In addition to balancing, Bethesda Game Studios (BGS) also overdid it with a technological element that made the game run very slowly…

BGS’s RPGs are sometimes full of little details that are hard to notice, but sometimes they go overboard. This is what Jeff Gardiner, a former producer at Bethesda, told PCGamer. He left in 2021 after 15 years there to found Something Wicked Games (they developed Wyrdsong). He had an interesting story about butterflies:

“It’s not just that I kill someone with a sword and there’s a reaction to the crime. It’s the feeling that there’s this living world around you and things are happening. They put butterflies in Skyrim, and they put in a system where the butterflies would smell flowers in your inventory and follow you around the game. But it was very expensive – I mean, there was a lot of processing that had to happen because all the butterflies in the game had to detect whether the player had flowers or not. And we were like, “Why is the game slow? And then you spend hours figuring out, ‘Oh, it’s because so-and-so put the script in the game that makes it so that if you’re carrying flowers, butterflies will be attracted to you,'” Gardiner said.

He had problems with ants. They were added to the world of Skyrim by an artist, Mark Teare, but they made a mistake when they cast shadows, so the light had to cast shadows, and that was the most expensive rendering at the time, and when you multiply that by a thousand, the output was a bit… slideshowy. But Gardiner says it was fun because the parent company, ZeniMax, basically never had a say in their affairs. They set their own milestones and goals, and as long as ZeniMax trusted them, they had a free hand, and for creative people, that can be very important.

Gardiner also said that the AI didn’t work as a human because it only attacked, so Skyrim was only balanced for those who ignored basic combat techniques. Something similar happened in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He, on the other hand, got into the game two weeks before release (i.e., October 2011) because he had respect for the designers, but many producers don’t have a design background (and others are good at it). Gardiner’s unique position allowed him to make changes to the game.

Gardiner added, “I had this battle with the designers at the time. They wanted to do things with data and simulations. And I was like, ‘But the player is doing things, like backing up and double-tapping.’ And they would do AI simulations where an NPC and a monster would fight, and if the simulated player won more than 50% over 10 times, then it was balanced. But I was like, “They’re not supporting it. The AI is just doing so many things. So you had this problem in Oblivion with Clannfear, where they’d put you in these things called stun locks, which is the most frustrating thing for a player. But the AI, when it got stunned, would do something different than the player would do. So with Skyrim, I came in and went through and played the game with all these different archetypes and then tweaked the creatures and the weapons and stuff. Right before it shipped, I spent two weeks doing that, and I was like, “Well, I hope this is good.””

In the end, it was good that he got involved!

Source: PCGamer