Many years ago, my friend suffered a disastrous Oblivion softlock that entirely ruined his playthrough. After stepping into a painting, he was forced to fight a group of trolls. Try as he might, he couldn't defeat them, which meant he couldn't get out of the painting. With autosaves off, he was trapped in an endless cycle of troll beatdowns that put paid to his entire campaign.
This tale of woe put me off Oblivion for years. Between the apparent ability to accidentally trap yourself in an alternate world and the imminent arrival of Skyrim, I'd heard enough that I felt no need to lose dozens of hours to The Elder Scrolls 4. But with the arrival of Oblivion Remastered, I felt it was finally time to rectify this gap in my Bethesda knowledge - and finally put right the wrong my friend had suffered.
The observant among you may recognize this painted prison as a key part of the A Brush With Death side-quest. In it, the player is tasked with finding a missing artist - who, it quickly becomes clear, has somehow entered into his own painting. Thanks to a magic paintbrush bestowed on his father by the goddess Dibella, the artist is able to create exceedingly lifelike worlds by stepping into his artwork. Unfortunately, the brush is stolen from him - a thief bashes him on the head, stuffs him inside his painting, and jumps in, painting in some trolls to help cover his tracks. Without the brush, the painter is trapped forever, but with six trolls guarding it, there's nothing he can do.
When you follow the artist into his painting, he'll tell you that the thief is already dead - his head caved in by the monsters he conjured to keep him safe. It's now your job to recover the brush, without which neither of you will ever be able to return to the real world. The only way out is to kill all the trolls, and return the brush to its master.
Paint me a word quest
If this sounds about as simple as most Oblivion sidequests, that's because it is. Your objective amounts to little more than 'kill six monsters', all of whom are so spread out that you can easily take them on one at a time. The multi-troll beatdown I'd imagined my friend suffering through all those years ago could only manifest if you ran through the painted world, aggroing all six of them at once, and surely he hadn't done that.
Deeply confused, I sought answers. 'I beat this super easy Oblivion Remastered quest today', I told him. 'Something about some trolls and a painting?' I didn't take him long to catch on, but while I made fun of his apparent ineptitude, he explained that I was forgetting a major part of the story.
I'd assumed that my friend had been critically underleveled. There was no way this could be an issue with gear - I ran through the trolls with a hand-to-hand build and some tatty light armor. Maybe he's accidentally stumbled upon the painted world far too early? In fact, almost the opposite true - my friend was far enough into the game that he'd become a vampire. But what normally should have offered a combat advantage is exactly what held him back in this quest.
There will be blood
Vampirism in Oblivion offers a powerful boost to several stats and attributes, particularly if you haven't fed for a few days. Unfortunately, if that's the case, hungry vampires will also take significant damage from sunlight - while your strength, speed, stealth, and destructive magic might all be much stronger at 100% vampirism, you'll also take eight points of damage every second that you're out in the sun.
Most of the time, that's not a problem. It's easy enough to stay indoors, wait until nightfall, or even stroll around Oblivion for a while if you want to stay in the shade. The painted world, however, is a picture, and it's one where the artist has chosen to replicate a sunny day. There are no cloudy days or starlit nights, just a perfect blue sky that will do some real damage to any vampire foolish enough to get stuck in this sun-soaked painting. Trapped in the sunlight, my friend's vampire was burned to a crisp long before he could race through all the trolls, and that meant loading an hours-old save or abandoning the playthrough all together.
It might be one of the edgiest of edge cases, but it's an Oblivion story that's (mostly) stuck with me for nearly 20 years. And as unfortunate as it might have been, it's also testament to just how effective an RPG The Elder Scrolls 4 was, even all those years ago. The series' take on vampirism was always keen to play blessing off against curse, but it's rare to see the negatives well and truly win out in that particular matchup. Oblivion might be showing its age, even in this remaster, but one thing it still nails is consequence - the freedom of its world still shines through (albeit sometimes a little too bright) and the depth of its systems remains clear. Nearly two decades after being convinced that this game really wasn't for me, I've found that not only did I never really have anything to be afraid of, but that there's more to experience here than I ever expected.
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