Skyrim’s headless horseman is doomed to explode, because of Bethesda

pcgamesn.com:

Venture into the plains outside Whiterun or Solitude, and you’re likely to encounter one of the Elder Scrolls series’ most memorable NPCs. Any time after 10pm, the ghostly Skyrim headless horseman will come trotting by, blazing a trail of intrigue and eeriness as he leads you towards Hamvir’s Rest. It’s a wonderful homage to the tropes of fantasy and RPG games, skillfully woven into Skyrim by Fallout and Starfield creator Bethesda. But the headless horseman is hiding a horrifying secret – his programming and scripting mean he’s doomed to suffer, again and again, every time he spawns into your Skyrim save.

Emerging from the same game-dev secrets archive as the GTA 5 flying camera truck, to make the Skyrim headless horseman work, it turns out Bethesda had to get pretty creative, and subject the poor NPC to a gruesome death, over and over again.

Steve Lee, a level designer who has worked on Dishonored 2 and BioShock Infinite, recently interviewed three fellow level designers behind the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. Justin Schram and Joel Burgess, who collaborated on both Fallout 4 and Skyrim, reveal the grim technical tricks needed to make the headless horseman… well, headless.

“Joel had just figured out how you could make a character headless,” Schram begins. “I forgot how you figured this out.”

“Well,” Burgess explains, “you would call a script command at a certain point in their spawn. You had to do it at the right moment. And you could dismember body parts by script, and it didn’t actually kill them. If you were there at the time, you would see their heads explode, so we had to spawn them around corners and stuff.”

“So I spawned this horseman,” Schram continues, “and I gave him this little back story and a place in