The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel is probably still a couple years away, and we don’t know much about Bethesda’s next big MMO. However, the game director for Skyrim has come out with a couple of specific requests for the game.
Former Bethesda design director Bruce Nesmith sat down on The Examined Game podcast to talk about his time at the company. But, about 40 minutes into the interview, the YouTuber asked Nesmith about what he’d like to see from The Elder Scrolls VI, and there are two things, better mounts and better ladders. And that latter one is how you can tell that he’s a game director.
Wanting better mounts in Elder Scrolls is almost universal for fans, as Skyrim doesn’t exactly have a great mount system. As Nesmith describes the problem, “you can ride a horse, but that’s all you can do in Skyrim. Thats it. You just ride the horse. Well, I should be able to do other things with the horse, too, like maybe fight on the horse, or have it fight with me, or you know, stuff like that.”
To be clear, Nesmith now spends his days writing novels, and doesn’t have anything to do with Sentinel, but it would be cool to be able to have some kind of mounted combat system in The Elder Scrolls VI. For instance, I’ve been getting back into Monster Hunter Wilds ahead of the expansion, and the way you can use your Seikret to dodge out of boss mechanics and manage your inventory while avoiding attacks is huge, and would be great in other RPGs.
But as for ladders, Nesmith request seems odd until he starts to explain the way that ladders limited game design in Skyrim. As he explains, “you don’t climb up and down ladders. It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don’t climb up and down ladders, which really limits the art team in terms of how they can do multi-layer things. You know, all the ladders in Skyrim, you click on the ladder, and poof you’re at the top. Or you have to climb a stair.”
Some of that is obviously the limited technology of 2011, but it’s apparently something Bethesda tried to solve, before giving up to prioritize other elements of the massive RPG. When Nesmith tried to get ladders solved in Skyrim, he says “to do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions that our programmers very legitimately put in front of us and said, ‘you give me answers to these, I’ll tell you how much programming time it’s going to take to make them.’ and that caused problems right there.”
Even when I sit down and think about it, I can’t really think of any game that really nails ladders, and a lot of games have problems with them in one way or another, especially around the era of Skyrim. Nesmith goes on to explain a lot of the specific problems that enemy AI has with ladders, like its ability to decide whether or not to wait for you at the top, or to climb back down the ladder to come after you. These problems have all been solved in one way or another in other games, but I’d hope that Skyrim finds a way to solve the issue as well.
Either way, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel is still a few years away, even though Bethesda is already selling merch. We’ll have to wait a bit to see more about the game, but there are some signs about what might be in the game, and that might even include ship combat – or at least I hope.
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