I'm rather happy playing Morrowind*, but now I decided to finally have a look at Oblivion. I read lots of criticism from Morrowind fans (yeah, obviously it's not Morrowind 2) and now learned about OOO. Since I don't actually have the time to play both vanilla and OOO exhaustively, I'd like to know whether I miss something by skipping the vanilla experience.
What sounds good about OOO is the removal of the levelling enemies, and more items probably won't hurt. However, I enjoyed exploring in Morrowind and didn't like the Morrowind Comes Alive plugin being a bit too generous with additional hostiles (even in cities!) so I'm afraid OOO's "more challenge" could result in having to fight most of the time when I was just enjoying the landscape 😉
So let me repeat my question:
For someone who quite liked Morrowind, can you recommend starting to play vanilla Oblivion or OOO?
(I don't ask which way Oblivion is more like Morrowind, since the answer then is "Play Morrowind, it's perfect* already")
(* using some of the great plugins and MGE, but considering vanilla enjoyable as well)
Best Answer
OOO doesn't take away anything from the "vanilla" experience, if anything, it adds a lot, plus fixes some of the broken mechanics (like level-upping the NPCs according to the user level - playing "vanilla", I finished the Arena at level 3, which is ridiculous), while adding some cool new features, like quests and factions and a lot of other stuff which I can't recall right now (it's been a while since I last played it). The one thing is that it makes Oblivion more difficult... Which isn't a bad thing since, like I said, I finished the Arena at level 3...
Either way, I'm of the opinion that OOO, along with the Unofficial Oblivion Patch and the Uncompressed Textures make TES: Oblivion a much better game, both gameplay-wise and graphically.
To quote Raven Dreamer:
So, yes, I recommend starting with OOO and just forgetting about vanilla Oblivion.