Why is Shivering Isles addon so perfect?

[Sex_And_Violance]

I really don`t have an other example of such a brilliant work that is so much better then the original game.

In my opinion it`s because of great contrast between the atmosphere which changed from typicaly medival to more sutable to the TES series. SI has more common with Morrowind and Morrowind is truly beloved amoung TES players.

Secondly SI has many collectables. Player can collect magic armor set parts, unusual things for Crusible Museum. All memorable stuff from the main story line are also automaticly collected in the Sheogorat Palace. Collectables are the huge motivational factor which was completely absent in the original game.

Some sort of choise between Mania or Dementia during the main quest line is also new campering to direct vanilla main quest line and guild quests.

[Wai]

We are all different.

If there was one bit of DLC I could un-buy it would be The Shivering Isles. I played it through once and, never again! Each to his own. For me, it is trivial, somewhat insulting and rather cartoon like, but, I appreciate that so many others love it.

Trivialising serious mental health issues in this way is not, for me personally, acceptable.

[psychotron666]

It's the best expansion Bethesda has ever made. While oblivion is one of my least favorite Bethesda games, the expansion is my favorite expansion of theirs.

It's so much better than the original game because they fixed the level scaling, making monsters in tiers which they would do for their later games.

[-={LG}=-]

I thought it was tedious, and was relieved to finally be rid of it. I used to have an Oblivion.esm from my original copy back the day it was released, and I'd replace the Oblivion.esm in the GOTY which would totally eliminate every vestige of Shivering Isles.

It doesn't work doing that anymore though, such a pity. The game gets all buggy with my current mods.

The only plus it has for me is I can go get Felldew addiction at level 2 or 3. Then around level 20 I can do the questline and get it cured, giving me several stats over 100 just for kicks.

[gr1nie]

The reason is simple: SI's locations and especially dungeons have shiny, glowing things scattered throughout them, all of them colourful and contrasting with the surrounding darkness. These shiny things worked really well at distracting people and making them forget about all the hours of slog. They worked so well, in fact, that later in Skyrim Bethesda adopted the same design principle of adding glittering rocks and other such distractions to its locations, and it worked wonders for that game's reception, too.

For me, it was one of the most tedious experiences in TES, and I vowed to never play it again during my recent Oblivion playthrough (the previous time I beat it was many years ago). There are a few decent quests, though.

[Customs Officer]

They really came into their own after experimenting with the base game. The AI packages cause quirky, obsessive behavior, so they married the writing and story to their most prominent mechanic. Perfect.

As for DLC better than the base, Mask of the Betrayer is often recommended by itself, not as Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. The dlc is perfect, while the original campaign was raw.