Bethesda
Many years after its release, we still find out something new about Skyrim. Sometimes, the best decisions, especially about such a cult game, are made at the last possible moment. As Bethesda’s former producer Jeff Gardiner revealed, he had to rebalance Skyrim’s combat about 2 weeks before its launch.
“I had this fight with the designers at the time,” he said (via PC Gamer). “They wanted to do things through data and simulations. And I was like, ‘But the player does things, like backs up and double taps’. And they would run AI simulations, where an NPC and a monster would fight each other, and if over 10 times the simulated player won more than 50%, then it was balanced. But I was like, ‘They’re not backing up. The AI only does so many things.'”
Naturally, a human has more ideas for maneuvers than an AI bot, so this would not be balanced for them at all. Moreover, a similar issue Gardiner met in Oblivion, so he knew what he was talking about.
There, fighting Clannfear, you’d get into stun locks, and AI, when stun-locked, would behave differently, not as a real person.
“So on Skyrim, I came in and I went through and I played the game with all these different archetypes, and then would tweak the creatures and the weapons and stuff. Right before it shipped I spent two weeks doing that and was like, ‘Well, I hope this is good.'”
Bethesda
And perhaps it is since players are still playing and praising it.
As you can tell, the development wasn’t all a bed of roses, some things would surely infuriate players if they were not caught on time.
When people compare the recently released Avowed with Skyrim, they point out the former’s lack of reactivity in the world around the protagonist – something the TES game is famous for. However, this interactivity could cause more issues than it was worth at times.
“They put butterflies in Skyrim, and they put a system in where the butterflies would smell flowers in your inventory and start following you around the game. But it was very expensive – by this I mean there was a lot of processing that had to happen, because all the butterflies in the game had to detect whether or not the player had flowers. And we were like, ‘Why is the game running slow?’ And then you spend hours figuring out, ‘Oh, it’s because so-and-so put the script in the game that makes it so, if you’re carrying flowers, butterflies are attracted to you.'”
Other pesky creatures were ants. Apparently, one developer made them cast shadows, “the most expensive thing in the rendering,” at the time, so the lighting had to compute them all and pressure the system. “Thousands of ants that you can barely see, casting little tiny shadows,” Gardiner recalled.
While, yes, these were problems that needed fixing, the producer remembers them fondly:
“That’s the fun of it,” he said. “The beauty of Bethesda was, because of the success of our games, our parent company, Zenimax, basically left us alone. We set our own internal milestones, our own goals, and as long as we earned the trust of them, they left us alone. Which is so important as a creative.”
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