Oblivion Remastered hero returns to the game's golden age by spending 7 hours arranging books just to topple them like dominoes

Oblivion players of a certain vintage will recall that, after the original game's release, there were various community trends based around what you could do with the game's physics system: specifically, just how elaborate of a domino run could you make?

This has of course been repeated across Bethesda's games up through Starfield, because something about that jank-ass physics system is just irresistible. I used to love piling up skulls in Fallout 3, for some reason, and just seeing how high I could possibly get things (on one memorable occasion, a skull at the bottom began vibrating faster and faster until it shot up and caused a skullplosion).

Ahem. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered now has its own version of book dominoes (spotted by IGN), thanks to redditor Muaxh03. They spawned the books, turned off NPCs so they didn't "lose [their] mind", and then spent seven painstaking hours placing the objects (which include a sword) just right. While presumably praying that a physics wobble didn't collapse everything.

Someone stole my video and uploaded it, without credit or permission, blurred the video enough so my watermark wouldn't be visible. So please enjoy the video in higher quality and from the creator. from r/ElderScrolls

"I spent the first 1-2 hours trying to learn how to place them good, after that the stairs took 2-3 hours because every time I tested it, it gave me different results, every time I loaded the save something broke," said Muaxh03. Sure sounds like Oblivion, god love it.

"Took about 6-7 hours, almost every time I loaded the save something broke, it was not reliable so yes I had to deal with books falling or glitching most of the time, that's why you can see some desynchronizing on the books, some fall slower or faster,” added Muaxh03.

This process is a proper pain in Oblivion Remastered because, unlike later Bethesda games, you can't rotate and place objects in the same way: you have to carefully drop them and pray to the Creation engine. But if you want a sense of what players achieved in the OG, the below shows the kind of ludicrously impressive setups I'm talking about.

Oblivion Remastered has only been out for a few weeks, but already the modders are going hard on it. Yes, the gooners were on it immediately. But for the more high-minded among us, why not be a stealthy murder king? They've also fixed things like the awful loot levelling system and, my favourite one yet, a kind of contracts mode that makes the Dark Brotherhood stuff last forever.