Mod adds Dark Souls-style player messages to Oblivion Remastered so you can write 'Try finger but hole' in front of Patrick Stewart

The thing that makes FromSoft games great isn't the tightly honed boss fights, the layered lore, or the quiet tragedy of their antagonists. It's the ability to write 'Don't give up skeleton' and 'Try finger but hole' across every inch of the game and subject players around the world to it.

Every game should have that and now, thanks to enterprising modders, we're one step closer to a world where that's true. Ghosts of Tamriel is a mod for Oblivion Remastered (via VG247) that lets you leave little messages for your fellow Heroes of Kvatch, Dark Souls style.

The mod comes from authors yamashi and jay-jay, and lets you drop messages anywhere in Cyrodiil for other players (who have the mod, naturally) to read just by hitting CTRL on your keyboard. They take the form of floating Welkynd Stones—those glowing blue mana-restoring rocks you get in Ayleid ruins—and are a lot more flexible than FromSoft's collection of canned sentence structures and words that players manage to make absolutely filthy anyway.

In fact, the whole thing is dangerously, wonderfully open. The interface is just a text document that you can title and write anything you want in. This is a recipe for a terrible nightmare, of course: you can already picture the ASCII art, but there's also an upvoting and downvoting system to push back on stuff you'd prefer not to see. Messages have a 24-hour lifespan before they vanish forever, but that resets whenever they get an upvote. On the flipside, any message that accrues enough downvotes will get yoinked out of the system. There's a system to hide messages you don't want to see in your own world, too.

The mod requires an internet connection, of course, and will show your character's name in addition to the messages you leave, but apart from that it's all gloriously anonymous in a very old-internet sort of way, which is appropriate for a remaster of a game from '06. "None of the data sent to the server is logged," say the authors, "it only exists in memory for the lifetime of the message, after that it disappears forever."

So if you're desperate to share your wit and wisdom with the Oblivion community writ large, pop over to Nexus, install the Oblivion Remastered Script Extender, then install Ghosts of Tamriel with a mod manager and go.

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