The cart scene brought up an incredible (but funny) story from the past. It’s hard to believe the truth: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched nearly a decade ago…

Nate Purkeypile spent nearly 17 years at Bethesda until this April (Fallout 3, Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 76, Starfield; now he’s developing independently under Just Purkey Games). He shared his story on Twitter in a thread. Let’s see what he has to say:

“So, I have a story about the Skyrim intro and how hard game development is. That intro is famous now, but back then, it was just that one thing that we had to keep working and working on forever. I lost track of how many times I’ve seen that cart ride. Easily hundreds. See, the issue with that cart ride is that it’s not just a cart on rails. That cart is physically simulated. Why, you ask? Good question.

It meant that all kinds of things would cause the cart to start to freak out and fly off the road. Maybe the road was too bumpy. Maybe there was just a physics bug. Maybe somebody accidentally put a rock too close to the road. The cart had a path it wanted to follow, but that doesn’t mean it could follow. Big difference. 🙂

Well, one time, riding that cart yet again, the carriage starts to shake violently and all of a sudden, whoosh! The cart goes up into the sky like a rocket ship. Like WAY up there. Something was telling that cart to just f__k right off and getting off that road. The thing is, it wasn’t happening every time. Nobody knew what was going on at first. So it turns out there was another bug where the bee in the game couldn’t be picked up. So then some potions couldn’t be made. That bug got fixed. Only the type of collision put on the bee didn’t just let it get picked up. It also made it collide into things.

Meaning that the bee was an immovable force of nature if it ever happened to cross the path of the cart. The cart wanted to move down the road. The bee did not want to move. So up the cart goes! So game development is complicated. Every time you fix one thing, you might be breaking another. This is especially true about open-world games. Yet, that interplay of all the systems is what ends up making them all super interesting,” Purkeypile wrote.

Another developer then added that having honey in your inventory led to further complications. Having this seemingly harmless item had bees follow you… but due to their collision detection, you couldn’t MOVE!

There’s no Bethesda Game Studios title without a buggy launch. Let’s hope Starfield will turn this trend around next year…

Source: PSL