Gaming IndustrySkyrim’s lead designer admits Bethesda games lack ‘polish,’ but at some point you have to release a game even if you have a list of 700 known bugsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustrySkyrim’s lead designer admits Bethesda games lack ‘polish,’ but at some point you have to release a game even if you have a list of 700 known bugsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
I know this because those kinds of minor bugs and weird behaviours have been a staple of Bethesda games from Oblivion onwards. They’ve all drawn criticism for it, too, and not just from us lot in the peanut gallery. In fact, Skyrim’s lead designer Bruce Nesmith is the most recent notable name to cop to Bethesda games' jankiness in a chat withVideogamer.
“I will be the first person to say that Bethesda Games could have a higher degree of polish,” said Nesmith, adding that players generally give the studio a bit of leeway just because of howmuchthey can do in its games. “A certain amount of lack of polish could be forgiven. Having an NPC run in place in front of a wall for a little while became acceptable because of the 17 things you could do with that NPC.”
Would it even be possible to polish up a Skyrim-style Bethesda game to a mirror sheen before release? Well, maybe—or at the very least these games could bemorepolished than they are at launch—but the demands of business are such that you do have to put a game out at some point. “Are you willing to let the game sit for six more months and be delayed six more months in order to try to polish it?” asks Nesmith, pointing out that even if you did do something like that, the final product would only be “better,” not perfect. “So at some point you have to make the decision to publish,” he says, even though you still have a big list of known bugs (the number Nesmith plucks out the air is “700”).
Anyway, I’m not even sure I want Bethesda games to be gleaming, sleek, and bugless. Not to bang on a tired Starfield drum, but one of my myriad issues with that game was actually that it was a bit too slick. Oh, don’t get me wrong, loads of things went wrong while I was playing it, but none of them had the comedic value or character of the kind of whackadoo bugs that still makesOblivion one of the most unintentionally hilarious gamesever made. So funny, in fact, that it can go viral 18 years post-release.
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You know what I say? Publish those bug lists, Bethesda, and embrace them. No one on Earth has the time to iron every single quirk out of Skyrim in the span of a normal period of game development, and I’m not sure I’d want them to. Better to accept them for what they are: A staple element of their games that have a charm all their own.
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