Summary
- Goblin Wars is a little-known system in Oblivion that has the game's seven goblin tribes in conflict.
- The system was designed by Kurt Kuhlmann, who admits that the system stretches the limits of Oblivion's scripting.
- However, he believes the implementation of Goblin Wars was ultimately worth it.
With the sudden release of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Oblivion Remastered, the fourth instalment in The Elder Scrolls series is back in the limelight. With 🐭this renewed attention on Oblivion comes the sᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚame discussions about mythical mechanics and features that we had on forums nineteen years ago.
One of the mysterious systems that new players are discovering for the first time is Goblin Wars. This system, which was only ever addressed in Oblivion's official strategy guide, revolves around Oblivion's seven goblin tribes. Each tribe has a military leader called a warchief, and a spiritual leader called a shaman. The shaman protects the tribe's sacred♈ totem staff.
Most players will encounter this system in the side quest, Goblin Trouble. However, every goblin tribe (except the Bitterfish) has ꦿa totem staff. Goblin tribes that have their totem staff stolen are supposed to seek out the staff, meaning the player can lead them into conflict with other tribes or really any other non-player character. There's still a debate about whether this system works as intended without mods, with even wikis having conflicting information on Goblin Wars.
In Goblin Trouble, the player must solve aꦑ conflict between two warring goblin tribes, the Rock Biters and the Bloody Hands. The Rock Biters stole the Bloody Hand's totem staff, and you simply need to return the staff to the Bloody Hands to end the conflict. You can also just murder every goblin if you're not feelin🐠g sneaky.
Oblivion's Rarest System
The designer of Goblin Wars, Kurt Kuhlmann, recently sat down with to discuss the myst🔯erious system. Kuhlmann worked at Bethesda from 1996 to 2023, most recently working as a lead systems designer on Starfield.
Kuhlmann explained that he decided to implement the system because he already had to do a lot of the scripting legwork when making Goblin Trouble. "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." Kuhlmann explained. "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 goblin culture and how their tribe was organised."
Goblin tribes in Oblivion are fascinating. If you slay their warchief, the goblins will eventually elect a new warchief. However, killing their shaman turns the entire tribe passive. The lo🎃ss of their spiritual leader is too mඣuch for the tribe to bear, depriving them of the motivation to raid and loot.
"As I recall, one of the big difficulties was getting the goblins inside the dungeon to be able to come out," Kuhlmann said, "I don't remember how I solved that but apparently I did! Probably with some questionable design ❀hackery. This also took advantage of some of the rarely used but powerful AI tools such as 'Find', which was how the goblins would head for the tꦡotem wherever it happened to be."
Kuhlmann explains that Goblin Wars was "stretching the limits of our game systems", which is why it doesn't always work how you'd expect. One of the problems with Goblin Wars is that the wait mechanic doesn't seem to advance time correctly for the goblin's scripting, meaning you have to wait for the goblin tribe to arrive without faꦿst-forwarding.
"There wasn't much else like it in Oblivion," Kuh💦lmann reflected. "Where you could freeform mess with the world state and have it react in an understandable way. I would have loved to do more of that ki💞nd of thing but we didn't have extra time - in fact the opposite - and also the tools for doing that kind of thing in Oblivion were very primitive."
As players get deeper into Oblivion Re𝓀mastered, we'll likely see a new generation of scientists experiment 🌊with Goblin Wars.
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