Oblivion's goblin wars stretched the limits of the game's systems

Thankfully, the feature has also made it into the recently released remaster.

If you're just playing Oblivion for the first time thanks to Virtuos' The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, then you're in for a treat when it comes to the game's quests. One quest in particular, though, has become legendary for its chaotic use of game mechanics.

The quest in question is called Goblin Trouble, and it has you resolve the dispute between two goblin tribes on the Yellow Road. In creating this quest, designer Kurt Kuhlmann also introduced a system which meant that if the sacred totem of a goblin tribe was stolen, there would be hell to pay, allowing goblins to essentially be led to war against other tribes and in theory any NPCs.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Kuhlmann explained how the system worked. "Since I was having to set up a scripted system to get the goblins from one dungeon to periodically attack goblins in another, I figured it wouldn't be a lot more work to make this systemic, so that it would work with any goblin tribe if the player stole their totem. I'm not sure if the part about 'not a lot more work' was actually true, but it certainly allowed for fun emergent gameplay. I also liked that it gave you a little bit of insight into the goblin culture and how their tribe was organised."

Apparently, this did put quite a bit of strain on the game's systems. "I don't remember the specifics, but the goblin war was stretching the limits of our game systems, especially the AI and scripting," said Kuhlmann. "My guess is that because of the scripted nature of the goblin wars system, when you use Wait the scripts aren't getting updated properly."

Kuhlmann remains fond of systems that allow things to occur naturally and chaos to take over the game, even if Bethesda has reined back some of those systems a bit over time due to the bugs they can cause. "I took my opportunities to introduce whatever elements of 'controlled chaos' whenever I could," Kuhlmann said. "The vertibirds in Fallout, and dragons in Skyrim, were also both sources of great emergent gameplay as they would randomly encounter things and get in fights that you could watch from a distance or join in the fun."

Have you tried your hand at goblin wars yet?