The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Bruma

Fantasy game art from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.Bruma is a citadel north of the Imperial City and high in the snowy Jerall Mountains. Detailed information on Bruma can be found at the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

The altitude and geographic location of Bruma means the land is generally snow-covered, and many of the buildings reflect this. However, because the game uses the same artwork and models for certain buildings elsewhere (e.g., the Great Chapel of Talos), some of the buildings will not have any snow on them. A large depression not far outside Bruma's walls is also the site of the critical Defense of Bruma. During the main quest to save all of Tamriel from the demonic invasion of Oblivion, a Great Gate opens here. This enormous gate is necessary for the forces of Mehrunes Dagon to bring through a siege engine meant to obliterate Bruma. The devastation such an engine can cause was seen in Kvatch earlier in the game, a fortified city reduced to a smoking ruin. Once the Gate opens, the Champion of Cyrodiil (i.e., the protagonist / player) has a mere fifteen minutes to make a run for the Great Sigil Stone that keeps the worldspace open. Seizing the stone causes the Great Gate to collapse, and also destroys the siege engine that presumably was only partway out of the gate (although the entire engine is present outside Bruma afterwards).

The very few troops gathered for the Defense of Bruma is no oversight -- The entire battle scene is already so heavy in computing processing power that the game can frequently crash, and even with computing power maximized by reducing the screen resolution, turning down all graphics options, and turning off audio, the battle is chaotic enough that with the number of combatants that do show up, the player is just as likely to kill allies as they are to kill enemies simply because of how combat works in the game. The landscape itself helps by being largely bare of trees and grass, both of which contribute to processing load. In the screenshots below, we have used cheats to manage the battle and thereby focus on getting screenshots of the gates, and especially of the gates rising from the earth -- the only time in the entire game that the player gets to see how Oblivion Gates open. You may also notice that a dead body of a Dremora gets tossed up by the rising Great Gate.