Oblivion Remastered player picks wrong quest at wrong time, spends 100 hours and counting running around Cyrodiil afflicted with The Elder Scrolls 4's most irritating curse

An Oblivion Remastered player has spent 100 hours running around Cyrodiil with a debilitating curse, all because they picked up exactly the wrong quest right at the start of their playthrough.

Stendarr's Mercy is a quest that makes up the Knights of the Nine questline, which featured as DLC for the original release of Oblivion. For many of those OG players, it's the kind of quest that you wouldn't have undertaken until the endgame, which might have made what comes next less of an issue. But in the remaster, you can pick it up pretty easily, leading to an unfortunate situation for one player.

Over on Reddit, one player says that Stendarr's Mercy was the "very first quest" they did in the Knights of the Nine line, "and that was soon after I started my playthrough." The quest involves a mysterious curse afflicting an NPC called Kellen, which can only be 'cured' by being passed on to someone else. The player has the chance to take on the curse, freeing Kellen, but incurring a Fatigue penalty in the process.

For a late-game player, that Fatigue nerf might be annoying, but it's likely to rarely come into play. For an early-game player, however, you might find yourself running low pretty often, especially when running or jumping around the open world. When the curse afflicts you, that drain becomes doubly frustrating, because now when you run out of stamina, your character falls straight to the floor, ragdolling chaotically as they go.

The very first Knights of the Nine quest I did was Stendarr’s Mercy—and that was soon after I started my playthrough. That was 100 hours ago… from r/oblivion

The only way to fix the curse is to complete the entire Knights of the Nine quest. That's easier said than done, because the full line includes travel to nine different shrines, their related side-quests, a series of battles against the gods' chosen knights, and then another journey to gather a series of holy relics before the final battle. Suffice to say, this is no simple fetch-quest, which might explain why this particular player says they've been suffering from the effects of their curse for more than 100 hours, having picked it up right at the beginning.

As if the constant falling down isn't bad enough, the community was on hand to offer a warning: never let yourself run out of stamina while swimming. If you do, your character will ragdoll in the water, and then be unable to find any ground upon which to stand up. The result is a player lying face down in the water forever - or at least until you reload a save. After all, it's not exactly a fitting end for the Hero of Kvatch.

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