"The "low poly grass mod" does not only serve to improve the frame rate, without losing any visual quality, but also helps to get rid of the tiling effect."

"Besides the vegetation mods, the landscape LOD texture replacement is one of the higher callings. From overwriting/replacing files to recompiling - you can do a lot (wrong) to make this game run hot on multi-gpu systems."

"The gfx mods are very impressive and can alter the look of the game significantly. The OBGE (Oblivion Graphic Extender) is only one meta-project: Parallax Occlusion Mapping, SSAO, diff LOD, Luminance adjusting HDR, Physics based sky, Liquid Water, etc."

"The same City entrance without the "Beautiful City" mod (see former picture) for reference. Both with hi-res texture packs."

"A vegetation mod that changes the trees and leaves significantly."

""Bananasplits Beautiful Cities" is a mod that alters the architecture and design of cities and dungeons."

"high res textures, overwriting some shaders, adjusting colors and suddenly the same tutorial dungeon reminds me of a certain Frank Frazetta painting, only without the pale girl against the stone wall. I don't know what the Bethesda artists, programmers and game designers think about their work being (sometimes highly) altered, but without them, there would be no alterations. Their work lives on for many more years and is always present as the fundamental building block."

"If you are a parent, you have to spend a good amount of time to find the "right" mods and tools to install it, so your daughter can play as this character. There are several bug-cleaning unofficial patches that come along with this and at this point you probably think of just buying her another game or letting her play something else on Facebook/Online - without this elaborate hassle. Yet the game experience could have been quite rewarding. Funny enough, in the early days of the monochrome & EGA monitors & 8/16-bit games, we used to fill the (visual) gaps with ... our own imagination? What happened to that these days, I wonder? ;)"

"First I laughed at this (I have no kids), but if you have a Harry Potter reading daughter, these custom mods and outfits can help identify with the character and immerse girls more into the game? After all, there are still not enough AAA games that have strong female characters, being the heroine of the game, without "serving" a male fantasy teen audience (Bayonetta). Oblivion lets you be whoever you want and still be the hero of the game! There are not only gay/lesbian elf & vampire mods, but hermaphrodite models & skin packs (I kid you not). I like to believe, these are because of a certain desire to play as/with such characters, who are not well enough represented in video games, or not represented at all. Of course, some modders also created some rather odd manga-style models."

"Minuscule thing, but I just discovered you can 'name' your self created potions. Strangely satisfying. The game systems in these open world RPGs have to deal with vast amounts of data on the fly, while making sense of it all and not breaking (too badly) ."

"One of the most expensive ways to read a book - energy wise - running it within a 3D application, on a ca. 200 Watt? consuming PC. This "Brief History of the Empire" comes in 5 tombs and ends up being several hundred pages long. It is written in the style of real history books and has quite some depth to it, although minor errors. In these history books, nobody is really eager to become King. They end up doing it by chance. "Oh? Alright then, if nobody else wants to..." - haha."

"Not every improvement mod can be a winner. I personally don't like this vegetation mod, turning everything into a Disney style fairy tale but different people have different tastes. And I do appreciate the elaborate work and artistic will to make a dull market place a more interesting and colorful one."

"Some Lord of the Rings like moment, thanks to this mod ("Better Cities") adding these statues to the Imperial City. (btw: The Kings of Gondor, Isildor and Anárion, guarding the passage of the Great River Anduin, was that famous scene in the books and the movie. Trivia question for cocktail parties). Interesting how such a relatively minor tweak, can enhance the character of an environment. I hope Bethesda's (and other) game designers took notes."

"30 seconds of Batman Arkham Asylum/ Arkham City Detective Mode view ... in Oblivion. Night Vision Scroll does it for you."

"I only recently discovered the literally over a 1000 mods you can install for the original Oblivion game (for PC). Among them, high res texture packs, landscape LOD texture replacement, but also skeletal replacement, new animations and physics. Be assured these boobs are bouncing physically correct. Other mods change the RPG systems, add companions (you can bro up with Chuck Norris!), new buildings, new islands, - complete playable Addons with storyline and new characters ..."