@illbrush3672
I hope people never stop making oblivion content
@FoxAzureOfficial
I do love the conversations NPCs have in Taverns. "How are you?" "Go away!" "'Bye!" "Take care!"
@conormartin8894
Cut to Starfield, where all NPCs are basically in the same spot 24/7. The regression of Bethesda is such a shame.
@centeroftheearthofficial
Having a vampire character at the end of the main quest, maxed out infamy.. the chancellor proclaimed "all hail the grand champion of Cyrodiil!" All cheery and doughy smiles; when the dialogue ended he went apeshit-mad in his facial expression grunting "ville scum!" While evil-eyeing my character until he was out of sight.. Amazing!
@TheMemeLord700
A guard walks into lava to say a dead body is still warm is a funny thing.
@jakezepeda1267
As a kid Oblivion's AI was so cool to me. I liked to follow people and just see what their day was like sometimes.
@Kirmon64
A Radiant AI weirdness story, as requested: I remember watching my cousin play; he was doing some Mage's Guild related quest about defeating some necromancers in a fort. Finishes the quest, leaves the fort, looks around: "Alright, I guess I killed them all, let's quicktravel back to the Imperial City." Then the instant he arrives, the battle music starts and EVERY guard onscreen IMMEDIATELY makes a beeline for... somewhere. Not to him. They ALL run down the road in a line - and MORE of them start pouring out of the city. There ends up being a train of about 20 guards all sprinting on the road to Cheydinhal, ignoring everyone and everything else, every mounted road guard they pass dismounting and joining the train... until they make it most of the way there, and encounter a single necromancer on the road. Necromancer gets deleted by the guard swarm, battle music stops, and as one the guards turn around to calmly walk back to the Imperial City. Best guess is the qt happened JUST as some random straggler necromancer noticed him, game got confused, guards reacted as usual and went ham on the hostile despite the huge distance. It was very funny to watch, though.
@WooShell
Yesterday I went afk in Bravil to fetch me a drink, and when I got back, City-Swimmer lay dead in front of me. Apparently, he got hungry and tried to pickpocket some of my food, only for the guards to kill him right then and there.
@imperialproductions8088
The issue with the Legion Foresters fighting each other isn't caused by one catching a stray arrow. Foresters hunt deer, and deer will automatically flee from anything that approaches, which makes it incredibly hard to kill them. Bethesda got around this by adding the Foresters to the deer faction, so the deer wouldn't consider them enemies. The issue with this is the AI considers any attack on an ally to be a threat, so the Foresters north of Bruma attack each other because one shoots a deer and the other considers that an attack on an ally, which is always responded to with violence. Normally it's not an issue, because Foresters are spaced far enough apart that their patrol zones don't overlap, but the two north of Bruma have overlapping zones and therefore come into conflict with each other.
@MrThejoshmon
Using rally, bound equipment and frenzy spells, I had the Adoring Fan assassinate rude shopkeeps I frenzied who I did not like that didn't sell or buy anything useful. Because the game nets anyone who kills a merchant a flat 1000 gold bounty, even if you were never caught, the Adoring Fan became a wanted man. The guards would run up to him to arrest him but because NPCs cannot follow the law system he couldn't pay for his crimes. Now every time I head into town, the guards will hunt him down and he will flee from them, leaving cities unguarded (as the entire force pursues him) and when they finally get him I end up finding guards all over Cyrodiil on their way walking back to town. Due to the fact that the Adoring Fan respawns after a few days unexpectedly and will rejoin you if he was last set to follow you, this has repeated multiple times across my playthrough and is always a great bit of levity between diving in dungeons.
@White-Kagura
During the quest "A Brotherhood Betrayed" an Imperial guard Carius Runellius had me wait in a Bruma's "Olav's Tap and Tack" inn until the guards track down the location of a phony vampire hunter. Entering the inn I spoted Ongar the World-Weary, who is a member of the thieves guild. Since he has 25 Responsibility he usually just steals the food on the table which makes everybody in the inn upset about it but nobody ever takes action. During this instance he was sneaking towards his destination but I remembered that this quest is the only second instance of a guard entering an inn. And so I tried to slow Ongar down before Carius enters the inn. After an ingame hour the guard enters the inn and I let Ongar steal the food before a guards eyes and the guard shouts "Halt!", which I hadn't had heard in the game before. I was certain, that when a guard will see somebody steal they would just attack, but this time Carius and Ongar initiated a conversation which immediately crashed my game. I tried to repeat all of this but all the next time Ongar would not steal food for some reason.
@AsymmetricalCrimes
11:09 The AI killing a Skooma dealer for not having Skooma is actually hilarious.
@souperdooper8732
I was blown away when I realized you could poison people with the poison apples you get from the Dark Brotherhood. It's a bit quirky, but it does work. You have to follow the character you want to poison around and find out where they get their food from, usually a barrel. If you just put the poison apples in their food barrel, they'll grab bread or cabbage and not get poisoned, but if you remove all the food from their barrel and leave only the poison apple, they'll grab it, walk to a nearby table, sit down, take a bite, and immediately drop dead. It was during the Glarthar quest that I noticed the pattern of specific NPCs getting food out of specific barrels and eating it, and one thing just led to another.
@beardalaxy
The idea of an NPC cloning the player character who then goes on a killing spree is straight up creepypasta material.
@AviaRayne2
My favorite Oblivion story: I was watching my brother play. I can't remember what quest it was as it was in 2008 when this happened haha, but he had to get a key off of someone in the Imperial City. He decided to steal it while the guy was out, but I think the NPC happened to walk into his bedroom while my brother had just picked up the key. Didn't even see the reticle change from hidden to seen! Brother bolted out of there, jumping over this NPC to get out of his house as he started getting aggressive and started wailing on him with his fists. Brother gets downstairs and out the door and fast travels before the guy follows. Ended up finishing that quest and went to another town to do some more things afterwards. Returned to the Imperial city a short while later and this NPC hunts him down in the streets and starts beating in him. Bro goes to pull his sword and start fighting him, but the entire city watch showed up and ended this guy. BUT THEN, someone must have bumped one of their friends with a sword because the whole watch was now fighting themselves. My brother just stood there as the player character and he and I both, on the other side of the screen, just sat shocked at what we were witnessing. I think 2 or 3 of the guards survived out of like 12. It's been nearly 20 years and we still have no idea what happened. But it was sure a sight!
@andrewdornan587
On my first playthrough I put in 527 hours, ,and tbh a good 70 of them were me sleeping to the background music but I retired my character in the Crusaders Armour sitting on Sheogoraths throne.. where ever that old 360 hard drive wound up I hope he's still sitting there.
@TheZombifiedGuy
27:19 This comparison of later Bethesda titles as polished, rehearsed plays compared to Oblivion's experimental, rough-around-the-edges jank feels really apt and it reminded me a lot of "The Play that Goes Wrong." If you've never seen it, it's a sort of play within a play that, as the title suggests, goes very wrong. People forget their lines, an actor gets knocked unconscious multiple times and has to be replaced by a backstage crewmember, the sound technician keeps missing cues (and at one point, hilariously, accidentally playing a Duran Duran CD), and parts of the set break. There's a degree of encouraged audience interaction that means it doesn't always play out exactly the same, as well. It's very meta in that sense but you also get immersed in the play-within-a-play, and when the actors finally get the cue or line right the audience almost always cheers wildly. You sympathize with these people who are incompetently, adorably, but absolutely doggedly pressing on the face of adversity to create a flawed but thoroughly entertaining whole. Oblivion has the same energy for me. When it works, it's so satisfying, and when it doesn't quite work, it's still fun. You get dragged into and suddenly thrust out of immersion depending on how the game world around you progresses, and you can never be entirely sure when something absolutely unhinged will happen even amidst scripted quests you've played through multiple times. It's all part of the charm. I'm glad we have Oblivion.
@SkyBlueFox1
This is an excellent deep-dive, but I feel like adding in my own two-cents as someone who has a biiiig soft-spot for Oblivion. One thing that I think a lot of people overlook about Oblivion is, funnily enough, the randomly-generated conversations. They can be ridiculous, yes, and many of the "rumors" and other things can get a little bit repetitive... but the fact that they happen so often, and can happen between almost any pair of NPCs, makes the world so much more lively. You hang around in the Mages Guild or Fighters Guild and you'll overhear your guildmates chatting about whatever, and that alone helps make them feel like lived-in places. This also helps sell your impact on the world much better - when you complete a quest or as you progress through a Guild's storyline, there's a good chance you'll overhear NPCs gossiping about the events at-hand. No matter how potentially-absurd or robotic the conversations can seem, the fact that the system exists at all goes a long, long way. By comparison, Skyrim relies a lot more on pre-built conversations - two specific characters having a specific discussion about a specific thing. And while that does avoid the nonsensical elements that Oblivion "suffers" from... it also gets repetitive extremely fast, making it feel all the more artificial. On top of that, there really aren't that many interactions like that in Skyrim in-general - which means characters are interacting less often, and thus the places you go don't feel quite as lively as you'd expect them to. Like, the Thieves Guild hall in Riften has a variety of NPCs doing stuff, but they rarely talk to each other or even leave their "posts", which is especially noticeable if you play Skyrim and Oblivion back-to-back. Sure, it's "safer" in terms of implementation, but it's also less interesting and less ambitious. (This is also why something like "dropping a weapon in Riften and watching two NPCs throw hands over it" catches so many peoples' attention - it's one of Skyrim's vanishingly-rare, sort-of-kind-of dynamic moments.)
@OAM47
My favorite is the chaos the Mythic Dawn sleeper agents can cause. Else God-Hater revealed herself in the tavern and it was such tight quarters, I was afraid of attacking back lest I hit a bystander (and then I'd be in real trouble), so it was up to the mob to stop her. Tavern owner died in the process and I was kind of dumbstruck like... I guess I can't rent a bed here anymore...
@lordsnarf