Oblivion Dev Reveals The Origins Of Killing NPCs With Poisoned Food
Original Oblivion Devs Accidentally Discovered The Best Way To Kill Someone: Poisoned Food
Back in the day, Oblivion giving all of its NPCs their own schedule was huge. Hell, it's still impressive when you go back to it in Oblivion Remastered, seeing how all of the different systems come together to make Cyrodiil feel alive - even if we're more often than not laughing over some of the unintended quirks of these systems.
One of these quirks was discovered long before launch: being able to poison other NPCs. That is because NPCs are actually programmed to eat, meaning all you have to do is poison whatever it is they're going to nosh on if you want to get rid of them. Someone at Bethesda did this to get past a quest during Oblivion's development, and rushed to praise designer Emil Pagliarulo for accommodating that. However, Pagliarulo admitted that they hadn't - this was just a side effect of how Oblivion's AI worked.
How This Oblivion Dev Discovered Our Favourite Way To Off NPCs
Art director Dan Lee, who joined the company as an intern during the original Oblivion's development, shared this anecdote in an interview with Nintendo Life.
"I was playtesting and I was learning about how reading AI worked and I learned about the hunger mechanic, how the characters actually look for food if they're hungry," says Lee. "There's a quest that has you getting onto a boat and you have to kill a captain. And then as you do it, his second in command and another guy pop up and ambush you.
"I was like, 'Can I abuse this in any way?' So I heard about this eating mechanic, I snuck through the ship into his room, took all the food, left a poison apple in his pocket, and then left," he continues. "I wait and I get the pop-up saying 'Quest Completed'; he's dead. I ran to Emil Pagliarulo and said, 'I can't believe you accounted for this. This is great!' And he's like, 'I didn't, that was just the game systems working.'"
It's wild to think that Oblivion's quests were not made with that specific possibility in mind, but it's made for a fan favourite way to kill any NPCs who are in our way. I am also fond of leading people into traps or into fights with other NPCs - that is quite fun.
If anything, Oblivion could have done with a bit more than this. To this day, I am still peeved that I used my initiative to break into Castle Skingrad to discover that the Count is a vampire, and that's why I was getting shrugged off when I tried to meet with him. Despite my character seeing with her own eyes that the Count is showing obvious signs of vampirism, the quest would not update, so we're just expected to follow it in the way it was written. At least you can just mess around with NPCs between quests; just don't expect thiking outside of the box to be rewarded all of the time.