Skyrim Developers Surprised by Players Abandoning Main Quest for Open World

Not everyone cares about the story in Bethesda games.

Former Bethesda Game Studios lead designer Bruce Nesmith continues to give interviews and share memories of working on various projects. During a recent conversation with Insider Gaming, Bruce Nesmith mentioned a player behavior pattern that surprised the creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

The TES franchise is built on the concept of freedom, and in Skyrim the developers managed to implement it very successfully. After the opening escape sequence, players find themselves facing a massive open world and, as practice showed, many could not resist the temptation to drop everything and set off to explore diverse locations.

Bruce Nesmith explained that while working on Skyrim, one of the key tasks was to give players a “true sense of freedom.” The developers studied statistics and discovered that after the starting dungeon, players did not go to Riverwood as the authors intended, but instead left to explore the world:

That was genuinely staggering. About 30% of players did that. We had to make sure the game continued to work normally for those people too. Not many projects are capable of giving a player a true sense of freedom.

Image source: Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks

To ensure this freedom, the creators of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had to put in a lot of effort, because quests and the surrounding world had to adapt to different player actions:

There were many situations where we realized: if one event happens, then everything must develop in a certain way, and if another happens, we will need to choose a different path […] and so on. A huge amount of work had to be done so that under any circumstances quests and the environment could adapt differently to the player’s actions.

Bethesda Game Studios is currently developing a full-fledged new installment in The Elder Scrolls franchise, The Elder Scrolls VI, and several Fallout games are also in the works. The developers have not yet specified a release date or launch window.

Related articles