I'd been putting it off for years, but recently I was finally forced to upgrade to Windows 10. I decided to take the opportunity to do a full re-install of Oblivion- though I had all of my previous files, my old install was held together with dark magic and tape, and thus prone to crashing if I changed anything.
After creating a clean vanilla slate, I decided to run around ingame to check that everything was in working order... and ended up doing whole playthrough. Including finally, after 1500+ hours of game time in Oblivion, playing the main questline to completion.
Anything I could say about the main quest was said years ago. Suffice to say I enjoyed my time with it, but am not eager to play through it again any time soon. (Okay, but for real, Oblivion Gates get real tedious, real fast.) That being said, I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed playing vanilla. Don't get me wrong, I miss modded- sooo many times I caught myself trying to use my UI hotkeys- but it was nice recapturing what I loved about this game in the first place. The world, the quests, the core experience of Oblivion is just fun for me. I also realized a few things I didn't need to mod; For example, I actually enjoyed playing with the vanilla timescale of 30 and remembered that I'd originally modded it lower to work with basic needs mods I no longer use.
Other games, like Minecraft, don't hold my attention unless modded. But when it comes down to it, I really like Oblivion for itself. (In spite of the bugs, holy crap I forgot how buggy this game is. It makes my creaky old modded install look pretty stable by comparison, lol.)
All that being said, I am going to be once more modding the shit out of Oblivion. It's been ages since I did a full re-install, and I've learned a lot since then. There's been more work by the community to compile modern Oblivion modding guides, too, such as bevilex's popular one. It's going to be a bit of an ordeal to get back to where I was, and I don't even know how much I'll be able to save of my personal mod projects, but it'll be fun, too.
After all, as they say with Skyrim, modding the game IS the game.
