Former Bethesda Producer Reveals How Developers' Unusual Ideas Nearly Broke Skyrim
Former Bethesda producer Jeff Gardiner recently shared a story about how, during the development of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, the creators nearly broke the game but then identified the problem and quickly fixed it.
According to him, developers were given a lot of creative freedom to implement their own ideas. This led to the addition of butterflies and ants in Skyrim, which significantly impacted the game's technical performance.
They put butterflies in Skyrim, and they put a system in where the butterflies would smell flowers in your inventory and start following you around the game. But it was very expensive—by this I mean there was a lot of processing that had to happen, because all the butterflies in the game had to detect whether or not the player had flowers. And we were like, 'Why is the game running slow?' And then you spend hours figuring out, 'Oh, it's because so-and-so put the script in the game that makes it so, if you're carrying flowers, butterflies are attracted to you.
As for the ants, the developers made a critical mistake when adding them. The insects cast shadows, which at the time was extremely taxing on performance.
"Thousands of ants that you can barely see, casting little tiny shadows," says Jeff Gardiner.
However, all these moments are fondly remembered by the former Bethesda producer.
That's the fun of it. The beauty of Bethesda was, because of the success of our games, our parent company, Zenimax, basically left us alone. We set our own internal milestones, our own goals, and as long as we earned the trust of them, they left us alone. Which is so important as a creative.
As a reminder, Jeff Gardiner also recently revealed how he single-handedly fixed the combat balance in Skyrim just before its release.
