Birds fly, the sun shines, water is wet, and Bethesda games get unofficial patches. There’s Morrowind’s Patch for Purists, the Yukichigai Patch for New Vegas (an Obsidian game, but Bethesda’s engine down to its bones), even a Community Patch for Starfield. This is an immutable law of the universe, and not even wrapping original Oblivion in an Unreal Engine 5 layer makes it any less true.
So I doubt anyone was too surprised when a mod by an author named Arthmoor called the Unofficial Oblivion Remastered Patch – UORP popped up on Nexus Mods just one week after Oblivion Remastered launched on April 22. What might be surprising, if you’re not all that wired into the Bethesda mod scene, is how angry that made everyone.
TLDR: he’s stubborn and has made some misguided decisions in the past in the name of lore-friendliness, but isn’t a nazi or anything.
- People are mad because Arthmoor has a “monopoly” on patches (i.e. has put a patch out for many games)
- He has made a couple questionable and arbitrary decisions over the years, like adding (inactive) oblivion gates to the middle of cities (even though the residents would almost certainly have removed these eyesores over the centuries.) He remains stubborn even facing overwhelming disagreement.
- Some glitches were found in the patch for Oblivion Remastered, leading people to assume it was nothing more than a cookie-cutter port of the patch for Oblivion (original). He disputes this, claiming he spent the past week carefully going through the old patch.
More info here (reddit)
Arthmoor is probably at least half the reason the Community Patch for Starfield exists, and why I hope there will be an equivalent for the next elder scrolls when it eventually comes out.
Im olny like 15 hours in, but I honestly don’t think the game requires any major mods in this state.
This is coming from a person, who spent days modding the shit out if Bethesda games until I broke them and had to start over. While 15-20 years ago I had plenty of free time for modding, this remaster already done the heavy lifting with the graphics and minor gameplay tweaks and I am just happy to launch the game and play it as is. Call it laziness if you want :)
It still coud use some minor stuff, like key ring for inventory management, local map hotkey, alchemy interface tweaks, disabling sell confirmation messages, etc.
Nothing critical in my opinion, so the modding drama seems a bit exaggerated.
What the game desperately needs is more optimization though.
Same here. Ive got 40 hours or so in it, and have no desire to mod the game. Virtuous really did a great job modernizing the game and besides maybe some minor UI tweaks and QOL stuff in the inventory, there isn’t much i feel im missing not having mods.
Are they still selling the horse armor ? Because the horse armor mod was my only mandatory mod when playing the OG, just to give Bethesda the middle finger
The original horse armour is included in the base game, but there’s more horse armour in the deluxe edition
Its part of the standard edition.
Considering the new game uses the exact same data to run the game as the OG, I am going to guess before reading the whole article that it pissed people off because they simply took the original Unofficial Patch and just uploaded it, and took credit for creating it for the Remaster.
Edit: Surprising. That was not it. It’s because the modder himself is a known to be a major douchebag. 🤣
Still more civilised than the Minecraft modding scene! *cough Forge drama cough cough*
I’m not into Bethesda games so saying this based on the article: Arthmoor sounds like a piece of shit. It’s fine if you have a “vision” for the game, and your mod is about that vision, but you shouldn’t pretend that your vision is something else, like simple bug-fixing patches.
Always interesting to get a glimpse into a small subculture and what’s happening there
Thanks for sharing :)
I just woke up and read the title as “terf war erupts”. Was really disappointed when I read the article.
As for the actual topic, his mods are mostly fine. It’s a shame he has to mix bug fixes with content alteration. I love overhaul mods big and small. But I like to choose playing them myself, thank you.
Arthmoor’s mods are fine, he’s just a shitty person. He tends to get into arguments with people and removing his mods (and thereby breaking a lot of people’s load orders) when he doesn’t get his way. He also reports and harasses any modders that try to fix the same bugs as his unofficial patches, even going so far as reporting them to get their mods removed and banned from the Nexus.
If I remember right and i probably don’t, the troubles go deeper as this is related to the nexus’ own monopolistic way of handling mods and Arthmoor’s (plus others) relocation away from that similar can of worms.
No, Arthmoor is the monopolist. He goes after any other modder who tries to make a competitor to his unofficial patches, trying to get them and their mods banned from Nexus so there’s no alternative. Because of that, his unofficial are prerequisites for a ton of other popular mods.
Arthmoor also gets into arguments on the forums because he’s a giant drama queen, and in the past when he didn’t get his way, he would remove most of his mods from the Nexus, breaking people’s load orders as group punishment. Him and others pulling this stunt are why Nexus implemented the permanent access to old versions on the site.
iirc he moved because nexus allowed to download previous versions.
So some gamers don’t like the modmaker because his mods modify the game. Do I understand correctly?
His unofficial patch mod is a hard requirement for other mods on Skyrim, and his changes while mostly just bug fixes but also gameplay changes based on his view on how the game should be played, and you can’t just turn off the changes you don’t need, and it’ll be the same for OBE but I hope mod authors don’t includes his mod as a requirement after the Skyrim mess. PS: he’s also a massive cunt
His unofficial patch mod is a hard requirement for other mods on Skyrim
So overall, it is a good and useful patch that doesn’t have alternatives?
There’s alternatives but he reported them to get it removed
Obligatory “read the article” etc. These unofficial patches get flak because some of them include “features” that are the modders preference. The point of unofficial patches is to fix bugs/glitches while remaining essentially vanilla or at least that’s why people want them. Worth noting that mod devs have been grilled for it before.
Also, Arthmoor is a cunt and people generally dislike him for how IP-protective he is over his mods, including these garbage patches
I didn’t even read the article I’m just familiar with this exact bullshit, Nexus users made a big push like 3 years ago of dumping his ass, basically anything his mods do are done better elsewhere by people who support Cathedral style modding
Is he the one that gets pissed if a secondary mod changes anything in his mod?
When your mod is big-fix mod people expect that it won’t modify the gameplay, yes that’s one of the reasons, also his ‘licence’ disallows people from using anything but latest version of the mods which only support latest version of the game, also he is a dick.
No. Because his mods say they do one thing, and do more than one thing.
Read the article.
Also: Arthmoor is famously a massive dickwad in the community, and a few years back there was a converted effort to replace his mods with better-made mods under the cathedral theory of modding (that were all working together to build a cathedral, and thus taking your ball and going home because x/y/z doesn’t happen)
In very reductive terms, yes. If you care about some of the nuances though, people don’t like that changes are being made outside of the “scope” of the mod, like a bug-fix patch being used to balance the game or change the lore.
