When Oblivion was first released, I got a pirated copy from a friend, played about an hour, and uninstalled it. I just thought it was boring and rather than having a sense of "Wow, this is such a huge open world where nobody is telling me what to do so I can do whatever I want!", I got more of a feeling of, "Um. Okay. A bunch of ugly NPCs and identical caverns with useless loot, and I don't feel like wandering around town lost looking for a non-plot quest NPC...".
About a year ago, my friend picked the game up for 360 and couldn't stop playing. I decided to give it another go but I again quit very quickly after being furious at the ridiculous leveling system (which I hated in Morrowind, too) and the absolute (not fun) precision it takes to make a "perfect" character (I'm a min/maxer through-and-through).
But, now the game has an expansion and an addon and an extremely dedicated (and talented!) modding fanbase... And I'm totally digging Fallout 3... So on a whim today I purchased the PC Game of the Year edition, and I'm about to install it. What mods would you guys suggest? I DO hate the leveling system, but I don't want any really drastic changes to gameplay (I'm kind of a gameplay purist. New areas/items/enemies/etc. are okay, but I try to change the core gameplay of games as little as possible, at least for a first runthrough), and I also think the vanilla character models/faces are ugly as sin yet I don't want one of these crazy anime-styled sex slave mods or anything. But, what's the "must-have" stuff? Picky, I know, heh.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!