There are some mods that you need to read up on before you understand why you might want to give them a whirl. There are some mods with which that process can be accomplished via a single GIF. A new Oblivion Remastered work that makes it possible to hilariously reduce the contents of Cyrodiil’s cities to chunks of flying rubble just by slapping buildings with spells is firmly in the latter camp.
Before you get too worried about the karmic balance of the modding wizard powerful enough to make this sort of wanton destruction possible, it’s worth bearing in mind that they’ve previously given players the ability to build new homes any displaced citizens could probably move into.
Prolific Oblivimaster tweaker MadAborModding, whom we interviewed about his work earlier this month, has clearly been busy since that point. His latest mod, as its name on Nexus Mods yells in all caps, lets you DESTROY BUILDINGS. I usually like text to keep the hollering to a minimum, but honestly I think he’s earned it here.
As the GIFs on the mod page and the below showcase video from Reddit show off, the modder’s developed a means of getting Oblivion Remastered’s buildings to hilariously explode into bits when you fire spells at them. It’s glorious. Well, unless you’re an NPC living in some stone tower that’s just been uprooted and sent spinning into the sky.
“This is only possible because of Unreal, the creation engine in any other Bethesda game wouldn’t let you do this,” the building batterer wrote in the thread below the video, “But in unreal, all you gotta do is flip a few true/false flags.”
Don’t worry, though, the effects of any impromptu demolition you get up to aren’t permanent, with everything resetting to normal when you next hit a loading screen. On one hand, that’s maybe disappointing if you’re eyeing up a playthrough in which, to paraphrase Walter White, you are the Oblivion Crisis. Though, given how much lobbing staircases into the stratosphere would inconvenience the story, I reckon MadAborModding’s right to pitch this as temporary fun.
That said, he sounds like he’s far from done working on it. Future plans include giving buildings their own health stats and a visible health bar, as well as letting you hack chunks out of them with non-magical attacks. That’d bring the mod closer to a full-blown house fighting experience, something I didn’t know I wanted in Oblivion, but now definitely do.
The option to limit the destruction to specific areas of the game is also in the works. As of right now, the mod comes with its own optional tweaking menu thanks to Mad Mod Config Menu, in case you fancy messing with the explosion radius or enabling anti-gravity.
If you fancy giving the mod a go, UE4SS is a hard requirement. I wish your hardware the best in coping with the amount of fireplaces that’re about to be whizzing around the Imperial province.
