Despite the game releasing all the way back in 2006, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion still retains a fairly active online community, with the game having an enduring legacy in both the world of video games and through a whole host of internet jokes which fans still share to this day. While players wait for the next entry in the series, The Elder Scrolls 6, it seems many are still trudging the worlds of Skyrim and Oblivion enjoying the mountains of content both titles offer.
One such player has happened to spend a whole heap of time in Oblivion, however, not exactly in the way one might expect. Taking to Twitter, UESP (or the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages) showed off a unique stat within their save file of Oblivion, revealing to their followers that they had spent a whopping 616 years in the game's jail. While the stat is hilarious in of itself, especially as their character appears to be as young and spry as ever, it's even funnier when considering a number of other factors.
Perhaps the funniest is that UESP's character no longer has any stats above 1 due to the fact that, as many Oblivion players will be painfully aware, going to jail significantly lowers all of the protagonist's attributes. It seems the player is even weaker than they would be during the game's prologue, which is undeniably a strong example of why crime truly doesn't pay. It seems UESP's 600-year sentence also places the game's timeline long after the story events of Oblivion and, funnily enough, also those of Skyrim, meaning UESP has theoretically sat out two of the biggest events in the history of Tamriel.
While the post in of itself is a fantastic look at the small bugs surrounding Oblivion's jail system, the comments below UESP's photos make it all the better. "How kind of Mehrunes Dagon to wait for you to serve your sentence. He may be the Daedric Lord of destruction and change but he respects prison sentences," one player jokes, referencing the title's central antagonist, while another speculates, "In theory, you could stay in Oblivion jail for so long that you will be around during ES6, chronologically. The real ES6 was Oblivion all along."
Discussing how he managed to amass such a preposterous amount of years in the game, UESP claims "In honesty, I just set my crime gold to the limit to see if the year counter would in fact allow you to go past 1,000," meaning that the gag was created using console commands. Regardless, UESP's post has already created some hilarious and memorable replies, once again highlighting that The Elder Scrolls has one of the funniest communities of any franchise to date.
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is available now on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.