Getting OBSE working with Steam Oblivion

Update: It looks like the OBSE team has officially added support for Steam in their latest beta release, so you may want to use that instead of the file linked below.

Gah, I totally had a huge rant going about how pissed I was over OBSE not working with the Steam version of Oblivion. I did a little double-checking just before publishing and, lo and behold, I found this forum post by jmccaskey for Valve:

Here is how you get OBSE working legitimately:

1) Make sure you have received the latest update, we just updated on Steam about 30 minutes ago to make our binary more compatible with OBSE. Restart Steam if you are unsure and you should get updated. If you’ve replaced your binary with some non-Steam version you’ll want to make sure it updates and you are on the new Steam shipped version.

2) Install OBSE into your steamapps\common\oblivion directory as you normally would

2) Get [this file] and extract the obse_loader.exe over the top of the one from the standard OBSE install in your oblivion folder.

3) Run obse_loader.exe and everything should now work (you’ll get passed through the loader first, just hit play).

I’ve contacted the OBSE guys so we can hopefully get our revisions to obse_loader added into the official OBSE package. Until then if you would like the source for the changes for obse_loader to compile yourself email me at jmccaskey at valvesoftware.com.

So, you know, FUCK YES!

Hopefully this post saves someone some time and effort. And, as they say, now for something completely different– a post in that thread that I found particularly humorous:

[...] Cmom, if you are buying the game because of OBSE you are doing it wrong, it’s a hack made not by bethesda, and people are putting to much trust in it. [...] If you don’t like the vanilla game, what’s the point? If you have to mod the game in order to enjoy it, throw it away and buy a game you enjoy out of the box, or else you are just paying to get mad, and that is just stupid