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Veteran Bethesda Game Studios developer Bruce Nesmith, who worked on RPG genre gems like Skyrim, reveals that the bucket-on-head method of robbery – as iconic as it is, even now, 14 years after the fifth Elder Scrolls' release – wasn't an intentional feature.
Nesmith admits as much during a recent podcast episode from FRVR, explaining that buckets were never placed on any non-playable characters' heads during development – so Bethesda actually had no idea it would be used as a stealthy method of theft in Skyrim. "That was completely an accident, by the way," he recalls. "I don't think we even tried to put a bucket on anybody's head during development. It didn’t come out until the game came out!"
Although Nesmith knows "exactly why it happens" – as in, how the bucket-on-head trick, which renders an NPC effectively blind to a player's theft (or other crime, should they be of a more violent nature, ahem) – it was unexpected. It's sort of hilarious to envision the devs coming across a clip from fans with the trick on display, a poor shopkeeper standing around as they drop a bucket over their head to steal some cheese wedges.
It's just one of very many possible interactions that make Skryim's world feel so immersive – a world that, although riddled with some of the RPG genre's most infamous bugs, has proven to be so long-lived it's even shocked Bethesda devs over a decade on. Nesmith agrees, too, saying that the Elder Scrolls game has that unique ability to truly make its players feel as though they're in Tamriel rather than experiencing it from the outside.
"You get a sense of self, you get a sense of freedom, you get to grow your character, but you feel like you're there," as the former Bethesda dev puts it. "'This is me. I am here.' So you feel like your character."
He's not wrong – even without the very many Skyrim mods that are around to download nowadays, there's plenty to do within the 2011 gem. I've personally clocked thousands of hours and still feel I'm discovering new ways to play…
Searching for some new games to explore after Skyrim? Here's everything you need to know about The Elder Scrolls 6 after looking back on one of the RPG series' greatest entries.
