posted by originally on cohost.org on and reposted on
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 -- almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren't really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.
Beyond the more widely-known "horse-armor" DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the "Wizard's Tower". I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.
This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load a save from inside the DLC even though it was not downloaded. What we found was likely not supposed to be accessible except for the developers of the game.
This demo area existed outside of the bounds of the main game, and the underlying method for how we got to it seemed to be exploiting a memory pointer. Our best guess was that the DLC overwrote some "unused" (aka only used for developer testing) memory when it was installed, so removing it points the save state at that memory location.
I was spurred to undergo all of this work to reproduce the glitch because of a combination of wanting to port over the summarized version of this story from Twitter and from a Steam sale where Oblivion with all the DLC was bundled for $6. After making my way through the tutorial and going directly towards the DLC objective indicator, I summited some nearby mountains and entered the tower.
Once I saw the ice hand on the floor, my memories of this glitch came flooding back to me. This was the room in which we first found the glitch. I saved, exited the game, and then restarted -- this time making sure to uncheck the tower DLC on startup so that it wouldn't be loaded. I ignored the warning that my save was loading from a version of the game that had different content from the one I had running.
My character loaded into a black zone outside of a house looking in through one-way walls. It was impossible to travel through these walls by default, but by carefully jumping around the edges of the house, the front door became accessible, and it happened to be functional even through the invisible wall. This door led to the outside of the house, labeled "Wilderness", which was the village screenshot from before.
The village contained a number of empty houses that could not be entered -- they each had a "Door" that did not budge when interacted with. There were also a few houses which had functional doors labeled things like "Wooden Door to Bruma House Test" and "Wooden Door to TesterHouseBrumaMid".
While all of the exteriors of the houses matched those of homes and buildings in Bruma, there was one house whose insides did not match the exterior at all. Upon entering, it looked almost pitch black. Picking khajiit for this verification run wound up being a good choice because of access to night vision at level 1.
With night vision active, it was clear that the interior of this house was the final room of an Oblivion Gate. Following the ramps up to the top, a sigil stone sat just out of reach. If you have not played Oblivion in 16+ years, you can read up on what a sigil stone is here. The important parts to note for this are:
- Sigil stones were extremely rare with only 70 total in the entire game.
- Sigil stones could be used to enchant armor and weapons with magical effects that were randomly selected from a set of possible options upon collection.
- For what seemed like balancing purposes, the strength of the magical effects from the sigil stones were dependent on the level of the character collecting them at collection time. At level 3, this meant they were "Descendent Sigil Stones" (the weakest), while my friend and I originally found this glitch as characters that were at least level 13, which meant "Ascendent Sigil Stones". Interacting with the stone at the top added the sigil stone into the inventory and the only exit was through the floating wooden door that also served as the entrance two floors below.
Trying to get this sigil stone at level 3 proved difficult. Despite a few ranks up in the acrobatics skill, falling from this height was an instant death upon impact due to fall damage. I spent a few minutes wedged under the ramp to the sigil stone platform so that I could jump repeatedly in rapid succession. These ranks allowed me to level up, so I could increase my endurance, which would increase my health and help me live through a fall. I went back to the other Bruma houses and one of them had a bed I could sleep in to level up. Between the health increase from endurance going up and the higher and longer jumps from acrobatics going up, it was finally possible to jump across the gap and land only one level below, immediately pause and heal, and then drop again to land directly next to the door.
This house wasn't just a test to refine the design of an Oblivion Gate final room. It also may have been a way to practice generating all of the different sigil stone types and potentially load testing as well. Being able to access the door was an essential part of this because part of grabbing the sigil stone was that it effectively became impossible to move after about a second or two of game-time.
It has been impossible for me to ever play an Elder Scrolls Game without having to deal with becoming over-encumbered. 16+ years ago, my friend and I learned that we could make our way through doors while over-encumbered. And it turned out that exiting the room back into the Wilderness would stop the sigil stones from replicating in the inventory. At this point, in the Xbox 360 version, removing sigil stones from the player's inventory would drop individual orbs one by one. Unpausing after removing all the excess sigil stones from the inventory would lead to the game freezing up or crashing on that console from having to render the collision physics of all of those great many orbs. On PC, they were dropped in large-quantity bunches. Either way, dropping sigil stones was required, and we could drop just about all types of them.
The most important sigil stone for us the one that provided chameleon on self. chameleon was a form of "soft invisibility" that usually rendered a user less-than-fully invisible. However, in a crucial difference from the invisibility spell, chameleon would not dispel after making an attack or doing an action. At the "ascendant" strength for a level 13+ character, these sigil stones would have magic effects of 25% chameleon per piece of clothing enchanted. This meant that with only 4/5 pieces of armor enchanted, we could get passive 100% chameleon. No one could see us no matter how many items we stole or people we attacked.
After no longer being over-encumbered, it was possible to fast travel out to any other city, which returned the game memory to the regular range in case any of the DLC areas continued to be important to access.
From here on, hardly any characters in the game would interact with us without trying to speak to them first. Finally, we had transcended combat or laws. We had become Lords.