I say: Embrace the 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 an answer. “It’s an interesting problem, because when you’re in marketing, what you’re looking to do is manage expectations.” Per Nesmith, players go into games expecting “no bugs,” which no one is ever going to achieve. “So what marketing has to do is say, how can we get as close as possible to that expectation. How can we make it so these guys don’t hate us for what’s wrong and love us for what’s right?”
I think get Nesmith’s meaning: It’s better for Bethesda to polish and polish and polish and try to get as close it can to players’ imagined ideal game rather than coming out the gate—and undercutting a load of whizzbang marketing—by saying ‘here’s everything wrong with our game we want $60 for.’ Which, given Nesmith had only just finished pointing out how impossible it would be to actually put out a bug-free game, feels maybe a little cynical, but it makes business sense.
Anyway, I’m not even sure I want Bethesda games to be gleaming, sleek, and bugless. Not to bang on a tired Starfield drum, but one of my myriad issues with that game was actually that it was a bit too slick. Oh, don’t get me wrong, loads of things went wrong while I was playing it, but none of them had the comedic value or character of the kind of whackadoo bugs that still makes Oblivion one of the most unintentionally hilarious games ever made. So funny, in fact, that it can go viral 18 years post-release.
You know what I say? Publish those bug lists, Bethesda, and embrace them. No one on Earth has the time to iron every single quirk out of Skyrim in the span of a normal period of game development, and I’m not sure I’d want them to. Better to accept them for what they are: A staple element of their games that have a charm all their own.
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