, it'd be probably difficult to actually listen to some of them even if you knew German. I think WalkerinShadows made some mistakes while translating/rewriting some of the riddles: some of the riddles have been rendered as "The riddle makes no sense in English. The answer is X." Except, at least in some instances, they are not. You have to rely on trial and error to figure out what the actual answer is (and risk instant deaths and/or having to reload).

3) Following up on 1), many of the riddles and puzzles are very obtuse. No clue. No guidance. Just guessing, trial/error, and reload, followed by cheating when all else fails. Many gates are behind hidden doors/walls that can only be opened when you have gotten the through the puzzles and, worse still, you have to have some NPCs following you through them, too. The console is your friend...but it gets tiring after all while.

4) Quest updates are very sparse and the arrow is disabled (for most quests) by default. Place markers are often missing and, in the base mod, you cannot fast travel. You have to guess what's missing and wander around a lot hoping you guessed correctly. Doing this a few times is not too bad, but having to do it 12 times per each quest is not.

5) There are some issues with the map: the city of Kathar, important for dealing with many of the quests, doesn't actually fit the worldmap. With the fast travel disabled in the base mod, this doesn't really matter, I suppose--you just don't even see the actual world map when you are there--just an outline of the continent. In terms of the setup, the two parts of Kathar are actually set up as their own worldspaces without parents, which makes it irrelevant that the city has buildings and landmarks "inside" cliffs. The cliffs become apparent when you use slangen's map mod, which has a version that enables fast travel, and such, assigns the worldmap of Mephala's realm as the parent to Kathar. (I assume the new landmarks and buildings are new additions for the updated version.) Or, in other words, you can't mod your way out of this issue very easily, especially if you are not good at it.

6) The mod is not very lore friendly in light of what we have learned from Skyrim and ESO, although the modders can't be taken to task for it. One could imagine how the story of Ocato might have been retconned in-universe: after what happened in the mod, i.e. he turned out to have been an evil power hungry wannabe despot, he was made into a an assassinated hero instead to counter Thalmor, it is possible that Mephala's realm has different forms and names (Daedric lords operate in mysterious ways and so on), etc... But such rationalizations are up to the player if they want to.

It would be terrific if there is a version of ODD that is just tourist friendly (i.e. it's not too hard to just travel to and from Mephala's realm and experience, without needing to finish the main quest), but that's probably not going to fly... 172.56.232.173 19:58, 2 June 2025 (UTC)