Skyrim'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 bugs
I'm no fortune teller, but I can already pretty much guarantee a few of the features you'll find in The Elder Scrolls 6. First up, picking up any item on any surface will cause every item surrounding it to levitate a few millimetres in the air. Second, your companion will at some point jumpscare you by offering you some trash in the middle of battle. Third, land swimming.
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 with Videogamer.
«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 how much they 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 be more polished 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»).
When Videogamer asked if, perhaps, Bethesda should get out ahead of fan expectations by publishing those bugs before launch, Nesmith offered, well, kind of
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