Bruce Nesmith, a former Bethesda veteran who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has said that he “probably played Skyrim for 1,000 hours" and that for "950 of those hours, it was broken”.
In a recent interview with MinnMax (which you can check out below), Nesmith covers a real range of topics, one of which is how devs recharge between big, meaty projects, which naturally tend to require playing the pre-launch build over and over before all its bugs have been squashed and broken bits patched up. “Part of the exhaustion of any big project is it’s the same thing,” he says, going on to give the example of Skyrim. “I probably played Skyrim for 1,000 hours. 950 of those hours, it was broken.
“By definition,” he explains. “We were still making the game, it could not be anything but broken. This doesn't mean Bethesda's bad. In every studio, those 950 hours, you're playing a broken game. And on top of that, you're playing the same damn thing over and over and over and over. Now, the project's done, we're gonna transit over to Fallout now, or we're gonna work on this DLC. We're not going to start at the beginning of the process, and that's the exciting part, when it's all ideas and all that. And so that actually helps to recharge you also. But there's the old adage that is definitely a primary one at Bethesda, which is 'if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.'”
- Skyrim's iconic opening was done by Starfield's quest lead, but only after he was brutally called out for "everything we're doing wrong" in front of the Bethesda team
- RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says Skyrim is the perfect example of why it doesn't matter if players finish games because "a lot of people never finish the crit path," but "they love it"
Nesmith also praises Bethesda’s approach to helping devs recharge between launches, explaining that the studio’s “very good about giving people relaxed time at the end of a project, so when a project finishes you don't immediately put your nose to a new grindstone”.
He adds that a lot of celebration goes on, people take well-earned vacations, and there’s a “very chill atmosphere” - but also that the studio’s good at “giving you something fresh to sink your teeth into”, tying into his point about the exhaustion that can set in by repeatedly going over the same pre-launch material after time.
There have been some excellent stories of Skyrim’s journey to launch over the years. One particularly memorable example is how, at one point, the RPG’s iconic opening sequence was held hostage by a single superhuman bee, which sent the Helgen-bound cart flying “up into the sky like a rocket ship”, as former Bethesda developer Nate Purkeypile explained in a previous Twitter thread. Buggy in more ways than one, eh?
Elsewhere, Nesmith has discussed how Skyrim "proved to the world that open-world games were the place to be”, even more so than GTA 3.
