Lead designer Bruce Nesmith says Skyrim was a hit because it was built on institutional knowledge from Oblivion

Lead designer Bruce Nesmith says Skyrim was a hit because it was built on institutional knowledge from Oblivion

Maybe laying off people who know what they're doing is bad, actually.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a huge fan of the way YouTube encourages everything becoming a video that's over an hour long and doesn't have a text version available. There's a recent video putting the original Pool of Radiance into the greater context of the history of CRPGs that's almost 10 hours long, and the odds of me watching more than 10% of it are perishingly low.

Fortunately for you, we're here to convert video to text for your edification, as with The Examined Game's comprehensive interview with Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith. Asked how a game as successful as Skyrim came to be, Nesmith emphasized the importance of keeping the team together.

If I had an actual blueprint on how to do it, I would be one rich son of a bitch. A lot of it comes down to we had the same team that had worked on Oblivion. The studio had not really changed dramatically. So we were able to deal with institutional knowledge at a high level that had been retained, which allows us to not make mistakes and build on successes. That was definitely key to it.

I think also we gave a high priority to making sure that the world was full. There was nowhere that you went where there wasn't at least something fun to see if not something fun to do. And it and it can be just little things, it can be a little vignette on the side of the road. It doesn't have to be a huge big adventure, but the visual storytelling was fantastic.

I go back to that sense of freedom once again, but we accelerated that in Skyrim compared to Oblivion. It makes the world feel rich when there's a variety of experiences. The same experience over and over and over again doesn't cut it. So you have a wealth of enemy types, you've got a lot of different treasure types and loot types, you're allowed to pick everything up in the world.

When you go see the forests, they look like forests. Then you can see the mountains, they look like mountains. And you go to ice fields and they look like ice fields, so you get a variety of environmental experiences. Each of the cities had its own characters, so they felt very different. You felt like you're experiencing something new. And the characters, the characters all felt like they had some personality to them so that you weren't just seeing cookie cutter versions of people.

I have to disagree with Nesmith on the characters, because memorable NPCs are one of Skyrim's weak spots—all those people with recycled voices and limited dialogue. But he's right that Skyrim feels full despite the absence of Ubisoft-style repeatable activities. At no point do you pick up a butterfly and get a notification that says "1/100 butterflies collected". The butterflies are just there, and you can grab them and turn them into potion ingredients if you want. Then while you're out harvesting ingredients you meet a thief or a dying orc or an NPC who points you to a sidequest, and you're off on a new journey. That's what Skyrim does well.

Nesmith goes on to say depth like that was made possible, "by having people who knew what they were doing and could hit the ground running. You didn't have to train people what it meant to make an Elder Scrolls game." Instead of laying off half the Oblivion team the moment it shipped, Bethesda kept them together. "If you look at the history of AAA studios that do sequels, you'll see that repeated," Nesmith continues. "You'll see the best game in a sequence frequently was able to maintain a particular percentage of the staff—was able to maintain a vision."

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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