How I Completed Oblivion 100% (Champion of Cyrodiil Challenge Recap)

[Music] the gates have been opened and the elder scrolls oblivion has emerged as one of the best games of 2006 the year was 2006 and the gaming world had just been taken by storm by bethesda's latest role-playing game the elder scrolls iv oblivion who's laughing now yes i was in the chess club it saw critical acclaim and was in the following year released on the playstation 3. this is where my young impressionable self got his hands on it hello um and it was my very first rpg experience but something always struck me as odd about the way me and my friends played the game like we'd make a character find a playstyle do some quests and then we get a new idea for a character and start over with a fresh one so during 2016 10 years after oblivion first came out i asked myself the question can you complete oblivion 100 on just one character how long would that take how does one even measure completion in such a massive rpg welcome to the recap of my four year journey to complete the elder scrolls iv oblivion 100 it took me 250 episodes to accomplish each about 42 minutes on average given the full series a run time of 7 days 6 hours and 27 minutes this recap exists for those of you without the time to watch 175 hours of oblivion content and those of you eager to look back at the journey we've been on i'll also be giving out some advice tips and resources in case you wish to take on a similar challenge yourself so go grab some sweet rolls pour yourself a glass of tomica's west wheeled wine and get cozy as i tell you the story of how i became the champion of syria you've got a lot to learn during november 2016 i began planning for the challenge in earnest and one of the first big questions i had to answer was what race do i play now this was much more than a mere cosmetic choice because even the different genders in oblivion start with different stats i needed to find an optimal character someone that would let me tackle the challenges ahead and challenges they were because my initial completion list looked something like this finish all quests master all skills find all map markers clear all locations at least once shut all oblivion gates own all horses upgrade all houses invest in all stores collect all nirn replants collect all skill books and slay all unique enemies in cyrodiil meanwhile i had these limitations i couldn't fast travel i couldn't use big exploits or bugs i couldn't increase my skills at trainers and i had to play on max difficulty at all times max difficulty what does that entail in oblivion how hard can it really be well here's a level 1 character his name is imperius maylis good day this is the first combat encounter of the game against the weakest foes in cyberdeal rats let's see how he fares [Music] i'm not gonna lie i struggle to even get out of the tutorial on my initial attempts back when i was still feeling out the challenge and this is because the max difficulty makes the enemies deal 6 times as much damage while you only deal 1 6 of your regular damage it's by far one of the most unfair ways of scaling difficulty in a game and the divines forbid that a mud crab attacks you because while on normal difficulty it will take 12 hits to kill you on max difficulty it takes two two hits it was clear i needed a plan and a really good one so i looked up the different racial traits and greater powers of the different races and here i came to realize a few key things one endurance is a really important stat it determines how much health you get on level up so the higher this stat is early game the more health you'll have end game i need to mine my leveling process carefully 2. the bretons have an insanely powerful shield spell that makes them take half physical damage for a whole minute and they have an innate always active 50 resistance to magic so the breton's great racial features really made me gravitate towards them even though they did have a very low endurance so when the choice came between male and female britain i went with the female who had a higher speed than the male though less strength i spent days poring over the unofficial elder scrolls pages learning the intricacies of oblivion's leveling system magic system quests skill book locations etc because the scariest aspect of such a big challenge it isn't necessarily the hard hitting enemies but rather the fact that you can screw up the entire challenge by missing a time sensitive quest or locking yourself out of a dungeon that contains a book you need i had to be ready for what came next the let's play series that would occupy the next four years of my life started in those cold winter months near the end of 2016 and it went beyond anything i could have ever imagined [Music] what was i thinking her name was marina mistfire a fiery-haired breton battle mage with cool eyes that didn't betray the madness that lay dormant within at the peak of my winter beard i began the challenge and we had our first massive obstacle making a character that did not resemble a sun scorched wrinkly potato it took some effort but marina misfire came out really well in my eyes and her adventure was on emperor uriel septim entered our cell he told us he had dreams about our face and spoke of our great destiny which was kind of creepy now breaking out of the imperial prison is usually a massive yawn when you've seen the sequence a few times before but this time was different oh how do you get up here how did the rat jump up here what the heck it's a safe space the fact that we were a mage meant that we couldn't wear armor well we could but it would make our spells less effective so as we continued deeper in we soon found ourselves battling goblins skeletons and a zombie who legitimately gave me nightmares as a kids all the while dressed in nothing more than our undies oh this poor girl fighting her way through the underground in her underwear so fitting we fought tooth and nail and eventually made it to the end of the prison section where emperor uriel septim lost his life to a mythic dawn assassin he gave us the amulet of kings and asked us to take it to joffrey in coral it was very important that it reached him so of course i decided to do that later that was a common theme during the series the fate of the world could always wait because well i had flowers to pick this led to the character creation section i began crafting the champion class with magic as my specialization letting me level those skills faster i went with intelligence and endurance as my attributes and armorer blade light armor marksman mercantile security and speechcraft as my major skills however i would swap out marksman with blunt right before leaving the sewers it was around this point i began discussing the leveling system in oblivion which is quite a beast to tackle so essentially as a quick recap your major skills are what makes you level up so using them a lot makes you level faster but the non-major skills can also be trained and they give you bonuses to attributes when you level up and you want max bonuses before you level up on this difficulty so you need to pick major skills that you can easily avoid using until the time is right and make sure you only level when you have the right invisible bonuses by training appropriate skills so picking a magic skill as a major skill would be a bad idea for a mage because they would level uncontrollably are you confused yet great so was i i eventually got out of the sewers towards the end of episode 2 and that's where the skill diary was waiting this is one of the few mods i added to the game and it helped me keep track of these invisible level up bonuses and i highly recommend this mod to anyone wanting to level efficiently while on the topic of mods what mods did i use well i used these none that altered gameplay much other than the unofficial oblivion patch which fixed a lot of bugs and a mod to make selling and buying items easier more akin to morrowind system so i didn't develop carpal tunnel when training mercantile i was ready to take on the world but first here's a look at how the world wanted to treat us did you see that they do have your health bar ugh now get away from me get away from me mr mud crab and i do not have the means to fight back right now all i have is a pathetic flare spell yeah this was gonna be really really rough but somewhere along the way i began developing this fondness for the pain the punishment it was just so exciting to finally get within the walls of the imperial city in episode 3 to buy my first summon spell which cost me most of my money and suddenly i had a chance against the unfair worlds danger was around every corner out in the wild so a city felt like a proper refuge looting crates around the city for supplies became an essential strategy to stay alive oh i want a raid i want to raid i want to steal there are so many places so many houses that i just want to rob i'm going to get all the goods for now though i'm just going to rob public property i cannot stress enough how much this made me feel immersed in the world and i recommend giving high difficulties a shot in your own playthroughs so how did i fight enemies if mud crabs killed me in two blows and my fireballs had the stopping power of a wet fart it's simple i made someone else fight them the summoned creature spells would be my main way of fighting until i got access to the arcane university and could make my own spells because as it turns out summoned creatures are not nerfed damage wise in the same way the player is so they are still operating at max power now this new strategy was put to the test as i cleared my first alien ruin in episode 4 vilverine a classic early game dungeon marina used their summon scamp to beat the crap out of any inhabitants both inside and outside the ancient ruin and suddenly it felt like we were on more of a level playing fields this is also the episode where marina got her first set of robes and no longer would be the crazy nude breton girl but rather a crazy robed breton girl with a loot from wilverine in hand i could sell it off for a pretty profit in the city in episode 5 and i began buying more spells so i could start training my magic skills because skill training would be an essential part of the next leg of the series thus i began doing training sessions where i'd run around the city casting cheap spells or stand on the shore punching mud crabs until my knuckles bled all in the name of optimal leveling my initial focus was on maxing endurance speed and intelligence i wanted more health to survive blows more speed to avoid blows and a higher intelligence for more magicka however leveling up in oblivion comes with its own heap of troubles because unlike a game with very distinct level zones where you might start in an area to kill enemies from level 1 to 10 and then move on to the next area for levels 10 to 15 oblivion has global level scaling meaning that the enemies in the game scale with you if you get stronger so do they if you make poor leveling decisions they don't care they're still gonna be strong and they're gonna overpower you to the point of making the game impossible to play so how did i fight this imbalance of power well it's simple i just didn't level this helped offset the really harsh difficulty curve as i could get stronger through skills but the enemies would stay at their original power levels now this did have the downside of giving me really bad rewards from quests as well as spawning monsters with weak souls and loots since those are both level scaled but i could live with that now that marina was ready with some basic gear and basic spells the world was really ours to conquer we bought a small shack down at the waterfront which would actually be our main home for the rest of the series however after that purchase we were a little tight on money and it seemed the best way to get a quick profit was to become a thief so we met with some shady types on the waterfront and completed our initiation into the ranks of the thieves guilds don't worry about it i got it hehe amenti is like this diary there is so much quick cash we can get early on as soon as we get access to a fence who can buy the stolen goods also our first level up happened that episode which i judged to be safe since we were still a few levels away from enemies changing to the more dangerous variety and well this level up screen right here made it clear just how diligent we had been with our leveling a common theme to the challenge plus fives or busts that was our motto at this point there was one major goal in particular that i set my sights on that would take the next 50 episodes to complete i think i need something to drink if you want to harness the true power of oblivion's magic you're gonna need to make custom spells but those are locked away until you can enter the arcane university in the imperial city and there was a slight snag to my dreams of getting in because it meant i needed a recommendation from every major guild hall around ceredo i'd need to visit bruma coral chaden hall breville leon skingrad and anvil and help out at their local guild branch but i had outlawed fast travel and so marina's first world tour began as we trudged the roads leading to the different cities this was another spot in the series where i realized the immense satisfaction of self-imposed limitations the fact that everywhere i wanted to go had to be on foot with a squishy girl who could be promptly mauled by a wolf if he got the jump on me it made the travel so exhilarating and every time we entered a new city we felt much like a traveler in cyrodiil would feel exhausted by the journey but eager to see what new adventures their destination held we traveled first to bruma where a quest led us down a dark path get her boy after murdering a woman named arnora in her own home we were approached by a hooded man named lucy and lachance who gave us a chance to join the dark brotherhood if we killed a man named rufio for him we put that off for the time being and helped solve a mysterious disappearance at the guild hall which got us our first recommendation during these first city visits marina also raided every home she could come across for all other valuables and their jewelry and this is also when we started picking up our first skill books wolf queen vol 3 hey illusion skill note that down dark then the road went to coral where we found a monk named joffrey that the emperor told us about before his death we gave him the amulet of kings and he told us of a secret son the emperor had the last living blood of the septum line he was in the city of kavach the fate of the world was at stake and so we decided to let's just do it later marina then encountered the infamous killing fields quest where you are tasked with protecting two npcs as they defend their farm from a big goblin attack now the best reward in the quest is only gotten if both of the boys are alive at the end of it so this was a really great challenge early on and it proved that taking care of other npcs that was by far the hardest part of combat both early game and late game this is also where we got the finger of the mountain spell which would become our favorite way of disrespecting the dead along with our second mages guild recommendation we travel back home to the imperial city after this to join the arena and fight for glory despite the abuse from owen you want to be a combatant [Laughter] look at you my granny can beat you and she's dead probably true then the road led to shaden hall where we first took a little detour to the inn of ill omen to deal with the old man rufio goodbye rufio don't give me that look you knew i was planning on letting you in on this action oh yeah marina also has an undead ex-boyfriend now it we'd recently acquired some new monstrous summon spells that i was eager to test out marina wore the proud title mother of monsters for a little while due to her reliance on nasty beasts to save the day we arrived in chaten hall with an ever-growing dark void in our hearts and soon found the sanctuary that lucian had told us of here we met our new family of assassins and was welcomed into their midst while in the city we started up the fighter skill quest line dealt with some corruption issues and saved the man from his own painting where art dao oh and the recommendation almost got us drowned in a while it's all in a day's work for a champion the journey soon went south to brazil proud bearer of the title smelliest city in cyrodiil someone's been murdered here we experienced many wild quests from finding the secret of the forlorn watchman to diving into the mind of a fellow mage to save him from his nightmare we eventually got our recommendation from the guild hall and headed off towards leoin second smelliest city in cyrodiil i've heard others say the same now as we've been traveling i've been looting everything whenever we came across a farm every single cabbage every single carrot was going in my backpack and once we reached leon we reap the benefits of our alchemically incentivized thievery as we reached master alchemy in episode 46. this was our first master skill and this would let us make potions and poisons much more easily these were a staple of early game combat and they let us be much more offensive we just sting the enemy with a poison dagger and then retreat and let a nasty summon punch the living daylights out of them leowin had yet another mages guild hall so we helped them out by defeating a traitorous nord with the best eyebrows that i think we saw that entire series the charcoalness in his eyebrows is intensifying now as part of completing all quests we also had to go and do the daedric shrine quests which held some great rewards in the form of daedric artifacts but the issue with them was that many of them had level requirements and we were still level 6 at this point however we were able to do some of them like xiogorath's quest which had us terrorize a small village by raining down burning dogs on them i guess saving the world just takes on a lot of strange forms the journey went on to skingrad for a recommendation and some different destruction spells so we could mix and match them later on and while in the city we were approached by a paranoid wood elf named glarthir who wanted us to stalk some people in the city he claimed was following him as expected that whole ordeal ended in bloodshed and a nice lump of gold in our pockets as we passed by the city of kavach in episode 56 we were shocked to see it in ruins daedra had overrun the city pouring out of a portal it was time for marina to delve into hell to save the world for the first time that series and this is where the true horror of oblivion was made plain clan fares that clamfair just took half my health these realms really don't mess around when you're playing a squishy mage on max difficulty however the sigil stones found at the very end would have some extremely potent effects when we got around to enchanting our own gear but we'd need to be a higher level for them to reach their true transcendent states we helped stop the siege of watch and we met a priest named martin who we knew to be the last living heir of the emperor he agreed to come with us to meet joffrey and so we had our first companion on an urgent quest to save the world which by now as you have guessed means we took a little dark side vacation trip to anvil instead we're supposed to be going back to the wayne and priory but martin you know me i just want to go on a little sightseeing trip poor martin septim had to come along with marina as she bought a haunted house stopped a rogue mage for her final recommendation and got tangled up in a plotline about seductive women messing with the married men in the town and so once the dust settled we had visited every city in cyrodiil we'd had a surface level glance at its quests and contents but now it was time to delve much deeper to take on the quests that i'd been scared to start but we would need to be stronger to take on the nastier challenges ahead and so it was time to head to school you smell of death been conjuring up dead things episode 63 was a milestone we got to explore the arcane university in the imperial city and got access to custom spell making and custom enchanting i made some different cheap spells to train my different magical abilities i made some spells to charm people for better prices and a free ticket out of jail i made lots of fortify skill spells to make our skills stronger spells to control beasts and humanoids alike and of course custom spells that boosted our speed athletics and acrobatics to shorten our travel time significantly and let us reach new heights cast jump [Laughter] this is why i love the major skills after getting journeyman destruction we made new weakness spells that played a huge part in letting marina use offensive magic because if we stacked two similar weakness spells by firing them one after another we'd have a compounding effect with the weakness meaning the subsequent fireball we tossed out once the enemy was weakened would actually start hitting really hard and blast through their max difficulty armor this was about to get really interesting as marina was learning now to be a frontline fighter who actually found companions to be more and more of a nuisance instead of her savior this is so good for stealth as well i sneak in paralyzed him in the back and then i just weak week and i just smashed your heads in with that bloody mace oh i am a fan of this we finally arrived at wayne on priory in episode 79 and found a place under attack by the mystic dawn and we learned that the amulet of kings had been taken joffrey now a badass with a katana joined the party and we actually didn't dally long before heading to cloud ruler temple with martin and joffrey where they could lay the plan to recover the amulets and stop the oncoming invasion for the next batch of episodes we traveled around cyrodiil following guild quests and acquiring more golden power only to return to the university at regular intervals for new gear and spells when we felt inspiration strike as we leveled up wolves became boars boars became bears and what was once a puny soon became a mighty minotaur lord and that was the core of the rest of the series we grew in power but so did our enemies so we played with our abilities and constantly honed our skills to stay one step ahead as we leveled up quests gave better rewards the monster variety grew and my enjoyment of the series was still sky high this video could really go on for hours i could talk about the quest where we lost all our gear and suddenly struggle like an infant again in episode 158 or how we survived the epic battle of brooman episode 200s but the point of a recap is to not touch on all the small details you've seen the start of her journey you've seen her rise to relative power so instead i'll narrate the rest of the series with some broader strokes let's zoom out and get a bird's eye view of the challenge gracious what a hero finish all quests oblivion's quests were really the driving force for the whole challenge they were the backbone the red thread the light as we stumbled in the dark quests are what drove us from city to city that made us hunt down alien ruins for artifacts that gave us reasons to explore hidden nooks and crannies of the province they gave our adventure some contexts there are a total of 204 quests in oblivion but some of them can't be completed if you want to complete them all there are a handful of problematic ones the arena cast out of the thieves guilds eternal exile expelled from the fighters guild and whispers of death out of these cast out of the thieves guild eternal exile and expelled from the fighters guild are all expulsion quests for different guilds if you are exiled from the dark brotherhood or expelled from the fighters guilds it goes without saying that you can't complete the rest of the quests in that faction meanwhile for the thieves guild one you can always buy your way back in and the quest will never be marked as complete in your quest log this brings the total amount of completable quests to 201 now these last two quests the arena and whispers of death are repeatable guild reward quests so when you become a grand champion of the arena you can come back every week and fight an assortment of monsters for gold and this quest will remain active in your quest log for the rest of your life the same goes with whispers of death because after becoming listener of the dark brotherhood this quest will remind you that you can get a recurring payout by visiting the night mother and carrying forth her will this also never leaves your quest log however since i played with the unofficial oblivion patch these last two quests are now fixed they will be marked as complete when they reasonably should and thus they are completable so 201 quests were between us and becoming champion main quest guild quests main city quests village and inquests the arena date requests master training quests and actually a handful of non-journal quests as well these didn't count towards the overall statistic but i still wanted to do them the easiest place to mess up here is definitely the dark brotherhood so be warned there are four miscible quests so it's very important that you do the extra favor for our dark brother tainawa that you accept vicente's gift of vampirism and you even get kicked out of the guild twice just to complete two of the less severe expulsion quests do these before the purification quests the non-journal quests are also really interesting these are quests that don't appear in your journal but i still wanted to do such as the attack on fort such where we have to protect a legion of guards fighting the daedra or the horror of dive rock where we find a diary and have to uncover the scene of a of a terrible killing but how does one actually keep track of these 200 plus quests i mean yes we have the quest log but there's no search feature there's no way to see what episode we did it in what quests we have yet to do the answer is spreadsheets i made spreadsheets for every major completion goal in the game and i filled in information such as quest name completion status an episode it was completed in this way i could always go back to double check what quests were done and when providing a great point of reference for myself i'm gonna be leaving links to all of the spreadsheets that i used in the challenge down below so feel free to go duplicate them and fill them in on your own journey since quests was such a pivotal goal that's also how i ended the series in episode 250 we wrapped up the main quest the last content yet to complete in the game but before we got there there were several other goals we needed to achieve master all skills oblivion has 21 skills to master now some of them are very quick to train like alchemy where one just has to make between 900 and 2000 potions to max it depending on how you made your class now other skills like athletics can take between 32 and 94 hours of grinding to max out again depending on your class i trained most of these skills naturally as i played the game but some of them i grinded a bit off camera or in sped up montages to get the right level of bonuses so having outlawed using trainers we had to gain every bit of experience ourselves but we did do our best to maximize bonuses like quest rewards and skill book boosts so we trained athletics to 99 but instead of spending another two hours grinding to max it we just read an athletics book we've been saving up to push us to 100s likewise we had a plus 5 bonus to mercantile waiting as a reward for the hector quest and we only picked it up when we were close to maxing that skill by far the biggest slogs were marksman and speechcraft having to tell 6 thousand jokes or shoot 12 000 arrows into living creatures it took its toll on me since i had to focus while performing the tasks to get the optimal experience episode 249 is the episode where i finally maxed them all after several days of grinding our final level was 53 with all attributes maxed but luck which is nearly impossible through normal play luck also gives no particular benefit to a character with max stats so i did not consider it worth our time find all map markers i wanted to have a fully completed map with every available icon in the game found this meant dungeons like caves and camps but also miscellaneous places that might have little to no content other than the marker like the goddess fund priory so to show the contrasts this is our map in episode 1 and this is our map in episode 250 but we didn't just have to find the map markers we had to clear the associated locations this was one of the tougher treks of the series and i ended up live streaming episode 224 to 247 so i could have some live encouragement as we cleared cave after cave in a desperate dash to the finish line there is no in-game statistic for clear dungeons so i had to keep a separate spreadsheet for this very reason i considered a dungeon cleared when every enemy was dead and every chest was looted we cleared our last dungeon in episode 247 which felt amazing i think that was the most demanding of all the tasks of 100 in this game every single dungeon cleared every single location found every map marker that we can get map marked thank you mr goats it's been gotten except for a strange door of course shut all oblivion gates after completing the quest find the air during the main quest line oblivion gates start appearing throughout the land after the quest dagon shrine even more gates show up at that point there are 50 randomly spawned oblivion gates waiting that has to be cleared as well as 10 city-related gates bringing the total amount of gates we can clear up to 60. the oblivion gates are very time sensitive if you progress too far in the main quest past the paradise quest no more gates can spawn furthermore if you finish light the dragon fires all active gates are closed we waited a long time with clearing our first random gates not until episode 103 did we start delving into oblivion again long after our initial encounter with daedra and kavach and here i had a conundrum so there are 50 random gates we had to clear but there's only a total of seven unique worlds it could place us in when we entered so we would quickly start meeting the same realms over and over again and it easily took a whole episode or more to clear them early on in the series so i made a ruling and i said that once we have cleared an oblivion world 100 with all enemies dead map explored and loot gained we could simply speed run through subsequent iterations of that world and just rushed to the sigil tower this way i kept the pace of the episodes up while still feeling like i had cleared everything and it was a good compromise in my eyes the sigil stones that awaited atop the towers at the end also held incredibly potent enchantments in the late game that made it possible to make incredibly cool custom gear this is another reason to wait with clearing portals until you're at level 17 or above we closed our last portal in episode 212 and the worlds breed the sigh of relief and so did we 60 out of 60 portals [Music] cleared poor guy there's nowhere left to go for you now you're stuck here that was a daunting goal what would come next own all horses okay so this is one of the easier objectives there are seven cities that sell horses in the game so we just had to buy a horse from each city stable to increase the needed statistic as a side note we rarely ever use horses in the series considering our traveling speed in later episodes looked like this that being said it was tons of fun to cast command creature in a big zone to get several horses as my followers it works [Music] see you later okay well i'm gonna take the horses on a little journey we bought the final horse in episode 170 now this is not counting horses like the unicorn and shadow mirror these are just the city horses it's wonderful now take good care of it i know i paid a thousand gold but that's marina's life [Music] upgrade all houses eight cities in cyrodiil provide houses but these are other bare bones affairs but with some gold on the counter here and there to grease the wheels we can upgrade them and turn them into full-blown homes for our character when all eight houses are upgraded this criteria is met we achieved this in episode 114 and then subsequently only used our waterfront shack despite having a beautiful mansion in skingrads with a personal servant marina's a humble girl invest in all stores investing in all stores it's not a particularly hard objective but it must be done mindfully so there are 99 merchants in the base game of these all but five can be invested in these exceptions are kalindil edgar vatrine ernest manus mirage dar and hungarian however with the unofficial oblivion patch some changes are made hungarian store can once again be invested in the same fix is also applied to edgar vetrine ernest manus and kalindo this means we have 98 merchants we can invest in but there is a catch sudrasa and ungorm are both listed as merchants in the base game but they aren't meant to be merchants therefore the unofficial oblivion patch just removes their merchant capabilities altogether and our total amount of merchants to invest in is 96 with the only exceptions being mirage dar sidrasa and angorum to invest in a store one must have 75 in the mercantile skill and then you must give the selected merchant 500 golds this gold will now increase that shop's max barter money which is a pretty good long time investment so we travel around the world as soon as we got the invest perk in episode 95 because there are five merchants that you need to keep your eye on selena arena andreas draconis kirsten ethira and vlonholder they are all merchants who will inevitably feel the cold hand of death during the completion of the game's quests so these five are really important to do early on we invested in our final merchant in episode 184 and if you wish to see the full list of who where and when we did it there will be a spreadsheet in the description you're going to be spending around 50 000 gold on these merchants but that's just a drop in the bucket if you're a loot order marina mistfire's final gold amounts was 1.7 million a stark contrast to the start of the game where every gold piece was a treasure collect all nirnroot plants nirnroots are non-responsible plants found near bodies of water and there were 306 of them in the base game and we had to collect every single one now nirnroots are split into two categories interior and exterior the 43 interior nirn routes are found around people's homes no real big issue there however keeping track of the 263 exterior ones that was the main challenge here's how it went i found a map online outlining the locations of each nirn routes i had this open on the side as i played so i could adjust my travel routes to hit as many as possible and later during editing when i collected one i would write down the location of the plant i found with a timestamp for when i collected it i also included the plant's id found by zooming in on an interactive oblivion map that i will have linked below and furthermore i would also cross out each nirnroot on the map as we went along labeling each cross with the number of the collected nern roots this way there will be no confusion about which plant was gathered or so i thought ladies and gentlemen i give you black wood about 40 of the nern roots we needed were all gathered in this one swampy place the issue was that everything looked exactly the same how could i differentiate this nern roots from this nern roots so this process involved a lot of numbering careful measuring and focused searching but i'm proud to say that in episode 213 we picked the last of the cursed nern roots oh my gosh that was a sneaky one collect all skill books a skill book is a book that can be read once to permanently increase a character's level in a skill this skill must be below 100 for the book to take effect out of all the criteria this one was among the scariest initially simply due to the nature of random chance there were 109 skill books to read and collect 89 of which were in set locations around the game other than the occasional quest sensitive book the location specific books were not too bad to keep track of but the remaining 20 skill books could only be found in random loots as i touched on earlier there is a 10 chance that a skill book will appear in a legible boss chest and the type of book you get it depends on the dungeon for example let's say we want a specific magic book from a chest first we need to find a dungeon that gives us magic books like a conjurer or a necromancer dungeon then we'd need to make it to the boss chest at the end of the dungeon then we'd need to hit the 10 chance to get a skill book then it would roll to give us a skill book from all available magic skill books of which there are seven so we'd have a one in seven chance to get the skill book we desired a 14 chance so all in all add those percentages together and once we open the chest there was a 1.4 chance we'd have the book we desired so having to hit that 1.4 chance 20 times part of me was scared that i would just never end up finding all the books that i wanted but i devised a method that gave me very good results so in episode 248 i decided to hunt down the final skill books by analyzing the dungeons that we had cleared throughout the game to find the ones with the most optimal boss chest placements i would quick save outside the best entrance rush in check the chest and quick load if i didn't get the desired results now the boss chest contents is generated when you enter the zone so finding dungeons with a quick access to boss chests is really useful an example of this is seia tatar an alien ruin with a secret back entrance straight to the boss chests i am feeling good about this because if you take a look right here you can see marina freaking misfire merchandise and when that adorns your body your powers of oblivion playing is increased tenfold and that means there's a skill book in this chest oh marina you can't stage that you can't state that was like 13 attempts looking back at it while the skill book hunt was yes tedious and nerve-racking at times it it did add that little bit of excitement to every dungeon we cleared and in the end just sitting back and looking at that beautiful list of books in our chests that was satisfying i should probably get around to reading them one day slay all unique enemies of cyberdyle so what is a unique enemy well for this one i counted creatures that there was only one copy of and that weren't tied directly to a quest's completion creatures like the uder friction matron the lich erender vangeril the ghost of perennial draconis the spectral mud crab etc there is a list on the unofficial elder scrolls pages that detail these further and i will link it down below other completables besides the criteria i just mentioned we were also on the lookout for 13 birth sign stones and seven heaven stones now heaven stones are ancient monoliths that grant us permanent greater powers if we have the right fame requirements and birth sign stones have no requirement but we can only have one stone's greater power at any given time and most of them suck we also completed the pilgrimage of the nine way shrines meaning we visited the way shrines of each divine to receive their blessing and the different greater powers that we amassed definitely came in handy during some of the game's tougher encounters that's look at that greater power we just got fortify all of our stats 10 points for 5 minutes and those are the objectives i set for myself those are the criteria i chose for my 100 challenge and after 200 hours of in-game time i had completed them but could i say i truly completed the game drunk with madness madness for all what constitutes one hundred percent completion well you probably lump in maxwell skills and do all quests right but what about talking to every npc what about collecting every piece of armor every different enchantment on a weapon what about eating one of every food or drinking one of every wine this i think is the beauty and terror of a self-made challenge because you decide the finish line you get to say this is complete there are a million arbitrary objectives i could have added and honestly some i think maybe i should have tried for example what about collecting one of every regular book or eat one of every foods the main reason i chose not to do these things is because well they didn't have a statistic in the menu you can find a bunch of numbers representing your deeds and this does include a list for books reads but whenever you read any book even if you read it before this increases so it's it's worthless there was no real way of knowing which book had you read before without having a separate list it was the same with eating food there was no in-game way to track that in contrast my own criteria they were usually things that the game acknowledged and that was very satisfying to me i could see how many neuron routes i had i could see how many quests i had completed i could see how many skill books i had reads it meant i was less likely to mess up my tracking of that criteria i gotta be honest there are times where i'm where i doubt where i think is this really that impressive what we've done i should have done all of these other things and i should have collected all the armors all the weapons all the but no i'm satisfied with the rules i sets the restrictions i gave and the result that we got one could say that four years is a long time to spend to achieve 200 hours of playtime and they'd be right but we didn't rush this series it wasn't just about completing the game it was about making a memorable series i played oblivion when i had energy to put on a good show and when i had planned our next grand adventure this way it was never a chore well beside the dungeon clear and the nirnroots and most of the skill grinds but seeing my character reach max stats it gave me a deep sense of satisfaction that topped anything i've ever felt in video games marina's grown i have grown and hopefully you have grown too [Music] so this is it this is the end have a still good day take care and stay awesome you didn't think i'd forgotten about the dlc now did you right now i'm planning marina mistfire's next adventure in the champion of dlc challenge where we will take on all of oblivion's dlc and we will do it 100 maybe even incorporating new completion goals retroactively her story is not over yet so stay tuned to the channel to take part in it down in the description you'll find links to playlists spreadsheets and other resources to forge your own oblivion challenge may your adventures be as enthralling as marinas were these last four years have been magical so let's continue that magic have a still good day take care and stay awesome but most importantly everybody stay dark goodbye [Music] you

Channel: VoicesFromTheDark

Views: 335,031

Keywords: the elder scrolls iv oblivion, oblivion, the elder scrolls 4, tes iv, champion of cyrodiil, challenge, max difficulty, 100% completion, hardest, marina mistfire, breton, mage, pc, 2017, main quest, dark brotherhood, thieves guild, mages guild, no exploits, no cheats, jeremy soule, music, uesp, wiki, voicesfromthedark, voices from the dark, plays, vftd, lp, let's play, lets, play, full, walkthrough, playthrough, gameplay, hd, commentary, episode, part, new, channel, facecam, high definition

Id: 3o4dpFHX2II

Length: 50min 0sec (3000 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020