Legendary Bethesda dev admits: we deliberately left bugs in Skyrim. „If you smooth everything out, you lose some of that magic”

Bruce Nesmith is a Bethesda veteran who was the Lead Designer for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Since he left the team in 2021, he's been giving some pretty interesting interviews on a regular basis. In a recent chat on the FRVR podcast, he admitted that both he and the rest of the team were surprised by how long the game stayed popular.

1. In the podcast, they discussed how Skyrim is still extremely popular, even after all these years. Just yesterday, at its peak time, 26,039 people were playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition on Steam at the same time.
2. Nesmith thinks it's mostly because of how Skyrim's open world was designed. It offers immense freedom and unpredictability, even if the price for that is a lack of perfect technical polish. As the developer explains:

Nesmith added that when creating Skyrim, the devs didn't try to hold players' hands and instead allowed them to shape their own adventures in this virtual world. He thinks that even today, it's pretty rare to see this approach, despite the fact that so many open-world games come out every year.

1. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition on Steam

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

November 11, 2011

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• The Elder Scrolls (franchise)
• Bethesda
• RPG games