We quickly discovered that the new Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion remaster is an impressive and shiny UE5 wrapper over the janky gem we’ve always loved, and that’s led to some surreal developments like a beloved line reading flub getting some delightfully high-quality new lipsyncing.
It also means that speedrunners can slip right back into well-worn strats like a favorite pair of jeans. Case in point: Prolific Oblivion YouTuber Bacon_ (you’ve absolutely seen at least one of their videos before) beating the remaster in 12.5 minutes thanks to the door to the end of the game someone left in the Imperial City Temple District, an absolutely ancient skip from the original Oblivion that’s made it into the remaster.
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Spoilers for a 20-year-old game with a pretty bad story, I guess, but Oblivion’s climax where Sean Bean sacrifices himself for all mankind happens in a cloned, variant version of the “cell” or loading zone for the Temple District of the Imperial City, rather than the version of the district we see in normal gameplay.
For some reason, there’s a door to that variant cell buried under the district’s titular temple that leads straight to the endgame, bypassing the entire main quest.
After the discovery of this door eons ago, the history of Oblivion any% speedrunning appears to have revolved around reaching it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
My favorite method, long out of favor for being too time consuming, involved taking advantage of a glitch to suspend paint brushes in midair, forming a ladder of sorts with the player jumping from brush to brush to the top of the temple, where a lack of collision would let you drop underneath the building to where the door lives. Here’s a 14-year-old video of somebody doing just that in God’s own crunchy 240p resolution.
For Bacon’s new run of the remaster, it looks like they took advantage of fresh physics glitches introduced with UE5 to reach the same door. “I am using an Orc because of the Berserk greater power that has Fortify Fatigue,” Bacon wrote in the video description of the run.
“I cast it then use all my stamina and let the power run out while sitting on a chair making me ragdoll because my stamina is in the negatives, while ragdolling I go ham on the scrollwheel which places the camera way above your head and lets you clip your camera into walls.
“I use that to access the Temple of the One door, doing the skip.”
See? Simple. In motion, it has the same baffling, magical effect as seeing Mario butt jumping backwards five times before launching at mach speed in a Mario 64 speedrun, or someone killing Shadowheart and stuffing her in a box to skip all of Baldur’s Gate 3’s second act.
I’m always happy to see speedrunners doing their thing, but I’m looking forward to luxuriating in some Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quests for one million hours or so instead.
The rest of Bacon’s YouTube channel, meanwhile, is an unburnt Library of Alexandria for great, short clips of Oblivion being Oblivion. They’ve even started “remastering” some of the classics in the new game.