Oblivion's Incredible Hidden Mechanic

by the nine the white gold Tower is dripping by my merch enjoy the video I remember the first time I ever saw Oblivion it was at my family's farm when I was watching my big cousin play it on a Frankenstein of a PC I'd only ever played Morrowind and adored it despite being young and terrible at it hey why don't people like Morrowind I watched as he was chased by Daedra towards a roadside Inn he entered inside and I immediately relaxed knowing the danger was behind us only to have my world shattered when the Daedra came straight through the door I know such a basic mechanic of the modern era which often doesn't even have loading screens or houses these days seems like such a weird thing to be amazed by but in Morrowind cell switching by NPCs almost never happened only just noticed that the end of this boat is like a tree that they're just kind of hanging a lantern on me when I console command unlock the door ah NPC simply remained where they were or wandered in a small area never chasing you out of the cell only a few had schedules and mostly for quests as far as I know this led to things like young me murdering terrorize gavaine because the guards could never come into houses I would then set up our home as my own slowly integrate myself with the townsfolk every day they'd peek in between the boards and the windows and wonder where is Theresa anyway I'll open the door and I'll look at them and I'll smile and say howdy neighbor so enemies chasing you into cells blew my mind and it's what made Oblivion so special to me it felt like the first living world and I know that sounds silly with how simplistic Oblivion really kind of is but for a kid at that time it was the best thing I'd ever seen enemies might follow you into an end and you can watch as the local populace gives them a very physical demonstration of why their drinks are so cheap Oblivion had a few flashy things to show off its new NPC schedules and cell switching ability including a dude and Anvil who's been riding the local bicycle sorry Chad's but in Oblivion the short King gets the Weird elf seriously like all of the quotes about her are just racism against wolves greetings bosma yes what's the news from the other part of Tamriel nothing I'd like to talk about see bye Jesus Christ what a Flawless infiltration oh hold on speaking of thank you I'm Hassan Heinrich okenhall's wife take care well met one of my favorite mods was 28 days and a bit later a mod that simulated a spreading zombie apocalypse where people actually got infected and spread the virus it really made the world feel alive when a horde in one town might travel to another and threaten its survivors I even played some of the sequels to that mod for Skyrim on the channel ages ago oh the special edition with the deaths increasing the reports of hideous creatures in the snow coming from bruma now what's going on up in bruma I wonder oh oh this is going on in bruma hey protect and serve it's what we do what's the matter what the [ __ ] where has the light gone why has the gods forsaken us I've actually never seen this happen before and I'm [ __ ] terrified but there's a mechanic that makes the best use of this new ability of the engine and it's one that I don't think many people know of the mechanic that I adored as a kid and that inspired this video the goblin Wars [Music] yes that's right Oblivion has a hidden mechanic mentioned only in a single Quest as far as I can tell Goblin trouble is a minor side quest that has you aiding a group of farmers who had their land swarmed with goblins due to ongoing ethnic tensions between the tribes tensions which involve warbands of goblins marauding through the hills and collateral damage is not considered a sin in Goblin culture but a score to be beaten your job in this Quest is to put an end to the war through all the usual different means as a side note to further showcase The Living World once you complete the quest the town actually slowly rebuilds and rewards you with gold every week and I think that's cool as hell radiant AI huh what is real world so how do these mysterious Goblin walls actually work well there are seven tribes of goblins in Citadel there's actually more but shut up each tribe has a lair a shaman a war chief and their totem staff now let's see why most people don't even know this exists first to begin a goblin war the shaman must be alive which considering the average player is not a very high chance second the totem staff must be stolen which in some cases it already is with two tribes missing their totems and thus being at War at the start of the game however even worse is the fact that the totem stars are often guarded by the shamans who die defending them because the average player likely never knew about the diverse interconnected religious system that the Goblins strictly adhere to including laying down all arms and showing the Intruder who has slain your God Avatar battle a day [Music] my God he just overthrew the system one recommendation is that after you decapitate their leadership and rip families apart why not use the cave as a safe place to rest guarded by your own theologically enslaved Army [Music] third the totem staff must be on the ground not in your inventory not in a container and not sold that last one is important because if there's one thing merchants in the Older scrolls love it's rotting Goblin heads on sticks by God you've struck gold so after you've blast a couple people with it you'd sell the staff and make a shitload of money and the Goblins go to war with the merchant guilds wait what the [ __ ] this is just elder care if you've done all these things if you've aligned yourself facing north on the 11th of Hearthfire if you've smashed the like button then you might have just started a brand new race war oh but don't make the mistake of trying against the bitter fish there's actually more but shut up yeah shut the [ __ ] up okay which is a tribe you meet in the main quest which has no Warchief no totem pole uh it has a possibility of spawning multiple shamans but they don't work like shamans they are truly just a tribe in name the Shaman's death will not affect the stone cold hearts of those infidels there's also this kinda unique Goblin witch this Goblin witch also has a goblin Shaman staff but this isn't a goblin totem stuff those are completely different things and she's also not a shaman what did Todd mean by this throw into the mix the mechanic itself was buggy as hell and relied on NBCS that moved over land without the player being present which was somewhat of a wacky system some people claim the code never existed though those people seem to be very much wrong and that Oblivion very rarely featured things like this and it's not hard to see why most people would just never come across it but I had I found out about it became fascinated with it as a kid I remember the joyous days of goblins attacking the coolest house in the game I have a castle gate it keeps the bad things out so what's my aim in this video what was I trying to do well this wasn't how it started but by the end I was trying to prove that the mechanic existed I was going insane I was trying to prove that I wasn't crazy see despite all of the posts you can find about the goblin Wars people asking about them or talking about them or how they do work so many people say they have never worked but others say that they did work even on Console where it couldn't have been modded others say it's cut content that was never added in some say you just have to wait forever way longer than you'd think or that you must place the staff in a rival tribe's Lair not just in the open or that there's a distance limit to it and even The Unofficial Elder Scrolls page God bless the wiki disagrees with itself as to whether or not they even exist or work I'm breaking out the archives because even the game's own guide mentions it and by God it's a treasure Trove it tells you how to return the staff that they respawn it flirts with Marissa what the [ __ ] it tells you how to restart the war and that being near the settlers will will cause the traveling goblins and the settlers to load in and therefore the Goblins to slaughter the settlers and finally tells you about a free form Quest we'll get back to that one it mentions that the raiding party will leave at night full notice the timing of this mod which says it just uses the goblin Wars code also I like that the guide after this Quest doesn't just like stay there and live with them she actually goes back and becomes a deer hunter this is a sort of [ __ ] that makes me love Oblivion so what's a free-form quest it's basically just a list of [ __ ] that you can do that isn't actually a scripted quest in the game but still has some cool stuff about it you know some things like meeting an adventurer and just kind of hanging out with him while he loots money for a dude named Dort [ __ ] further in however is this fun with goblins it includes a lot of the info we now know but it doesn't mention what the shamans do strangely enough it includes a lot of ideas to spark the imagination and I feel this is where some may have fabricated their own memories from it's a very hard mechanic like to figure out whether it's actually working or not because of the time delay that's if you knew the mechanic existed in the first place and that left me with one choice it was time to start [ __ ] with their little idols there are rats and goblins down there but from what I've seen of you I'm guessing you're an experienced Barbarian Jesus Christ what the [ __ ] you can't say that just cause I'm green okay stage one of the testing is complete and I think I can resoundly say that it doesn't work with these guys which means I have two more things I want to try before I install patches and I start changing the game I'm here to steal your floating stuff thank you I'll take these gems as well I just want them because they're shiny there's meant to be another Goblin totem staff right here I figured out what happened to the totem pole it was actually rescued by those goblins see this is a goblin wall hold on let me uh let me pop some invisibility potions and let me show you what a goblin wall actually looks like here the white skins fight the sharp tooth and the important note here is that only the Warchief is able to pick up the totem pole if it's in a foreign location if it's inside of your own base then other goblins are able to pick up the totem pole too he's claimed the totem pole this time the white skins have actually ended the war on their own I'm impressed so as you can see he's gonna try and get this out of here and we're actually gonna follow him goblin war parties are all centered around the Warchief he's the one that respawns every three days just like all goblins except for the shaman once he's done that he can lead off a war party of Berserkers and skirmishes they'll return home if the Warchief dies because they can no longer recover the totem the mode that I know of I definitely played this mod as a kid because it was played back in 2008. uh I know this more the edited things that the skirmishes could pick up enemy totems uh but that is not in the base game as far as more air in the base game the skirmishes and the shaman can pick up the totem as long as it's in their own territory only the Warchief can pick it up if it's not in their territory anyway here we have the white skin Goblin Chief and he's going to take us back to the coolest cave you've ever seen in Oblivion hey look at this we're back at the cave we've found Goblin Jim's cave we head into white skin City oh oh my stop please every time I enter a door like because I'm following you God damn it I have to keep drinking my invisibility potions this is another reason why Goblin Wars are almost never experienced by players they practically require the player to not intervene in a war in which both sides are going to attack the player so it's kind of hard for them to not do it you know not intervene and somehow screw the war up so the goblin Warchief is supposed to actually drop the staff in some locations it's known that dropping the staff will clip through the floor and then it flies out of the world but the only reason I know that is because the unofficial Oblivion patch references this so the goblin Wars mechanic as far as the unofficial patches concerned does exist I this is the weirdest mechanic like deep dive I've ever gone on I think you ever met Goblin gym before he's a Breton who is the shaman of this tribe he is actually the shaman except the tin vanilla without the unofficial patch he won't correctly uh what do you call it work as their Shaman they won't go passive once he dies there's a better be a bit of a gang war here here's the Rock by the Warchief is the uh the bloody hand one coming in now is it gonna be the guy who didn't bring a weapon to invade another cave or is oh it's the guy with the mace who won I'm kind of unsurprised on that one all right let's see if this goblin war is real or not one week later we've waited an entire week and no goblins have come I have a few theories I'm gonna try all of them we're gonna exhaust everything before we move on to patching because once I start patching the everything goes out the window at that point I'm basically just dealing with mods and I kind of can't really say it's vanilla anymore I'd lay odds that the war between the two tribes is because of a stolen tribal head they call them tribal heads in dialogue which is another name that's different it's not totem pole it's not totem staff it's now tribal head so with hours of testing finished I turn to mods to see if I could at least get the system working I thought maybe people played with the unofficial Oblivion patch and still considered vanilla but you know that maybe that fixed the problem no I thought it was going to be Martin's monster mod also known as mmm or potentially another equally annoyingly named mod 000 it didn't seem like it was either of those and finally I turned to mods I knew would work given that every other option has been exhausted I'm finally just gonna go to the mod that seems to enable it the reason why I didn't want to activate this is this is obviously very clearly a mod if you've turned this on then you're not playing vanilla you know at least the the patches you can kind of get away with like oh it was still vanilla but it was just patched to fix something that should have been in the game kind of thing I could get that but yeah this is not exactly that instead uh Oblivion is intended to be capable of goblin Wars between tribes who have stolen each other's totems however this is not fully implemented in the scripts and AI for reasons Beyond me there are ongoing Wars between the white skin and sharp tooth tribe as well as the bloody hand and rock by the tribe at the beginning of the beginning of the game but while you are supposed to be able to provoke your own Wars between any tribes or even all of them this is not yet possible without modification this probably the most correct statement I've seen which sounds weird to say but remember that these posts are all from more than a decade ago more than a decade and I mean that very literally in that this mod was first released in 2006. so we're gonna use the beta if this doesn't work then all hope is lost you know the Bell Tolls for me but uh hopefully it does work and if so what's going to happen here is that we have the tribe totem staffs as before uh if we steal our staff at 6 PM every day the Warchief of the tribe will determine whether or not their totem has been stolen in case it's missing they will set at an Excursion to retrieve the tribe's lost Staff All Of the Goblins say for the shaman will accompany him I don't know if this is true or not because it used to be at least in vanilla it's just Berserkers and skirmishes the standard goblins don't accompany the uh the Warchief this may be changed after the tribe's totem is retrieved the skirmishes will stay behind for a short time to search for an enemy totem this is as far as I can tell brand new Behavior I don't know of any reference to this in other documents or informational Forum posts elsewhere but this may have actually just been in the code and he may have just enabled it that being of course Mr Dr gamut himself whose only mods by the way are the goblin war mods I realized that I started this as like a let me show off a cool feature from a game I used to you know really enjoy and it's now just a [ __ ] conspiracy theory and just to show how long it's really been the last time I downloaded this beta mod was in 2010. goblins it's 6 PM trying for your tribal Excursion not Goblin head picked up what ayo I I don't think you're allowed to do that actually yeah hey the skull Breakers are here as well that's good that's good it means it's working well given that we know it all works now let's get to it it's time to start actually engaging in Goblin Wars yeah I know it only took like two full days of work before I decided to just use the [ __ ] mod oh my God there's an entire goblin attack on the gates of coral this is exactly what I wanted yes men to Arms get him oh my God this is a huge Goblin look at this dude this is uh What mmm does it adjusts the size of some monsters oh I nearly clobbered you Jesus dude's name is hairy legs it's the rock biters versus the dust eaters but the dust eaters seem to have only brought their Warchief that was a uh pretty one-sided fight Oh look The Skirmish you just picked up the uh travel yeah and there goes another one oh oh my God this will be the richest skirmisher you've ever seen he has all of the totems The Rock biters have secured every single totem we've got the three feather on the left and the sharp tooth on the right I think this is pretty obviously oh hang on as the three feather got some reinforcements here what are these guys are they all three feather yeah it looks like they are okay they're having a big fight in the doorway meanwhile I heard there was some Goblin head picking up going on let's have a look what's going on over here oh my God in the room it's the three feather and sharp tooth WarChiefs fighting each other alone who shall win oh it was it was the sharp tooth kind of unsurprising on that one all right but he is gonna steal his totem pole and his tribe will be I think the first to successfully steal one and uh and get it out of here a bit of an upset though the Three Feathers won the initial engagement not the sharp tooth which means the sharp tooth war chief is coming out into a Three Feathers Army oh no you poor boy so close yet so far I'm just establishing ethnic conflicts than watching from the corner of the cave like I wonder who's going to win all the little Warchief is getting bullied oh no but it's all right because the Rottweiler has a skirmisher here to help out here we go this is look at the little teeny War Chief look at him go oh he's so cute oh and he's here to steal back his totem pole oh my God he killed the Warchief it's the defeat of the skull breaker tribe never to be recovered ah well guess I'll have to clean up hello oh my God is that a small chicken all right well our home is established it's time to face off against the goblin hordes a couple of those down on the ground then we go up on the wall we uh we keep an eye out for any little cheeky goblins intending on attacking up is that a [ __ ] sheep I want to say what was that get away from here we're trying to Siege get out of here what the who are you oh that was [ __ ] terrify I just who okay you're a Raider okay right there's just a woman on the side of a hill staring at me and the moment I see her she turns around and leaves the Goblins are here greetings orc uh the Goblins are inside the Goblins have breached the facility oh my God I don't even know which tribes these are okay hold on we have is that just okay sharp tooth skull breaker and three feather have all shown up oh my God okay so somehow The Three Feathers spawned inside anyway not sure how this one occurred anyway let's just kill these guys real quick oh hello would you like to leave well the Three Feathers were dealt with quickly anyway Let's uh oh who's this oh my God another war chief just a right oh it's a skull breaker hello oh my God morgue goblins are coming look at them poor over the hill Oh my God okay get back to the gates fall back to the gates damn it [Music] oh my God so you need that bowl in a second mate because there's a lot of goblins outside that was perfect I could not have expected better than them just flowing over the hill open the gates we must rescue the blacksmith Sally four just made him eat [ __ ] I probably should drop all of the heavy stuff I'm carrying and uh just actually fight right look I swear there is a good excuse for having uh god mode on this whole time it's because I had 5 000 invisibility potions on me at any one point let me just cut down on that a little bit okay maybe maybe even a bit less okay that's a good number of invisibility potions we can probably drop some other stuff too I'm also gonna take the Castalian I'm gonna put him on the walls I can tell him to stand here and he should be able to fire down and actually kill goblins excellent work a stallion I hope you don't get shot by a goblin Archer that'd be a sad end of your story hmm what the huh I'm gonna get another man at Arms real quick one second hello does anyone have a bow your turn to take the position I forgot how unnatural people looked in Oblivion why did your face look smooth I don't know how I've done this but this is just pure white now it's just a thing that's happening hi you know I think I think I really had some Rose tinted glasses when it came to how well Oblivion actually ran when it came to you know bugs and such because dude [ __ ] God I'm finding a good few what uh so I was trying to figure out why the Goblins weren't coming on the on the plus side I have all of the different uh Black Horse couriers now there we go that's nice to be good for a read you killed all of them uh you know probably probably the horse that did most of it frankly horses are quite tough on the plus side the Castle's gained a new horse that's pretty nice well I think we're gonna call it there I'm like 97 sure that the mod has just broken and uh the Goblins will no longer come on something else is being screwy or they're getting like stopped along the way by something else or something like that but either way I'm having some issues and frankly Oblivion has crashed like three times in the last hour so I'm starting to get a little tired well that is it for the goblin Wars thank you all for watching I know I can do a bit more with it like I could repair it and just carry on do something else reload the save or something to when it was still working and and try and have them attack a different location but I think we've gotten the uh kind of gist of how these work the biggest downside to them is that the mod and I guess the base game itself has no restrictor for them just appearing next to the totem because obviously when they're being transported in the Overworld in the I'm when I can't see them rather they're not being moved normally they're being kind of virtually moved and so they just kind of appear there I know it's crazy to want updates for a feature that doesn't even exist in the base game but uh you know having like a nice little circle of maybe like 300 meters around the totem where they stop and then they have to actually walk the rest of the way to go steal the totem would be uh would be quite nice for making the walls a lot more fun despite this being an almost forgotten feature I think it's probably one of my favorite AI features of Oblivion and it's what I wish the game had so much more of they care enough enough about these to wage Perpetual war and I think it's also a nice World building and law thing you know the fact that a goblin war is just a natural disaster that can like occur it's like oh the the tribes are at War again guys watch out roads aren't going to be safe there is so much more they could have done with it and I really wished that Skyrim did more with it as far as I know Skyrim doesn't have anything like this at all it's radiant AI is better than oblivions for certain but it's not good but there was nothing quite as ambitious as Goblin Wars and that's just yeah it's a real letdown the later games didn't carry on with stuff like this building a living world is a challenging thing to do most games that try to make worlds feel lived in really just fail hard but this is one of the few features that I think could really sell someone on this of course I'm not saying specifically the Goblins but you could have all sorts of stuff with Bandits and mercenaries and Wars I mean the Skyrim had a civil war on and it was all just scripted in instances and battles that didn't [ __ ] matter and then just quests that was it why the [ __ ] could you do this there's a whole War mechanic in Oblivion you could have done oh God would be so cool imagine that storming camps to steal their [ __ ] Banner the camps attacking you back in return you get like an alert from your guys oh no the Stormcloaks will be arriving in 12 hours you better get there and defend the camp I don't know the main thing I like the most about it is that it doesn't actually need the player to be involved and that is what is so interesting to me that is what is so crucial it tells a story without actually requiring the player to do it themselves because you can have situations in which you're just out in the wilderness and suddenly goblins pour over the hill it's incredible that is just such a cool feature that I really really wish that Oblivion had actually properly fleshed out but for now I think it's just gonna have to be a weird little footnote in a very weird little game that I appreciate quite a bit thank you all for watching this was not quite the video I wanted to make I wanted to make a one focused on the goblin Wars but then I realized I had to kind of you know prove that they existed first and that I wasn't just you know hallucinating everything as a child so well I uh I might have been in the end who knows after all of this we are left with the most horrifying possibility of all that at some point somewhere along a bolivian's life cycle if every single person who spoke about this wasn't just lying on the internet about video games which people used to do way more it feels like it if all of them weren't mistaken if anyone actually bothered to check if this mechanic was real then there is the chance that this feature may have actually worked worked at some point on some console or system at some patch it may have been patched to work or worked from the start and then another patch along the way may have broken it or reverted the fix and no one ever noticed and now I don't know what you expect me to do I'm no [ __ ] infono plus mate I just write Loops well true [ __ ] I ain't about to Tunnel through the code of every Oblivion patch ever just to prove my child's self wasn't like making [ __ ] up or confusing it with the mod and that it really worked on vanilla at some point somewhere but hey if you did experience the system ever working as intended that being more than just the two Wars that are active at the start of the game or if you have some footage of it working that you can prove isn't modded I'd love to see it until next time everyone cheers for watching

Channel: Rimmy Downunder

Views: 1,392,009

Keywords: Rimmy, Downunder Gaming, Gameplay, Funny Moments, Funny Montage, Memes, Elder Scrolls Oblivion, Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion, ES4, Oblivion, Bethesda, Todd Howard, Goblin Wars, Oblivion Goblin Wars, Oblivion Goblin Wars Mod, Oblivion Goblin War, Oblivion Goblin Trouble, oblivion goblin totem staff, Oblivion Goblin Tribes, Oblivion Mods, Oblivion goblin shaman staff, the elder scrolls iv oblivion, elder scrolls iv oblivion, elder scrolls, the elder scrolls

Id: q-QPuhtgrAo

Length: 30min 20sec (1820 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022