Video, on Mon Jan 2, 2012 3:22 PM, said:
Yes, the "Vanilla" game saves will work with the GOTY version of the game. Here's the kicker. The GOTY saves will work with the original game as well....however, you won't have access to GOTY stuff (which could be whole levels, certain inventory items....I should load a save from somewhere in a GOTY specific area on an old game and see what happens....probably crashes)
No. Oblivion had the ability to load saves that were created with addons and expansions enabled, which is all GOTY is, without issue. It will warn you that content enabled when the save was made will be unavailable. I believe that if you load a game where you are physically located within an addon it will load you in the place where that addon would be located which was often an open area in the game. In the case that something was added in a totally different place like Mothership Zeta or something then I think there is some common location that it will drop you. I would be interested to know where you find yourself if you saved in a place totally outside the wasteland like that and then loaded the game with the addons disabled.
This reflects the difference between a GOTY Morrowind for Xbox and a GOTY Oblivion or Fallout. With Morrowind the expansions were built in and the xbe was different. You could upgrade your original save to GOTY but you couldn't go the other way. Now that we live in a world of console DLC they simply take the original release, apply any patches that were released, and pack the same addons that are available for download in so that the XBE is exactly the same whether you are playing the original game or the GOTY. With the original game they had to provide a way to continue playing without addons or the removal of addons would break your game. Since GOTY is just the same stuff with different packaging the behavior is the same.