Evaluating Oblivion's notable side quests + The Shivering Isles

So I was working on something a little different for my next video, but then this happened. I'm really happy that people enjoyed it, but I also noticed a lot of people saying that the

side

quests

in Oblivion are where the game really shines. with the dlc of course, I've definitely played Shivering Isles a few times in the past, I don't remember exactly what happens in it, but if there's one thing I haven't done it's the

side

quests

, so for better or worse. I'm going to go through the Shivering Isles and some of the game's most

notable

side quests completely blind, at least on the side quest front, and give my impression of it all and how it affects Oblivion in general.

I apologize in advance if I didn't accomplish a certain quest or set of quests, but I feel like I covered a good period here, if you remember, in my last video I still loved Oblivion for what it is, but I came to the conclusion that it wasn't as Well, since I remembered it when I was a teenager, I'll let you know now that this video will definitely have spoilers for all the missions I cover. I know a couple people were a little upset that I didn't say that directly. last time, so here you are anyway, let's dive back into this.

Know that I'll start with the side quests because I know the Shivering Isles are good and I want to save them for the end and the first side quest I jumped into. It was this painting, basically, this lady wants you to find out what happened to her cabin, wait a second, okay, this lady wants you to find out what happened to her husband and that's what you do when you get to this guy's painting, he He explains to you that he's a bit of a fraud and the way he paints so well is through a magic brush.

This mission is really cool. I love the painted look, even if the goal is pretty simple. Basically, you have to beat up six trolls that Naruto, you and recover the super brush from the thief. I don't actually think you have to beat the trolls, but same difference. I just like how they give you turpentine to hurt them more. It's a nice touch. My only drawback I would say would be. that music is anyway. I received a cool apron as a reward, but decided I needed a nap after that adventure, so I headed over to the inflated float to get some rest.

When I woke up, I was greeted by a message explaining that I was now in the sea, which is kind of exciting. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's definitely disappointing, but it's a good idea nonetheless. This guy was hanging around outside my room and starts spouting off about some mugging. and how he's only working with three others and all that, now this dialogue definitely seemed unique, so I thought that if I gave him a few different answers, there might have been a second outcome here, so when I turned to the next bandit I had helped to kidnap On the ship I tried to tell her that I was sent to help her which she went crazy and then I tried to tell her that I was sent to help her boss and she of course asks you why the guy downstairs sent you to you and your only one.

The option is that he's dead, so much for bragging, anyway, the same deal happened with the third of the Three Stooges and then I was sent to the big boss, who seemed pretty dumb, but because of my correct answers to his investigation, I actually gave up, this did the rest. All the conversations have a purpose, but in the end they made me wish I had infiltrated the gang and maybe tried to steal the treasure made from them. It would have been so much fun to side with the bad guys only to have the innkeeper tell us that the treasure doesn't actually exist, please leave me alone.

I guess you're wondering what I did with lene. The Imperial City authorities took her off the ship as soon as we docked. I went to take another nap, although this one was for a different purpose. Do you remember the quest giver from the Wizarding Guild? Could you could you couldn't you? I'm not going to say most of these things correctly so I'm sorry anyway she was losing her mind so I assumed it was one of the main Kreutz playing prank on the other but apparently it was because her close friend was in a coma, well, a kind of magic coma.

Think of it as exploring a new land, but a land inside your own mind. I shudder to think what happened to him there. This quest is Damn Awesome, you enter this guy's dream and have to go through four tests that belong to different virtues. This was probably one of the only missions in the entire game that made me wait. Is this a vanilla

oblivion

mission? Has anyone modified this? How cool, I loved every part of it. I almost don't want to spoil it, but the game is twelve years old and that's what I do, so after you've passed these four tests, you bring Hennessey back to your senses and he draws you in.

From the initial dream of him, let me introduce you to something that can help you on your travels, whereby you wake up naked. Could I be standing next to you for some reason and awkwardly walk out of the house after your third consecutive nap in my next stage of my life? nap quest 2006 I went through anvil and bought a mansion. I just needed a little more privacy after that last nap experience. I was told it was a bargain but I honestly have no idea how the economy works in this game or in real life. I headed to this creepy mansion and like any good horror movie protagonist, I made a stupid decision to advance the plot, of course a new pack of Scooby-Doo ghosts appeared from the walls and proceeded to ruin my dream. again.

I stopped talking so the Haunted Manors in the guy who sold it to me left town so I go look for him and he comes at me super aggressive like you're getting out of there alive huh so you think I'm responsible . I guess you're right. This style used to belong to my grandfather Loren Boehner, but it immediately softened and became very useful, so I didn't really know what to do with it, but it came to help me purge the ghost by removing the family blood seal from the wall or Anyone who Whatever character I'm playing, he gets fooled by this skeleton with a really cool voice, which, let's be honest, I have to be an idiot to listen to this guy go on and on about how he feels now and just believe him after he does it. .

I sacrificed some individuals, so I'm making a new narrative about this. I am one of the most powerful people in the world. I just want to sleep in my mansion without a damn witcher problem hanging in the basement, so I restore. him so he could make some cool wind chimes with his ribs for the front porch 6 of 10 Then I headed to Coral where I was told that the daughter of a merchant there was missing and was last seen and Hector, this mission was over. It has a lot of potential to be really creepy, but I think it ultimately failed in that regard.

You show up in this small, half-burned town and all the residents completely despise you for seemingly no reason other than being a stranger, this follows you everywhere and it's actually really disturbing when you go to confront the merchant who the girl was supposed to I would deliver your products. You're giving me I don't know what you're talking about, that's my horse back and go, so the average DMV. experience, after exploring a little more, you find a resident who is willing to tell you what happened and explains that the girl you are there for will be sacrificed to bring back something called the deep ones.

Now this is the height of creepy. This mission is sad because I feel like it really failed to deliver this new information. Basically, you go down one of the many trapdoors in the city into a cave system below and that's where the merchant girl is being held if it happens. to go down the door I made, she's practically to your right, you steal and leave into the night, that's all, so I decided to reload and do this the hard way and see if there's a better story here. Well, maybe there was, I mean, if being surrounded by shirtless guys is a better story for you and I recommend this mission.

I just wish the deep ones had been revealed as creatures you could actually fight. I found myself in Bruma for the next one. quest because that's where I was told to go look for it, it was here that I was sent on a mission to recover a very eco artifact called a draconian madstone, let me tell you the name sounds better than it is because it just stops everything. poison damage, I know I said that like it was nothing, because it doesn't even do what it's supposed to do, but I still honestly expected some kind of increased damage.

Berserker type effect, she's pretty much what she seems to me anyway. The beginning of this mission is quite interesting, like the previous one, they tell you about a battle that was fought long ago between the Akaviri and Sara Dale and how the Akaviri relied on a message to be delivered to the battlefront. Long story short, the Scout sent to deliver the message had his spine broken in the dust by the ogres guarding the pale paths, causing the Akaviri to ultimately lose. This is where you come in. The draconian mad stone was said to be buried with the echo.

Very soldiers, but no one. I knew where the pale pass was, so your test of walking to every bit that the Akaviri explorer traveled through using his rudimentary map that he drew landmarks on is actually a pretty clear way to move things along for a long time. , even for someone like me who likes to be told where to go when you go through Spriggans's ogre- and bear-filled cave, you come out the other end towards the long-forgotten cube passage, which doesn't actually reappear in the map. Super cool setup after going through ogre battle 64. You get to the old ruins full of skeletons and that sucks.

You reach the end and deliver the Scout's orders all those years ago, allowing the Akaviri soldiers to rest. It's a bland ending to an interesting start and I just wished the ending didn't remind me of the main quest where you have to put the four Knights to rest. The last real side quest I decided to take took me just north of the Imperial City to a town called Ales and as always, I went all the way to take as many naps as they had available only to find this guy telling me that all The damn city is invisible.

You might be wondering why you can't see me, so in order to sleep I needed to visit the wizard who did this to the city, luckily he was right at the end of the road so I visited him after killing some invisible animals, then proceed to introduce himself and explains to me that the villagers have been a headache for him all the time. As he experimented, this experimentation eventually resulted in the population of Ales Wells becoming invisible along with him. This mission was short. The wizard gives you a scroll to reverse the spell and a ring to protect you from any side effects and that's it.

I can't right now. I fail to do something I generally want, which gets right to the point. It honestly seems like it could have been trying to go get these ingredients from this cave by fighting these creatures and that would have sucked, but it also could have been done. There was something where you accidentally turned villagers into chickens and then made them small when you tried again and then two nirn routes until they finally turned back to normal. It wouldn't have added anything, but it would have been a bit of fun overall. I'd say this mission, along with most of the others I've played, would have been a lot more fun if I'd been completely caught off guard while exploring, but in the end they turned out to be legendary for me personally, plus could I dream?

The quest and the painting quest, of course, were definitely awesome, regardless of whether there were a few last things I wanted to accomplish before facing the Shivering Isles, but they don't count as regular side quests or maybe they do. I'm not so sure. Look, I've only done two Daedric Artifact quests before. Molag Bal and Europa assure me that it was the same old type of quest objective and involved you killing some of his followers who were vampires in a cave. It's really a shame because this. It's the quest the game points you toward when it comes to trying to get a Daedric artifact for Martin during the main quest and it's what personally turned me away from doing any of the others.

The only other one I did was Molag Bal. Since I wanted his mace for my initial game, his mission was definitely more interesting as the Prince had you try to mess with a guy who was considered a genuine hero and a good person until he finally breaks you and kills you with a cursed mace in this mission. He definitely made me reconsider Daedric Shrines as a whole, but I wanted to try to conclude my previous video on that point and ultimately ruled out Daedric Shrines are Half-Interesting Sidequests. I was so wrong that I'm not kidding when I say that I set out to do four of them because I just wanted to cover them in general and I ended up doing ten in a row just for the sheer entertainment of it.I got from them, if you hadn't already discovered it.

I'm really the type of player. that he plays a game and likes to be told what to do. I know that's generally frowned upon in games like these, but that's just who I am, whether in the form of side quests I get when running around town or just looking for guild quests that I know exist. I tend not to explore as often as I should. These sanctuaries have made me completely reconsider that philosophy. Things that seemed normal like going to grab this or coming back from a wizard and a tower turned into a half-expanding nightmare. cyrodiil half plain of

oblivion

and it was amazing that you were generally wreaking havoc on quests tailored to each Daedric Prince's personality type, whether it was extinguishing the light of priests trying to purify an area full of zealots hunting and killing the only unicorn in the game comes to families in a village to massacre each other after killing their leaders and planting evidence, free the ogres from slavery, eliminate a gang of necro 8, now that not that one who breaks into a dinner suddenly removing the everyone's clothes in articles including mine or getting a lot of superstitious.

People believe the world is ending. I had a lot of fun with almost all of these, sure there were some mediocre ones and I didn't do three of them for various reasons, but believe me when I say these were up there. with some of my favorite guild quests in terms of pure entertainment value, but enough about daedric shrines, let's finally get to the Shivering Isles, now full disclosure. I started the DLC earlier when I was trying to include it in my last video so you can see some. it changes graphically and as for the equipment, just letting him out when approaching the giant portal in the middle of the lake is always so daunting that you have a guard sitting there trying to warn people away, explaining that whatever is on the other side of the portal was driving people crazy. and that they would not return mentally intact, ignoring this warning of course brings you face to face with Haskell, faithful servant of the shale daedric prince Garth, after listening to Haskell and agreeing to try to become Garth's champion. happy city of Pass Wall, which seems to be the entrance to the rest of the kingdom, unfortunately, there seems to be a tremendous creature guarding the gate absolutely called the Guardian, it is almost impossible to kill it according to everyone except for a crazy DeviantART enthusiast, Jared Ice Veins.

I'm frozen beans, have you ever wondered why things look better without this skin? With the help of it, you can fill the giant, leaving you with the choice between two kingdoms, both leading to the same place, albeit with different tourist routes. Of them, mania is described as a place full of bright colors, wild life and ecstasies, and while the citizens are maniacs, the other, dementia, is described as a dark and sticky place, full of swamps, decay and citizens paranoid and negative, no matter how clear these concepts may seem. like they could have really dialed in the colors and theme of each side, don't get me wrong, they are definitely two separate sides that contrast in many ways, but whenever I think about the realm of dementia, I picture dark shades of purples and blues . and grays, and every time I think about the realm of mania, I again imagine vibrant yellows, oranges, greens, what they have going for them is not bad.

I just wish they turned it up to 11 anyway, dredging this path eventually leads you to a new her. central center where resides Shale Gorath I Shale Gaurav Shia Gorath Prince of madness and other things. I'm not talking about them. It's here that you finally meet the man in charge and he quickly assigns you to get a Dillian to operate the Zilean purpose again. It's basically punishing the unworthy instead of the guardian you killed, but we'll get to that, aha, dummy, the book has no pictures, I can't wait for you to read it now, can I? On my way out, I met this man here.

I didn't pay him any attention at all when I played before, but I decided to humor the guy before heading out to get Dillian up and running again. When you meet him after dark, he tells you that he wants you to kill him. I need you. to kill me, this naturally took me by surprise, but I assumed it was for some nonsensical reason, since the citizens here are not the most logical group to get married in that hall before, so I listened to him and he continues to explain to me. that he hasn't felt like himself in a long time and that he has no friends and that no one seems to notice that the happiness of this world has almost completely run out.

I don't know why this caught me off guard. Too bad, but he went on to explain that if he committed suicide, he would basically reappear on the hill as if nothing had happened and would be tormented for eternity, so I agreed to his request and pushed him off this ledge, I can't just jump. I don't want to end up on the hill but I hope that one day maybe a big gust of wind will come and push me so I can finish it all. He told me that he should collect my reward at his house with the key to his corpse inside.

In the jewelry box there was a single ring called the ring of happiness and a final note from him. The note details how he has felt horrible for a long time and that he was grateful that someone had finally killed him and that a wizard had given him the ring because he reminded her of his dead son. I'm not sure this game has cleared my mind any more than during this mission. I don't want to go into it too much further, but it's amazing when a game can make you stop like that and think. I just never expected it to be forgotten about all games after that little moral crisis I went through, aka the time video games became too real.

I continued with the civilian. Your first task is to restore the power of the joint by eliminating all these goblin shaman guys. and placing the crystals they stole into their proper places once all is said and done, the real fun of this mission begins. You're now a dungeon master, and like any good dungeon master besides Matt Mercer, you're trying to kill the group as best you can. As you might think, I'm not lying when I say this could have been the full questline reward for me. I'd be totally satisfied if you can forcefully overwhelm them or mentally break them every time and it's great when you're done reloading to see what happens with each option.

You are cut down by a wandering group of Regice, also known as the Knights of Order. After sending them, you report to Shell Gareth, who didn't seem surprised that he continued to explain that to you. jyggalag, the daedric prince of order, is the author of this encounter. His goal seems to be to destroy this kingdom and put an end to its chaotic nature to teach you the importance of the kingdom remaining intact. You must meet the Duke of Mania and the Duchess. of dementia and are in favor of it. I started with the Duchess, who immediately told me that I shouldn't talk to anyone and that then no one could be trusted and that she was being actively pursued by a traitor, which sounds crazy, as does everything in this kingdom. then you're given the role of Inquisitor, which means you're supposed to get answers from people, which means I don't know anything about a conspiracy.

This search is great. I loved how strangely unorthodox he is and fits the role perfectly. of dementia into the realm of madness, you're running around yelling at people about a conspiracy and they keep telling you they don't know what the hell you're talking about, you call them liars and this zappy guy comes flying around the corner he just smokes them with enough power to make them feel like Ben Franklin's lightning kite. It's amazing now that I said it, I honestly thought we would torture some people until we finally put it on some random innocent person to satisfy the Duchess as it turns out there is someone plotting against her and you gather the evidence necessary to convict them before they send them to surrender lightning for a SAP and a half after this, the Duke of Mania sent me to recover his great chalice of drugs.

He basically explained to me that when you ingest and drink from the Chalice, your world becomes a much better and brighter place. This basically involves retrieving a chalice at the end of a long series of tunnels with insectoid creatures called Elektra in order to access and stay. In these tunnels you needed to ingest a spoonful of vile do that came from Elektra themselves, this causes you to become addicted to the substance, creating a feeling of euphoria when you are taking it and causing terrible side effects when you are going through withdrawals. Overall, the message and theme of this mission is unique and interesting, but the actual navigation through these tunnels takes too long in my opinion.

Upon your return, you are taught the importance of addiction and what it has to do with how mania works both ways. He now understands both dementia and mania and is ready to report to Shale Gorath, who quickly tasks him with relighting the great torch hanging above the new shaft. When you arrive at the site to perform this task, you discover that the Mania and Dementia soldiers are in a small war with each other and you can choose which side to help, whatever the outcome. They bathe you in flames and then send you back to New Shale, then you choose which side to light on and are rewarded with an outfit. that reflects that choice, the citizens of New Shia also react to your choice accordingly, which is a nice touch.

The clouds don't smell bad, they taste like butter and tears. From here, Shale Gorath tasks you with taking the Duke of Mania's place. or the duchess of dementia for the duke you must poison him with an overdose of a powerful drug that he ingests every night for the duchess you must murder her directly and cut out her heart which sounds more fun to you the correct answer is poisoning which implies that you follow the good servant of the Duke to the underground silo filled with green pits and then sneak into the kitchen area to poison his food.

Yes, I must attend to it. The wrong answer is here, where I'm trying my best to sneak around and it doesn't matter because even if I actually lose the guards, they still come running to my exact location anyway and I'm really starting to resent the combat system of this game. , but I liked the dementia reward better anyway, so I stuck with it. You want an escort, Lord, I think they like pain. I expected the duchess to go crazy and call Sheogorath a fool would be unique to her and a different story would be split or if you had killed her, but the duke did.

The same almost word for word, although worded a little more amusingly after this little confrontation. You are sent to the sidelines to fight off incoming invaders. You want to hear something annoying. This search sucks. Look at this. Look at this. This is not fun again. It really started to sour Oblivion's combat for me. I was never a big fan of it, but I never cared too much for it, but this particular mission really started to make me realize how bad the combat is in this game. I tried my best to ignore it and try to focus on the actual story parts of the RPG, the combat really starts to sour when you're forced to fight multiple enemies of the same type in order to progress with the mission.

I did not care. way before because my playstyle was basically running and jumping past everything I didn't need to fight and I couldn't do that in this particular scenario because I needed to talk to this soldier to advance the story, but I do. I have to admit that compared to the base game, the dungeons in Shivering Isles are a delight in terms of design, some of them are still not that good, some of them last too long, but most of them are very fun to look at and navigate from my experience, this includes this mission and the next mission where you try to rebuild a goalkeeper in a mission.

This one has you go through interesting level designs with interesting monster designs. I mean, look at this guy. I mean, he doesn't do much more than watch. Anyway, he has some sick turns, once you're done you'll be able to build your own meat and he's the best guy any parent could ask for. This was a truly amazing quest reward. I know a lot of people need to have something of material value to justify a quest but man give me something cool like that and I'm really excited to finish these quests for real most of the time I get useless trinkets that I'm not going to use anyway when you get back .

To bombard Gorath again, he finally reveals to you the plot twist that only he can deliver: that he is jyggalag and that he will be the one to destroy his own kingdom with the Knights of the order when he finally becomes a gigolo again. Gray March begins to appear in order and does not become jyggalag and devastates the entire kingdom. You know, when you hear this Daedric Prince say these things, you tend to say oh damn, dude, what do we do when I hear myself say it? I go, what, what, what. Anyway, what the hell did I just say?

You're basically trying to stop Shale Gorath and his alter ego from destroying his own kingdom, soYou go to stop the order once again on another front, but when you return, Shale Gorath tells you that the time has come. increases as his manic and goofy demeanor changes to become a more serious and thoughtful lion which was no fun at all, then he performs one of these classic maneuvers and cleans up, this leaves you with Haskell who tells you that there may be hope . However, they tell you that you have been trained to take the place of the mad gods and that if you are able to construct a new staff of gorath shale then you will be able to rule the islands in their place and hopefully stop their destruction like the newly minted jyggalag. reborn, so go.

Go get a stick from the same area of ​​the water temple where you fight your clone in Ocarina of Time or in the grand palace, if you're old school then you grab that stick and this kind lady kindly donates her eye to you because you place the eye on the stick and that's how you make a staff, except you have a blessing, but the problem here is that the newly found logs, Ally, the former Duke of Mania, has infiltrated the tree that this blessing comes from , thus limiting his blessing. capabilities I think that was when I started to realize my biggest problem personally with Shivering Isles: the dungeons are designed much better than the base game, but they have a tendency to drag on for too long, I particularly noticed this the most in my opinion.

With the quests where you ventured into the trees, the main problem here is that I started to get the idea that the Shivering Isles aren't as unique as I remember them being because I felt like I was trapped in a lot of the dungeons. for much longer than I had anticipated, it really made me yearn and desire more unique and interesting landscapes, especially after the quest for the Daedric shrine of Vera Mina. It seems like the kingdom of the Mad God of all places should have had the most interesting and varied types of maps in the world. throughout the game, random voids with different colors that venture through a seemingly normal temple door and emerge onto a snowy mountain bridge in one room and then cross that bridge and find themselves inside a volcano and the next nonsense, you know, but maybe it's a bit stereotypical.

I'm not really sure. I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. I would love Shivering Isles even more after going through the entire base game and comparing it to them. I don't want to be picky without thinking. but I also don't want to mindlessly praise him either way after you wait for these big dumb heavy idiots to open the hallway so you can clean the tree, you go back and power up your new staff. You are now treated like shale gorath and Just in Time when the order invades and tries to eliminate you. I guess I wasn't expecting too much, but I was still pretty disappointed by this fight.

The staff is really great and lets you freeze everyone so if you had stocked up on hearts. of order, so this fight is as simple as freezing everyone who pushes hearts and then fighting jyggalag, which looks like it's going to be difficult, but I think most of the common enemies in the Shivering Isles are harder, but I think that this may have been intentional. It seems like a super disappointing boss fight, but then Jyggalag appears once again telling you the story of him. Basically, jyggalag was once a powerful daedric prince who spread his order across the seas of oblivion.

Each step gave her more and more control as his forces advanced like wildfire. Soon, the other Daedric princes felt threatened by him and cursed him with madness, turning him into Shell Gorath. At the turn of each era, Jyggalag was allowed to become himself again and dominated and annihilated everything he had built as Shale Gorath, but each time. If he did, he would soon return to his demented form and the cycle would repeat itself. This was the first time he had been defeated and it was all because you had taken Sheogorath's place. Because of this, the curse had been broken and Jyggalag is. free to roam once more, in other words, a happy ending for everyone and you will also get the best reward of all.

There are a number of benefits that you are entitled to, as well as a number of duties that you must attend to. In short, radiant missions. I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised with the content I missed in Oblivion. It was nice to not only experience a lot of the content that was new to me, but also to re-experience the craziness that is Shivering Isles. There were definitely parts of both the side quests and the Islands that were a little lackluster, but I honestly have to say that this whole effort really has me hanging on both the way I play my games and the overall entertainment value of it.

Oblivion, so here's my final brief breakdown of Oblivion as a whole and I'll note that I didn't cover the order of virtuous blood, but I can confidently say it won't affect my judgment here. The main quest isn't horrible but it isn't great either. I would say that in the middle point the magician's guild is boring and not at all fun in my opinion, the arena is fun but has little depth, obviously, the thieves' guild is good, but not great for me, the fighters suffer from a very slow situation. and a tedious start, but ends spectacularly, the Dark Brotherhood reigns as king of all guild quests, without a doubt, the side quests I experienced were for the most part decent, with a few standout star quests that led to the rest, the Daedric shrines were almost all phenomenal. and Shivering Isles were, as always, my favorite part of the game overall.

My final assessment is that if you haven't played this game and have even a remote interest in it, pick it up when you can and mod it. Definitely modify it. If you can, if you've played the game in the past but don't remember the details, I encourage you to play it again if I didn't completely ruin it with my videos and if you didn't really enjoy it. Before I want to say that you probably don't even like it now, let's be honest, but if you want to torment yourself anyway, I say do some side quests, tour some of the Daedric shrines, visit half of the guilds and play.

Shivering Isles and that's it, man, that's it. I appreciate you guys spending another amount of time here on the adventure and I definitely want to weigh in on Skyrim and Morrowind at some point, as long as I don't get killed for them, but either. This way, I'll probably end up covering other topics from now on, so hang in there and as always, I stream sporadically on Twitch whenever my little heart desires, so you can catch me there until then, have a good conversation.