Skyrim's opening is quite easily one of the most iconic moments in gaming, but the developer who led its creation was only given the opportunity after completely redoing all his work, when one of his quests was called out as "an example of everything we're doing wrong" in the middle of a Bethesda design meeting.
Will Shen was Starfield's lead quest designer, but before that he was also one of Skyrim's quest designers. In a new interview with Reece Reilly on the KIWI TALKZ YouTube channel (below), Shen is asked about a story from his time on the 2011 RPG, when he was apparently told by senior designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo that a quest he worked on – The Taste of Death – was the worst one in the game. Ouch. However, it turns out the reality was "even worse because that was in public!
"We were having a design meeting and he said that in front of the entire team – 'this is an example of everything we're doing wrong and something needs to change,'" Shen recalls. "And I'm like, 'what does it mean? I need to get better or I need to get fired?'"
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Despite it being "super brutal," Shen realizes looking back that it "gave me a lot of freedom because I knew the end was coming." He believed that he was "gonna get fired at this rate," so rather than hanging onto any "perceived rules or things that I should be doing," he forgot all that, and decided to "just make something that I would actually play."
The result sounds like a lot of work, as he says he redid "everything," which wasn't just The Taste of Death, but "all the quests in the city of Markarth, all the Daedric quests I was responsible for, all the systems I was doing." While a bold move to make, it clearly worked out, because "that's when things finally started to work and I was getting good reviews and then all of a sudden they asked me to do the opening, which is a huge honor. Going from, maybe you should just resign, to 'oh, why don't we give you the opening,' that was a huge turnaround," he adds.
Despite his fear of being fired, Shen obviously wasn't, as he also picked up credits on Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and more before eventually departing Bethesda in 2023. Now, he's a lead designer at Subnautica studio Unknown Worlds Entertainment.
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