The post 13 Oblivion mods that should not have been has been getting a lot of attention lately. It’s a great list, but I think the author forgot to include this mod necessary for anyone who wanted to play as a woman and didn’t want a handicap that could potentially affect gameplay: The Oblivion Equalizer.
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October 9th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Aw, thanks Tekanji for thinking of the Oblivion Equalizer!
October 9th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
It’s the first thing i think of when I think of Oblivion.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Ok, wow, I haven’t had a chance to play Oblivion yet but I was having a long running discussion with my boyfriend about this. If I recall correctly, most of the D&D style fantasy video games, where you make an avatar and spend points or roll stats or whatever, haven’t differentiated between genders for more than ten years. Console RPGs with ensemble casts will do this, giving you a weaker female healer, female mage, female “scrapper” type of class, but first-person RPGs have been very clearly avoiding doing that. The boyfriend believes that the last case was any older game based on D&D’s 2nd edition rules. (It’s been a while so I may have missed a recent glaring example, other than the Bethesda titles.)
What I’m trying to say is that game companies have been at least aware enough to realize that overtly creating a disparity between the abilities of fantasy characters was extremely stupid business practice. I’m stunned that either the Oblivion designers planned this disparity, or they didn’t examine the rules system they were building the new game from. (The bf believes they might have ‘ported the Morrowind rules over without “looking under the hood”.)
It’s infuriating as a woman to have a game system say “you are a deviation from the ‘default’ so you will be x points lesser” but it’s also aggravating as a gamer to bump into a system that has such penalties in place with no good reason. Thanks for the link to the mod, when I actually get a chance to play Oblivion you’ll have saved me hours of swearing at my screen.
March 3rd, 2007 at 1:12 am
The equalizer sounds like a good idea… I sometimes got fed up with the stock race/sex combos, which slanted things far too heavily towards Male Warrior/Female Thief-Mage. More time spent playing, and less time in the console, rearranging stat and skill points to match the character concept.
Hrm… then again, since the character-generation system in TES4 is a joke, the console would get a workout anyway.