Prolific Skyrim YouTuber Bacon_ (of I love dogs fame, among other videos) has uncovered a real fan service change in Oblivion Remastered—one where it’s naturally hard to tell whether it was intentional or not. The sessionable Khajiiti stimulant, Skooma, has effectively gotten a huge buff. The effects of Skooma now stack up to 22 times as compared to the original game’s eight.
In Oblivion, the fantasy drug temporarily boosts your speed and strength, tanks your agility, and permanently lowers your intelligence with each draught. The bonus is a massive 60 points (attributes have a cap of 100 when leveling, for context) and would stack up to eight times in the original Oblivion.
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Stacking eight Skoomas at once in Oblivion ’06 was a go-to speedrunning (and joke video) strat, with speedy players constantly slugging the narcotic to maintain running speeds nearly five times what you could manage through normal leveling. Bacon_’s discovery that the remaster lets us now stack Skooma up to 22 times, achieving a speed stat of 1,320 (over 13x the legal limit) is a real shocker.
Bacon_ managed this with a master-level Alchemy score of 100, which increases how many potions you can have active at once. There’s also a loophole in how the game counts the potions you’ve drunk that Bacon_ takes advantage of: It appears Oblivion Remastered has a separate cap for potions drunk from the inventory screen, and ones imbibed through a hotkey.
After slugging 22 Skooms, Bacon_ was able to sprint from the Imperial City to Castle Skingrad in under a minute, looking like One Punch Man’s Saitama on the track the entire way.
Comparing footage of 8 Skooms in the original game to the remaster’s 22, the land speed actually seems fairly comparable, but you’d get a lot more air from even a slight incline in classic Oblivion, resulting in huge, map-clearing jumps.
I’d chalk this up to differences between how Unreal Engine 5 handles physics, versus the primordial Havok implementation of the original. On the flip side, the 22 Skoom special in Remastered looks like it offers a far more controllable, usable sort of speed with less risk of death.
It’s hilarious in a vacuum, but allowing for more Skooma at once feels like a real treat for the fans: Skooma has long held this memetic appeal as the Elder Scrolls’ goofy fictional cat man narcotic that gives you the zoomies.
Raising the cap may have even been an intentional choice on the part of Virtuous to keep up with how much more sober and realistic the Remaster’s physics are—Tamriel’s Skooma Federal Reserve has to lower interest rates and encourage Skooma inflation in response to market conditions.
It’ll probably also have plenty of speedrun utility too—less so for Oblivion’s blink and you’ll miss it any% where Bacon_ himself took one of the first world records in the remaster last week, but more for full main quest or 100% runs that require more schlepping around the map.
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