MOD: (Oblivion) The Sentient Weapon

My first mod for Oblivion, called The Sentient Weapon.

A wandering weaponsmith makes you an offer- get him some materials that he needs, and he'll make you a sentient weapon of your choice. It promises to be unique for you can enfuse it with the soul and personality of another. Who will you take? A hero, a coward... a murderer? Oblivion mod with 1000 lines of spoken dialogue. New quests, including a seperate quest for each weapon personality. Weapons have hated enemies, which give cumulative bonuses against a particular kind of creature. New creatures, locations, items and quests.

I had hoped this mod would get a good reaction, and it did (and then some!) I ended up releasing three versions of it, each one with significantly more content then the previous. It went from a single quest to create a weapon, to multiple quests for each personality, customization, hundreds of sounds, frenzy modes and more. The weapon can fall asleep, it can go berserk, it can complain, comment on what you're doing and what you're fighting, and more.

In fact, I even got a mention in CGW as one of the top-five Oblivion mods. Neato!

I don't remember exactly where the inspiration for the mod came from. It wasn't my normal kind of quest mod- less emphasis on the quest and more on the prize. I believe I was thinking about how the game has voices for everyone, and it triggered in my head that it would be neat to have a talking weapon, commenting on everything that you do, complimenting and berating you. I thought my idea was so novel, as I had not seen it done before in this style of 3D RPG game. Unbeknownst to me it had been done before in Morrowind. I wasn't aware of that mod until after the first version of my mod was released, and then the comparisons began. Although the attitude of my weapons was much different, I believe I offered much more to the player in the end (a few suggestions coming from players, as well).

Scripting was a big part of this one. I ended up with so many processes going, especially when a weapon was unsheathed- mostly dealing with dialogue conditions and timing, quest functions, and plain ol' random events. A lot of time went into figuring out neat little things I could have the weapons do or say. Another big time sink was coming up with and recording all that dialogue, ugh. I think each personality got about 350 dialogue sounds, so that ended up being quite a bit. I was a little nervous about voice acting since... well, I'm not a voice actor, but the response was positive for the most part. I did get some comments about people not liking it, but that's to be expected, especially when I tried to make at least six different voices (including a female; with some creative sound editing I think I pulled that one off pretty well. Thankfully that was an NPC with only a few lines!) Looking back I think the only atrocious voice was the main quest character, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking with that one, but even then someone said that it sounded like what the race should sound like, so whatever. If I can find another hosting site (the one I was using shut down) I'll put some samples up so you can judge.

No point in presenting screens for this one I suppose. The mod does contain one new dungeon but I use a lot of pre-existing locations otherwise.

The mod is not very difficult to complete (although Atkivir's quest can be difficult since you must kill town guards). Some people do have trouble with it since I frequently do not give quest markers on the map. My logic is, you shouldn't know exactly where something is unless you DO know. So if someone gives you a map, or tells you a location, fine you get a marker. If you're going on a rumor however... you have to find it yourself. I think it makes much more game-logic sense to do it that way. Having markers for everything makes quests trivial and no fun.

There's still a few sites hosting the mod that have many user comments about it. If you want to read reviews/opinions, check em out! The one linked has a lot of comments.