I bang this drum a lot, but what the world needs right now, more than anything, is a remaster (and PC release) of Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, a game I mostly remember for letting me fly around in a helicopter and collapsing infrastructure. Would it hold up? Possibly not, but it’s one of very few games that let you input a cheat code to play as Han Solo and painstakingly C4 every building in a mile radius to dust. You can’t buy memories like that.
Alas, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s gonna do it soon, so I’ll console myself with Mad Destruction – Destroy Buildings (the PC Gamer style guide prevents me from rendering ‘Destroy Buildings’ in its accurate—and I think essential—all caps), spotted by the good folks over at RPS. It’s a mod for Oblivion Remastered from MadAborModding, who also made that one settlement-placing mod, and it lets you, well, destroy buildings. In a madly destructive manner. You probably don’t need me to explain this one to you, but just in case, here’s a moving picture.
Frankly, it looks to function incredibly well, to an extent I truly didn’t think was possible within Oblivion’s rickety confines. All you have to do is cast a target spell at a building and it will suddenly explode apart, disintegrating into its constituent building blocks and catapulting them around the map. It looks genuinely impressive in a way that feels like it ought to be impossible without official mod support from Bethesda.
It speaks both to the ingenuity of modders and, I think, to the malleability of how Bethesda put Cyrodiil together. Perhaps this is common knowledge in the modding community, but I’d always assumed Oblivion’s buildings were just big, singular blocks.
That they come apart so easily and into so many parts suggests to me—and I stress that I truly don’t have the coding knowledge to speak authoritatively on this stuff, I’m just spitballing—they’re actually assembled of many distinct and individual parts stuck together (and then pulled apart by this mod). Oh, and not to fear, the buildings reset when you exit and return to the area.
That they come apart so easily and into so many parts suggests to me—and I stress that I truly don’t have the coding knowledge to speak authoritatively on this stuff, I’m just spitballing—they’re actually assembled of many distinct and individual parts stuck together (and then pulled apart by this mod). Oh, and not to fear, the buildings reset when you exit and return to the area.
Anyhow, it looks truly incredible and seems outlandishly easy to install. All you need to install is UE4SS for OblivionRemastered and, optionally but ideally, the Mad Mod Config Menu. Once that’s done, download the Mad Destruction zip file and dump the contents into your Oblivion RemasteredOblivionRemastered folder. Then lay waste to everything.