If you’ve ever thought Oblivion’s Mages Guild questline didn’t do enough to help your roleplay as a proper scholar of magic, a new Oblivion Remastered mod that casts an alteration spell on the faction looks like it’s got you covered. It adds a bunch of new systems, including infinite elixir and staff crafting.
It’s the latest entry in modder ColdTyrant’s Infinitum series, which has seen the modder overhaul all of Cyrodiil’s major factions by introducing radiant quest systems that let you take on, for example, as many Dark Brotherhood contracts or Fighters Guild monster hunts as you like. They’ve already taken on those two factions. plus the Thieves Guild and Arena.
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That said, their Mages Guild overhaul ‘Mages Guild – Infinitum’ seems to be the most ambitious of the lot, adding six new systems to deliver infinitely repeatable activities designed to help the faction feel like it’s actually all about “unraveling the mysteries of magic”.
There’s elixir crafting that sounds like alchemy on steroids, staff making that lets you “craft a variety of different staffs of different skill levels across all six different schools of magic” in a fashion that’s far more in-depth than that one quest in the base game, and skill studying that’s lets you get better at magic by reading tomes once a day, rather than having to stand around spamming fireballs.
The mod also has some activities aimed at more outdoorsy magic users. There’s a “beast research system” that sees you harvest “Unaspected Essences” from creatures you encounter, which can then be logged in a special tome, rewarding you with boosts to major attributes.
If you’re in the mood for more of the kind of magical admin the base game has in spades, you can take on elixir deliveries and recycle the robes of necromancers you defeat by popping them into bins the mod adds to each guildhall. Both of those are ways to earn some extra gold and in the case of the latter, soul gems. I’m very much now wondering which poor Mages Guild members have to put the bins out.
“The Mages Guild has always been a weird faction,” ColdTyrant wrote, “Depending on how you progress the Mages Guild in Morrowind, you could find yourself performing any number of unseemly tasks. In Oblivion, you spend much of your time performing chores or odd jobs – confronting poor leadership or cleaning up the messes of irresponsible peers.
“It was difficult to decide what direction I wanted to take with Mages Guild – Infinitum, especially since being a Mage has always been my favorite. I decided to add as many endless or nigh endless and engaging systems as I could, to pump just as much exciting content into this major faction as I have for all the others.”
If you fancy giving the mod a go, you’ll need to grab its requirements – Oblivion Remastered’s UE4SS and UE4SS TesSyncMapInjector.
Make sure to check out the interviews we’ve been doing with Oblivion Remastered modders who’ve been pushing the boundaries and working on interesting stuff. The next entry in that series is a chat with ColdTyrant, so look out for that coming to the site soon!