Strangest Glitches in Oblivion
It has been 5 years since Bethesda’s last addition to the “Elder Scrolls” series was released. “Elder Scrolls: Oblivion” was a phenominal success with its diverse new gameplay and quite lengthy gameplay experience. Gamers could easily clock 60-70 hours into the game and still have many areas left to explore and side mission undiscovered.
Oblivion did so well that Bethesda’s other widely popular series, “Fallout” was giving a modern sequel that resembled a sci-fi version of Elder Scrolls in many ways called, “Fallout 3″, which was also recently followed up by “Fallout: New Vegas”, both of which did extremely well and continued to push the boundaries of the previous games. Gamers loved the revival of the Fallout series but craved for a new installment of The Elder Scrolls and when the teaser for “The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim” was announced, fans prepped themselves for what would surely be one of the greatest games of the year.
Skyrim is scheduled to be released on, interestingly enough, November 11th, 2011 and while fans are most definitely expecting stronger graphics, a stronger combat system, and a larger variety of enemies to name a few, they are also undoubtably expecting many glitches and bugs that uncontrollably find their way into any large scale modern game. These bugs have a particularly strong history with Bethesda’s large, open world concept games but with so much of everything packed into a 1 disk game, it’s expected. I figured now would be a good time to take a look at some of the strangest and most bizarre glitches found in Skyrim’s predecessor; Oblivion.
On the Cross…
I’ve only encountered this once while playing, but while wandering the roads of Cyrodill, I encountered a messenger usually found atop her horse. Instead of riding around as per usual, she was floating in mid air with her legs straight down, arms folded out perfectly straight and head upright, like a certain biblical figure. The horse was also just floating there but neither of them moved or made any noise when I attempted dialoque. Attacking her snapped her out of it. Very disturbing glitch if you ask me…
The Acid Face Treatment
This is pretty common humourous glitch that can happen at anytime, with any character. It appears as though you can walk through the character and see through the face “shell” that the game developers created around a set of teeth and 2 eyes to make a face. Try getting in the groove of a truly epic quest when suddenly the Queen is talking to you with half a face…
Where’d he/she go?
This is the absolute worst common glitch I can think of. You’re doing a mission and everything’s going great until you’re told to meet a CPU somewhere and they never show up. Having CPUs not load into where they’re supposed to be can be a huge nuissance. It basically screws over your entire game. If you have recently saved, you can keep reloading and hope for the best but for those you haven’t in a while…it basically means game over. There have been some so bad in the main storyline that players have been forced to simply give up their file and start over from the beginning. Ouch!
Stuck in the painting!
There is a specific quest in Oblivion called “A Brush with Death” where you are teleported to the inside of a painting. After retrieving the tool necessary for getting out of the painted world, the quest NPC will draw a doorway to get out. More times then not, the sound effects will engage but the door will be nowhere to be found. At this point, if you saved before you just have to do the entire quest over again but if you saved even once while in the painting, you’re game is basically done.
Duplication
Not all glitches mean bad things and this one proves it tenfold. This is probably the most known glitch in Oblivion and has been exploited time and time again by gamers looking for easy money…or a room full to the brim of watermelons. Basically there’s multiple ways to do this but I’ll explain the one I use.
1. Equip a large amount of arrows in your inventory
2. Perform any attack (melee, ranged, magic)
3. While the attack is in motion, try to unequip the arrows
4. After a message appears telling you, you can’t unequip them, drop the item you want duplicated while still in the menu
5. When you leave the menu the duplicated items will start to pour out onto the ground, equal to the number of arrows you had equipted (134 arrows=134 broadswords)
Obviously the glitch won’t work for some items but it’s definitely neat to test out.
Inifinite Money
Another very well known and exploited glitch and another perfect example of a glitch that can actually do good, and not make you want to toss your system out a window. Basically there’s a ton of ways to perform this act of cheatery as well but, once again, I’m going with my favourite. In the Imperial city, there’s an elf named, “Dorian”. If you enter his house and kill him, you can loot the low “X” amount of gold he has on him over and over. It will never leave his inventory so just keep hitting a button until you’re thumbs (or fingers for PC users) until it breaks and you’re rich!
