One of the most delightful elements of a good open-world RPG is the way you can bend and sometimes break systems to your will, giving you the freedom to approach and think about obstacles independently from the intended design. The Elder Scrolls games have been masterclasses in emergent gameplay for decades, as evidenced by a fun new anecdote from Bethesda Game Studios veteran and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered art lead Dan Lee, who joined the studio shortly after OG Oblivion's announcement way back when.
Talking to Nintendo Life, Lee shares one of his early memories from working on Oblivion as a play tester. Testing persistent AI behavior, Lee chose to use an NPC's hunger mechanic against him instead of tackling the quest head-on as scripted in the linear path.
"I was playtesting and I was learning about how reading AI worked and I learned about the hunger mechanic, how the characters actually look for food if they're hungry. There's a quest that has you getting onto a boat and you have to kill a captain. And then as you do it, his second in command and another guy pop up and ambush you," says Lee.
"I was like, 'Can I abuse this in any way?,'" he adds, a question every self-respecting Fallout and Elder Scrolls player asks dozens of times during any given playthrough.
"So I heard about this eating mechanic, I snuck through the ship into his room, took all the food, left a poison apple in his pocket, and then left. I wait and I get the pop-up saying 'Quest Completed'; he's dead. I ran to [designer] Emil Pagliarulo and said, 'I can't believe you accounted for this. This is great!' And he's like, 'I didn't, that was just the game systems working.'"
These kinds of interactions are what make games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Baldur's Gate 3, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild feel alive and endlessly replayable.
Lee says that quest has stuck with him for more than two decades because of the way Oblivion's systems "interplay" and result in "unexpected fun," and beyond that, anything that makes an RPG feel less scripted and more organic builds immersion and makes it feel more lifelike.
Of course, the game's lovably egregious bugs arguably subtract from that immersion somewhat, but that's all part of the Bethesda RPG experience we've come to know and love.
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