Veteran Bethesda Game Studios developer Bruce Nesmith, who worked on RPG genre gems like Skyrim, is surprised by the fifth Elder Scrolls entry's longevity – but he also knows why it's so special among other similar titles.
Speaking during a recent FRVR podcast, Nesmith says Skyrim's seemingly eternal lifespan – which is undeniable, judging by its current stats on SteamDB (keep in mind the game first launched in 2011, with various ports and new editions dropping since) – always comes as a bit of a surprise. "I'm eternally shocked by that. By all rights, a year later, some other game should have eclipsed it," admits Nesmith.
"And then two years later, three years later, five, ten. It's like 'what the hell is going on here?' Todd [Howard] would even go to these meetings and show us information… about how many people are playing it. It's like, 'You've got to be kidding me?' Seriously, still, ten years later." Why has it proven so popular, even over a decade after its initial release? Nesmith thinks he knows – and it all boils down to the RPG's impressive open world.
"I think Skyrim did the open world in a way that nobody had ever done before, and very few people have really tried to do since," as the former Bethesda dev puts it. "And one of those things that we accepted, which a lot of developers struggle to accept, is that this means you're going to have quirkiness. You're going to have weird stuff happen. And if you say that's okay, you can get this diamond" – and that's exactly what the Skyrim studio did.
"If you try to smooth everything out and make sure that you don't have any of these quirky things that people call bugs in some cases, you're going to lose some of that magic," Nesmith continues. "And we didn't make that as a conscious decision. It just sort of happened. You know, we kind of prioritize functionally, and 'well, okay, that bug's acceptable. This behavior is less than ideal, but we can live with it because look what we're getting over here.'"
What came as a result was a world so engaging and truly open it "became free" to players – "you could literally go anywhere." As a longtime Elder Scrolls stan with thousands upon thousands of hours in Skyrim specifically, I'm inclined to agree with Nesmith. There hasn't yet been a game, aside from the recent Oblivion Remastered, that has even come close to capturing the magic I still feel in Bethesda's iconic 2011 RPG.
"We didn't put anything off limits. We didn't try to manage the experience. We let it be your experience; it was a player-driven experience," concludes Nesmith. "Very, very few games have mastered that, because open world is now almost a cliche statement."
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