Oftentimes in game development, you can't be sure how something will work until you ship. In the case of Skyrim, one of the leads was certain the level cap wouldn't be a problem, and then players made it clear he had the wrong idea.
Bruce Nesmith, lead designer on Skyrim and a former longtime developer at Bethesda, told the Examined Game podcast all about his logic. "When creating the system where all the different skills would go to 100, it implied, mathematically, a level limit of 81," he explains.
"I didn't think of that," he says. "Most of the games that Bethesda produces are designed to, you've played all the content roughly around level 50. That's what we shoot for."
He qualifies this with the caveat that that's a broad generalisation, because it depends on how the players approach the game. The amount of stealth or magic you use can impact things, but you'll likely still be in the ballpark of level 50 by the time you've seen the bulk of any given Bethesda release.
"So, 81, and what do I care?" Nesmith continues. "I was wrong. The players didn't want to finish playing their character at 81 and start a new one. They had a character they loved, why couldn't they keep playing?"
This seems like a by-product of creating something as wildly popular as Skyrim. Few games will ever be as widely enjoyed and played as The Elder Scrolls 5, and that means there are plenty of people who wish the whole experience was longer.
There was a course correction, as Nesmith points out, in the Dragonborn DLC, where you could reset skills by spending Dragon Souls. This was introduced in a free update with Legendary Mode afterward.
"It wasn't my favorite mechanic the way we did it," Nesmith states. "But it worked." That it did, and it didn't slow down the RPG's momentum at all. Whatever else Bethesda's planning for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, I doubt there'll be a level cap, because it sounds like the team learned their lesson.
