Skyrim's lead designer says he played the RPG for 1,000 hours - "and for 950 of those hours, it was broken"
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.'”
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
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