I was a temporary project director for Bethesda’s game development department for a short period of time during the launch of their fourth installment to The Elder Scrolls saga, Oblivion.[ The Hist Sap Hallucination ]
From early 2004 until its release in the spring of 2006, my team and I were responsible for quest story-boarding and design, mapping out and detailing each quest objective, any necessary story component and of course, the reward. One quest in particular has had me regret I’ve ever been apart of that team. Even the executive producer Mr. Todd Howard admits that this wasn’t something he could ever imagine happening to a game like this. This quest — rather — this “Achievement awarded’ quest (hindering it much more unsettling) was actually a very real, very important part of the game.
The Infiltration [Hist Sap ]
Entitled “Infiltration”, it was the second last and most unusual quest for the Fighter’s Guild, and a quest result we didn’t originally plan to produce, in fact, we didn’t expect to produce. In case you’ve never played the game, the faction’s quests follow a league of fighters who are hired to perform jobs, involving a great deal of fighting as the name suggests. After you’ve furthered yourself through the Guild, you learn about a group called the Blackwood Company, who are stealing members from the guild and performing jobs created almost out of thin air.
Blackwood company [Hist Sap ]
Here’s where things start to get bizarre. For the quest, you are told to pose undercover as an interested recruit for the Blackwood company to learn their secrets. We as a team had already agreed that this is how we wanted the quest to begin, but it’s been a reoccurring nightmare for us from what follows.
First assignment [Hist Sap ]
Once you become a member, you’re tasked with your first assignment of eliminating a few goblins from a town just north of the city of Leyawiin. We sat in the board room for an hour, rallying ideas until one of us suggested that we add a hallucinogenic substance for the sole purpose of the quest, loosely named “Hist Sap”. For the quest, you are given it as a gift to drink for your first mission, unknowingly ingesting the rare hallucinogen.
Before you know it, you’re in the village, and tasked with killing the goblins. Now, I don’t know why exactly we decided to go this direction; why we wanted to create such an abnormal, unsettling mission, but that was the way we all strangely wanted, almost as an overwhelming temptation.
Testing sessions [Hist Sap ]
But here’s the thing: The end of this mission is where things started to fall apart during the testing sessions. To end the mission, you go back to the village after awakening from the hallucinogen, only to discover to your horror, that the “goblins” you imagined yourself slaying, were not goblins at all, but animals, and people. But what was meant to only be a row of dead bodies to the player, turned into something nightmarish.
Game developer [Hist Sap ]
We first heard about the discovery one evening, when an emergency meeting was called into the studio to review what the game developers found, myself included. We were greeted by a disturbed group of pale-skinned developers and animators, who briefed us quickly on the subject matter. Trembling, one of the animators, the one specifically testing the quest, tried to explain what he saw, and what’s worse, what he heard.
I will tell you what happened, but try to understand that this was no rendering error, no glitch or flaw in the games coding, or any other factor we tried to establish. Everything checked out. What I witnessed there in the studio that day, I will never forget.Read more
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