Oblivion Developer Explains How He Created The Goblin Wars System

With the sudden release of Oblivion Remastered, the fourth instalment in The Elder Scrolls series is back in the limelight. With this renewed attention on Oblivion comes the same 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.

Oblivion’s Rarest System

The designer of Goblin Wars, Kurt Kuhlmann, recently sat down with Eurogamer to discuss the mysterious 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 loss of their spiritual leader is too much 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 totem 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 fast-forwarding.

“There wasn’t much else like it in Oblivion,” Kuhlmann 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 kind 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 Remastered, we’ll likely see a new generation of scientists experiment with Goblin Wars.