Skyrim's lead designer has shared what he hopes to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel - top of the list: better mounts and, erm, ladders!
Bruce Nesmith was one of the lead developers on arguably Bethesda Game Studios' most enduring hit, the high fantasy open world of Skyrim, but his hopes and dreams for Sentinel are a little more modest than you might expect. While some fans are running wild with lore theories and hopes for ambitious new mechanics like sailing, Nesmith just wants to be able to climb ladders.
Speaking to The Examined Game (below), Nesmith says the request is "a very strange one," but not being able to climb ladders "really limits the art team in terms of how you can do multi-layer [environments]." There's a very good reason why Skyrim didn't let you properly climb up and down ladders, however.
"All the ladders in Skyrim, you click on the ladder, poof, you're at the top or you have to climb a stair. But to do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions which our programmers very legitimately put in front of us and said, 'You give me answers to these, I'll tell you how much programming time it's going to take to make them.' And you know, that caused problems right there," Nesmith explained.
He then points to what would happen if an NPC is halfway down a ladder as you decide to climb up, and all the development questions that pop up from that seemingly small scenario: "Does the player go through the NPC? Is he blocked by the NPC? Does the NPC stay on the ladder? Does the NPC go back up and know to wait and then come back down?[...] And I'm just scratching the surface of some of the problems they brought up. So, it seems simple. and other games have climbing ladders, but we chose to put our efforts into other things to make them better."
The Bethesda veteran says the small change could really "make the world feel a little more immersive" and affect how the team can design environments. His other small request is a "better implementation of mounts," which he acknowledges is a "common complaint" among Skyrim fans.
"I'm not alone in that. But it turns out mounts are tricky. They're really tricky. There's a lot of hard decisions to be made in those. You can ride a horse, but that's all you can do in Skyrim," he says. "I should be able to do some other things with the horse, too, like maybe fight on the horse or have it fight with me."
