Bethesda Softworks - Oblivion and Morrowind Hit Steam

The Bethblog has news that Oblivion and Morrowind packs are now available on Steam:

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Game of the Year includes Morrowind and its expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon (available in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian).
For Oblivion, you’ll have two different options to choose from. You can get The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year — which includes Oblivion plus expansions, Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles (available in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian).
Or get the “never available before in one package” called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition Deluxe, which features Oblivion, Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles and all the downloadable content, which includes the following (available only in English):

• Horse Armor Pack
• Wizard’s Tower
• The Orrery
• Thieves Den
• Spell Tomes
• Vile Lair
• Mehrunes’ Razor
• Fighter’s Stronghold

More information.

Special this week - the delux version is only $20. It's kinda tempting to buy it again. (I lost my old DVD plus those expansions never worked right on my Vista 64 machine.)

Hmmm … shows as $30 for me now … would buy it for $20,.

Would it allow europeans to get the US version? And is it moddable?

What does the US version offer?
As far as I can tell some mods that alter the .exe will not work.
Steam Forum

stealth: Thanks for the link. I had been thinking about buying the Steam versions to pick up the expansions for Oblivion which I never bought. Now it's a definite no-purchase.

I purchased the Steam version yesterday, and uninstalled it today. $20 wasted seems a small price to learn that Steam should be avoided.

It was my first Steam purchase after dozens of D2D purchases. I was stunned at how obtrusive and controlling Steam is. It forces their client to be active when you want to play a game, defaults to opening up IM clients during play, spams you with ads, and forces subsequent game installations into the directory where you first install their client. I put Steam on a relatively crowded C-drive, and was stunned to see it take over Oblivion installation and force that to the same directory on C with no user options as to destination. (I had planned to put Oblivion on another drive.)

And to add insult to injury, I discovered that the Steam DRM disabled some of the ability to mod Oblivion. (I wish I had seens the Stealth post, above, before my purchase.)

I spent a couple hourts seeing what I could disable in Steam. Its obtrusiveness makes the worst of Norton look like a good neighbor. When I failed to find how to disable all the spam or change directories, I uninstalled Steam, only to find it then uninstalled Oblivion at the same time!

D2D can be a pain, but at least with D2D and GoG you can do what you set out to do — buy and play a game without also inheriting dracoian spam and control.

I find steam easy enough to work with, but then I never had the need to try and make it do something differently than how it want to do things.
Normal mods will work just fine with the steam version, only mods using script extenders had a problem. I can't verify this but the last post on the steam forums suggest there is a solution:

Quote:
Originally Posted by plavski
You can use OBSE if you pretend the Steam version of Oblivion needs a CD to play.

Clever people should be able to work it out.

GENIUS! I WOULD HAVE NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT!

Tried it, OBSE works perfectly now. WITH THE STEAM VERSION!

YAY!!!

The retail version of Knights of the Nine included all of the downloadable content that they're listing seperately (excluding Fighter's Stronghold). I think it's pretty lame that they're charging extra for it.

Originally Posted by JDR13
The retail version of Knights of the Nine included all of the downloadable content that they're listing seperately (excluding Fighter's Stronghold). I think it's pretty lame that they're charging extra for it.

But the DLC version didn't.

Originally Posted by kalniel
But the DLC version didn't.

But what's the point? Considering how old this material is now, it's sort of redundant to have 3 seperate packages, when 2 would have sufficed.

*Edit* Ok, I just realized it is 2 packages for Oblivion, the only difference being those DLC. I still thinks it's redundant to have them seperate, considering how insignificant they are.

Originally Posted by JDR13
*Edit* Ok, I just realized it is 2 packages for Oblivion, the only difference being those DLC. I still thinks it's redundant to have them seperate, considering how insignificant they are.

It does make it unnecessarily confusing - sort of like having different Morrowind packages at this point. There should be 3 - MW BOTY, Obliv GOTY, and the combo.