All hail the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages dot net.
When I finally got around to the main quest in Oblivion Remastered—some time after I’d become head of the Fighter’s Guild, won renown in the Imperial Arena, joined the Thieves Guild, and helped out a few Daedric Princes with their chores—I spoke to an NPC who seemed to have more dialogue than I remembered. Not sure if I was misremembering, I went to the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages to look up Ilav Dralgoner. His additional dialogue, it turned out, was part of the Deluxe Edition’s new quests. Having alt-tabbed to check that one thing, I immediately fell into a UESP rabbit hole just like I do when playing every Elder Scrolls game.
Want to know which of Oblivion’s NPCs move between towns on a schedule? You can lose a precious chunk of your life looking them up in conveniently tabulated form on the UESP’s list of Oblivion’s traveling people. Take Alval Uvani for example, the dark elf who has “no time for your pathetic attempts at small talk” and shifts between Leyawin, Bravil, Skingrad, and Bruma. Or the eternally shirtless Yngvar Doom-Sayer, who is scripted to cross the entire Shivering Isles. The UESP details Kiara at the Brina Cross Inn just as exhaustively, even though she doesn’t move at all. According to the UESP she never leaves the inn and “remains standing halfway up the staircase, watching over a chunk of ham cooking on a nearby grill.”
This is the kind of attention to detail that elevates the best wiki pages, like BG3 Wiki’s list of references to previous Baldur’s Gate games, or Wookieepedia’s page on breasts. The UESP is full of stuff like this, like the list of all 16 of Oblivion’s rat subtypes, including the one peaceful rat in the Imperial Prison Sewer you probably didn’t realize won’t attack unless you attack first. Or the list of running gags, which I have to thank for making me realize M’aiq the Liar, who sprints across the world spouting meta dialogue about cut content and changes between the games, is a literal running gag.
The UESP has been around since 1995, having started as The Unofficial Daggerfall FAQ on Usenet. It’s got more than 100,000 pages, and for the 100,000th upload saved a special page just about cheese. As well as being a place to read lore and look up NPC stats, it’s a guide that can help you use Oblivion’s spellcrafting system to make useful spells and has every location on a zoomable satellite map, and it’s also a repository for archival material like official wallpapers and concept art. (The UESP’s archive of Shivering Isles concept art is what I think of when my therapist tells me to visualize a happy place.)
Basically, it’s everything you want in a wiki and it’s made my years with the Elder Scrolls more enjoyable than they otherwise would have been. Now that companies have realized there’s cash to be made from monetizing fan wikis they’ve dropped in quality, but the UESP, like the Team Fortress Wiki or Bulbapedia, remains a thoroughly researched warren you can dive into and lose hours in—all because you felt like looking up The Lusty Argonian Maid and realized you can just read every book in the Elder Scrolls series in one place.
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