I had never played a TES game before and knew nothing about *Oblivion*, but I decided to give it a try. I have a Nitro V15 (with a 3050 GPU), which causes the game's extremely dated engine to crash—on top of the countless quest-breaking bugs I’d heard about. Personally, I *always* prefer playing vanilla, but it seems Bethesda won't let me; knowing about the bugs and crashes—compounded by the fact that the game is old while my laptop is modern—I saw there were mods designed to fix the engine and bugs, like the famous UOP. I installed the UOP along with two or three mods that just fix the engine, plus the 4GB patch. However, after putting over 60 hours into my save, I discovered the UOP wasn't as purist as I thought; I saw people mentioning various unnecessary changes, though I heard it wasn't as extreme as what they did with *Skyrim*. I’m sharing all this to get to the main point and ask the experienced players here: do the UOP's unnecessary changes actually ruin the game experience? I see people saying "vanilla always," but if you have a newer machine, you're going to suffer more than the people who played it back in the day—you end up dealing with incompatibility issues on top of the native bugs and problems.
It would be cool to start a discussion about this topic on this post; I also plan to explore it in other games (since I intend to start playing Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim).