The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered | Ep. 4 – Saving Cyrodiil Between Unnecessary Side Quests
Cyrodiil is still in danger, the Oblivion Gates remain a problem, and the fate of the world may very well rest in our hands. Naturally, we’ve also got approximately seventeen unrelated errands to complete, several caves to investigate, and somebody in a nearby village who desperately needs help finding something they misplaced. Saving the world can wait five minutes. Probably.
Tonight’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered stream involved an unexpected disease, nearly an hour of painfully slow walking, some troublesome ghosts, and considerably more dungeon exploration than intended. We were supposed to be starting the main quest, but you all know what happens when I find somewhere interesting to explore!
🏰 About the Game
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered takes us back to Cyrodiil, the enormous fantasy province at the heart of one of Bethesda’s most memorable open-world RPGs.
With the Emperor assassinated and mysterious Oblivion Gates threatening the realm, we’re tasked with finding the heir to the throne and confronting the forces of Mehrunes Dagon.
Of course, there’s much more to discover than the main story. Ancient ruins, dangerous dungeons, guilds, towns, and countless side quests are scattered across the landscape. It’s exactly the sort of game where I can spend hours exploring without getting anywhere near the quest I’m supposed to be completing.
🗺️ Where We Are in the Journey
This is Episode 4, and we’ve already established that we’re not particularly good at sticking to our objectives.
We’ve escaped the Imperial Prison and received our instructions to find the Emperor’s heir, but that’s about as far as we’ve progressed with the main story. Last time, we ended up touring the Imperial City instead, investigating its different districts and generally getting distracted.
Tonight’s plan was to finish looking around and finally head towards our objective.
We also had a slight rejigglement of the streaming schedule. Our usual Saturday Bethesda night moved to Thursday because Saturday, 7 November, is N7 Day. I’ll be joining the worldwide Mass Effect community playthrough and protest concerning EA, BioWare, and the future of Mass Effect 5. As many of you know, Mass Effect is my absolute favourite game ever, so I definitely wanted to take part.
⚔️ What Happens in This Episode
We started in the Imperial City Market District, exactly where we left off during the previous stream. The plan was to finish exploring the city and then finally get on with finding the heir to the throne. We had a little wander around the streets to see what shops were available, although we didn’t actually go inside any of them. I was mainly interested in seeing what was there for future reference.
Naturally, I spotted an entrance to the sewers and decided we should investigate. Unfortunately, this particular entrance turned out to be a dead end. There was a door that appeared to open from the other side, but I couldn’t find a mechanism to operate it, so we headed back out.
From there, we continued into the Elven Gardens District, which was another section of the Imperial City we hadn’t properly explored. We had a rummage around the streets before discovering another sewer grate. This is also where we lost a sizeable chunk of the evening to what we’re going to call technical issues!
This second sewer system was considerably more interesting. There were multiple interconnected passages, different underground areas, and doors leading into other sections of the sewers. We started exploring all the routes, investigating anything that looked promising and gradually travelling further away from where we’d entered.
Unfortunately, while fighting some of the creatures down there, we apparently picked up Swamp Fever from a crab.
Now, normally, picking up a disease in one of these games isn’t particularly exciting. Unfortunately, this one reduced our Strength, which also determines how much weight we can carry. Our maximum carrying capacity dropped by approximately one hundred points, instantly leaving us completely overcucumbered.
We’d been collecting plenty of loot, and the only way to move normally would have been to throw away virtually everything we’d gathered. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen!
I started searching through the inventory for anything that might cure us. We had various potions, including ones for curing ailments and restoring health, alongside a collection of mushrooms, flowers, and other ingredients we’d picked up during our travels. I tried consuming practically everything that looked remotely useful, hoping that something would remove the disease.
Unfortunately, nothing worked.
That left us with the rather unpleasant prospect of walking all the way out of the sewers at an incredibly slow pace.
Fifty Minutes of Being Overcucumbered
What followed was approximately fifty minutes of trying to escape from the underground passages while barely being able to move.
Initially, I wanted to get back to the Market District because I thought there might be a shop where we could buy a potion to cure the disease. Unfortunately, we’d travelled so far through the sewer system that getting back there wasn’t particularly straightforward.
We tried using the map to work out which passages connected to which areas, but that involved travelling back through several sections we’d already explored. Some routes ended at locked doors, others took us into different parts of the sewers, and occasionally we found ourselves right back where we’d started.
All of this was happening while our character shuffled along at an absolutely horrendous pace.
At least it gave us plenty of time to chat!
One of our newer viewers asked why my stream looked like it was being filmed through an old camcorder. That led to an explanation of the CCTV-style frame I’ve used for years, which originally came from a scene I was recording for one of my old Minecraft videos.
I’ve been meaning to replace that frame for approximately eight years. I’ll get around to it eventually!
Of course, with my broken hip in real life and the fact that I can’t walk particularly quickly anyway, I explained that the gameplay was actually a live camera feed. I had a GoPro attached to my head and was physically walking through a holodeck recreation of Oblivion.
That’s definitely canon to the channel now.
Chat was also keeping itself entertained. Mr Smith requested another cheese-themed jukebox song, Rox mentioned being lactose intolerant, and that resulted in a conversation about how somebody who lacks toes manages to walk. Apparently, the answer is very carefully.
Meanwhile, Aida continued bringing up Gary’s missing potatoes, and the cheese-related nonsense carried on around us. At least everyone had something to do while we slowly tried to find the exit.
Eventually, we emerged from the sewers back into the Elven Gardens District. Unfortunately, we still couldn’t move at anything approaching a reasonable speed, so we needed to find somewhere that could cure our disease.
Gary suggested looking for an altar or Wayshrine, which seemed like a much better idea than continuing to search for potions.
We headed through the Talos Plaza District, where I vaguely remembered there being some sort of shrine. We investigated the area around the dragon monument, but couldn’t find what we were looking for.
We also asked Aida, who suggested that the Shrine of Talos was somewhere just outside the Imperial City. I wasn’t entirely certain where that was, but I did remember seeing a Wayshrine somewhere near the road leading away from the city.
So we slowly made our way through the city gates, intending to cross the bridge and continue searching.
Fortunately, just outside the gates, I spotted a Wayshrine down the slope to our right. We carefully walked over to it, activated the Wayshrine of Julianos, and finally managed to cure ourselves of the disease.
We could run again!
After spending so much of the evening barely moving, that was a very welcome improvement.
With the disease removed, we could finally fast travel back to Battlehorn Castle and sort ourselves out properly.
We unloaded a substantial amount of equipment into our storage chest, keeping the things we thought might actually be useful. We also visited the castle’s blacksmith and repaired our armour and weapons. I suspect I paid to repair a few things that we immediately put into storage, but at that point I just wanted everything sorted.
We also slept so we could level up, and I immediately put additional points into Strength in the hope of improving our carrying capacity. It didn’t increase by a particularly impressive amount, but every little bit helps when you’re determined to collect everything you find.
Back on the Road… Briefly
With our equipment repaired and our inventory under control, we fast travelled to the Wawnet Inn, on the other side of the bridge from the Imperial City.
The intention was to travel southwest, following the roads and visiting the towns along the way as we finally made some progress towards our main objective.
We hadn’t been travelling particularly long when I spotted another dungeon entrance near Lake Rumare. I could also hear the distinctive sound of Nirnroot growing somewhere along the shoreline.
Naturally, we needed to investigate.
We headed inside and started fighting our way through the dungeon, encountering skeletons and exploring the different chambers. It was also a good opportunity to remind ourselves just how frustrating Oblivion’s lockpicking system can be.
We managed to open a couple of locks successfully, but for most of them we were snapping lockpick after lockpick. I really don’t get along with this particular mechanic, and I’m very pleased that Bethesda introduced a much better system in Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
Then we encountered our first ghost.
Unfortunately, our normal weapons didn’t seem to have any effect on it, which meant we needed to find another way to attack.
That involved opening the menus because I’d completely forgotten which button was used to cast spells, along with what spells we actually had available.
Luckily, we had a basic flame spell, so I equipped that and added it to our quick-selection wheel.
The ghost was attacking us with what appeared to be some sort of frost magic. Fortunately, while I was trying to work out the controls, I happened to be standing at an angle where its attacks kept hitting a nearby stone object instead of us. I think it was a sarcophagus, although it might just have been a table.
Once we were ready, I adopted the same strategy I’ve used in plenty of other games: keep moving in a circle, try to keep something between us and the enemy, and fire off a few flames whenever our magic regenerated.
It wasn’t particularly quick, but it worked, and we eventually defeated the ghost.
With that dungeon cleared, we headed back outside and continued along the road towards our destination.
Then I noticed the entrance to Fort Virtue.
Obviously, we had to go inside.
Fort Virtue was considerably larger, with several connected dungeon areas to explore and more ghost enemies waiting for us. Fortunately, now that we’d worked out how to use our flame spell, we were much better prepared to deal with them.
Chat also suggested that silver weapons could damage ghosts, which reminded me of the original Witcher game, where you had separate swords for different types of enemies.
I enjoyed the story in that game when we streamed it a few years ago, but I found several of its mechanics incredibly frustrating. The silver and normal sword system seemed to make sense initially, but later in the game I felt that the distinction became much less clear. The crafting and inventory interfaces weren’t particularly enjoyable either.
That also reminded me of some of the final boss fights from our Witcher playthrough. I think one of those streams continued until approximately three in the morning because we were stuck fighting an enemy in a large circular room.
The only method I could get to work was running around in circles, waiting for our magic to regenerate, turning around to fire a single flame attack, and repeating the process until the boss eventually died.
If you haven’t seen those streams, they’re definitely worth investigating, particularly the final couple of episodes.
Back in Fort Virtue, we continued exploring the different sections, fighting through the enemies and collecting whatever useful equipment we could find. I briefly thought we’d reached our first proper death loop of the evening, but that particular experience was still waiting for us further along the road.
Eventually, we finished investigating Fort Virtue and headed outside again.
More Shrines, More Distractions
We actually started travelling west towards our destination, but it wasn’t long before something else caught my attention.
This time, it was an Ayleid Well.
After our earlier experience with Swamp Fever, I thought it would be sensible to activate it just in case we’d managed to pick up another disease somewhere along the way.
Nearby, I also noticed the Shrine of Clavicus Vile, which obviously needed investigating.
We wandered over and spoke to the people gathered there, discovering that progressing further with the shrine apparently required an offering of five hundred gold.
I was fairly confident that we didn’t have that much money available, so we decided to leave the shrine alone for the moment. We can always return when we’ve accumulated a little more gold.
During our travels, one of our newer viewers also suggested that we should be casting spells regularly while walking around, as that would help increase our magical skills.
That seems like a sensible thing to remember for future streams, along with using Sneak more frequently. Gary had also mentioned that he’d been levelling his Sneak skill simply by travelling around the map while crouched.
There are plenty of skills we could be improving while we explore, particularly given how much time I spend wandering between locations.
Our First Proper Death Loop
We eventually reached another location further west, where we were greeted by several rather unfriendly characters outside who immediately started casting spells at us.
After dealing with them, we headed inside and discovered another substantial dungeon with multiple areas to investigate.
We worked our way through the passages, fighting enemies and exploring the rooms, until we reached an area containing two particularly powerful mages.
Unfortunately, these were a little more challenging than the enemies we’d encountered previously. I suspect we were slightly under-levelled for this particular encounter.
Our first attempt involved going straight in and attacking them, which didn’t end particularly well.
We died.
Rather than repeatedly trying exactly the same approach, I decided to change tactics.
The mages were positioned beyond a doorway, so I opened the door just far enough to attract their attention and then retreated into the smaller entrance area. The idea was to separate them so that we didn’t have to fight both at the same time.
Fortunately, it worked.
We managed to draw the first mage through the doorway and deal with him individually. As an additional benefit, when he died, the creatures he’d summoned disappeared as well.
That made things considerably easier.
We repeated the same process with the second mage, drawing him into the entrance area and taking him down without having to deal with both enemies attacking us simultaneously.
With the mages defeated, we could finally investigate the larger chamber properly.
There was a reasonable amount of loot scattered around, along with several prison cells and a collection of switches mounted nearby.
Naturally, I assumed the switches were there to open the cells.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite what they did.
I started activating the switches and moving around the room, only to notice that our health was disappearing rather rapidly. At first, I couldn’t work out what was happening because there didn’t appear to be another enemy attacking us.
It turned out that the switches were controlling poisonous gas around the cells, and we were standing far too close to it.
That explained why we were suddenly dying!
I tried to work out how to turn the gas off, but couldn’t find a reliable way to make the area safe. In the end, we decided to keep our distance from the cells and concentrate on collecting the loot we could reach without poisoning ourselves again.
With the dungeon explored and the immediate dangers dealt with, we finally headed back outside.
One More Cave? Perhaps Not!
By this stage, we’d collected another substantial amount of equipment, and our inventory was getting rather full again.
As everyone knows, we’re good little loot goblins. If there’s something worth collecting, there’s a fairly good chance it’s going into our inventory whether we actually need it or not.
So I decided it was probably time to return to Battlehorn Castle, where we could sort out everything we’d collected and prepare for another level-up.
I did briefly consider continuing towards the town we were originally supposed to visit. We’d already spent the evening making very little progress towards the actual story, and I thought perhaps we could at least get a little closer before finishing.
Then I passed Greenmead Cave.
Naturally, my first thought was that we should go inside and investigate.
But that was when I realised we needed to draw the line somewhere. If I continued investigating every dungeon, cave, shrine, and unusual building we encountered along the road, we’d never actually reach our destination.
There’s simply too much to explore in this game, and I can’t keep getting distracted by absolutely everything we discover.
Well, I can, but it doesn’t do much for our progress through the story!
Throughout the evening, chat had been busy with its own entertainment as well. Gary managed to win one of our Hunger Games rounds, while CheeseCollector had a rather unsuccessful attempt at dealing with a Venusaur during one of the Pokémon hunting events.
Gary also generously gifted a subscription to Sonic, and we had plenty of conversations ranging from Harry Potter and Stargate to upcoming games and what everyone had been playing recently.
We also spent some time discussing Saturday’s special Mass Effect stream. I’ll be starting a fresh save in Mass Effect Legendary Edition on Steam, rather than using one of the Xbox playthroughs we’ve already completed.
Since I’ve previously done extensive 100% playthroughs of the series, the plan this time is to concentrate on progressing through the main story rather than exploring every conversation and side quest. We might even try playing Renegade for a change.
I’ve also been continuing the enormous project of rewriting my older gameplay blogs so that they properly tell the stories of what happened during each episode. There are nearly three thousand posts to work through, including our older Mass Effect adventures, so that’s going to keep me busy for quite some time.
For Oblivion, though, we eventually settled on returning to Battlehorn Castle and leaving the inventory sorting and levelling up for the beginning of next week’s stream.
That’s where we finished the evening.
We haven’t really made any progress with finding the Emperor’s heir, but we’ve explored several dungeons, discovered how to deal with ghosts, survived our first proper encounters with more powerful mages, and learned that becoming overcucumbered while carrying a disease is something we should definitely try to avoid in future.
We also finished the stream by raiding RememberMoll, who was playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Next week, Oblivion returns to its normal Saturday Bethesda night, and hopefully we’ll actually manage to continue towards our main objective.
Although, given how many unexplored locations we’ve already discovered, I’m not making any promises!
🎬 Watch the Episode
If you missed the stream, you can catch the complete adventure, including our remarkably slow sewer escape and encounters with the undead, in Episode 4 – Saving Cyrodiil Between Unnecessary Side Quests.
You can also explore the Oblivion Remastered Series Playlist or visit my YouTube Channel for more gameplay adventures.
If you’re enjoying the series, remember to give the video a like, leave a comment, and subscribe!
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The Oblivion Gates aren’t going anywhere, and apparently neither is my habit of investigating every doorway.
Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube, where chat can offer advice, suggest completely different things to do, and occasionally help us escape from our own terrible inventory decisions.
Next time we return to Cyrodiil, we’ll hopefully make some actual progress towards finding the Emperor’s heir!
🌐 Community & Links
There’s plenty happening beyond the Imperial City, whether you’re looking for more livestreams, gaming adventures, music, or ways to support the channel. Here’s where you can find everything.
Live — Follow the continuing adventures and join the chaos as it happens:
Community — Join the conversation and keep up with our adventures between streams:
Socials — Follow along for updates, videos, and whatever we discover next:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Music — Discover the music accompanying our adventures:
Support — Help keep the streams, videos, and creative projects going:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — Explore my other projects, services, and adventures:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🦀 Cured of Crabs, Still Avoiding the Main Quest
So, after all that exploring, we’re back at Battlehorn Castle, ready to organise our inventory and level up when Oblivion returns to its normal Saturday Bethesda slot next week.
We may not have progressed the main story, but we explored several dungeons, discovered how to deal with ghosts, survived a particularly unpleasant disease, and learned to be considerably more careful around suspicious prison-cell switches.
Before then, we’ll return to Red Dead Redemption 2 on Friday, where we’re just starting Chapter Five, followed by our special Mass Effect N7 Day stream on Saturday.
I’ve also been working through the enormous project of rewriting older gameplay blogs, including Alan Wake and Mass Effect 2. There are nearly three thousand posts to revisit, so there’s plenty still to do!
We finished the evening by raiding RememberMoll, who was playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Thanks to everyone who joined us, offered advice, gifted subscriptions, and kept us entertained during that incredibly long sewer escape.
Hopefully, next time we’ll actually get somewhere with the main quest.
Although I wouldn’t count on it.
— Dr Ravenholm
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