Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, who also contributed “significantly” to both Oblivion and Fallout 3, has shared two things he’d like to see in The Elder Scrolls 6 now that it finally has a name—Sentinel.
As reported by Insider Gaming, in a discussion with Steven Lake for The Examined Game, Nesmith was asked what things he would like to see from TES6, and he had a pretty simple answer: mounts and ladders.
“The number one thing I would like to see—actually, I’ll give you two things, because they’ve been missing or short in previous games because we just didn’t have the bandwidth to do them,” Nesmith said. “I’d like to see a much better implementation of mounts, and it’s been a common complaint. I’m not alone in that, but it turns out mounts are tricky.”
Skyrim’s horses could vertically walk up mountains, but occasionally their legs would give out, and they’d turn into Eldritch horrors that flung in all directions as their limbs spooled like spaghetti. They were so janky that it became a pretty common tactic to rush for Shadowmere just to have an immortal steed that could weather the game’s physics engine. Then again, in 2011, how many games had good mounts?
“They’re really tricky,” Nesmith continued. “There’s a lot of hard decisions to be made in those. But you can ride a horse, but that’s all you can do in Skyrim. That’s it. You just ride the horse. Well, I should be able to do some other things to the horse to like maybe fight on the horse or have it fight with me or, you know, stuff like that.”
Nesmith is right that they should improve mounts and add more versatility to what you can do with them, but after The Elder Scrolls Online showed how many options the series can offer, it’d be a shame to go back to horses. Especially in Hammerfell. Maybe we could get better mounts and camels in one fell swoop.
Then there are ladders. A game dev’s worst nightmare, except for maybe doors. “The other one is a very strange one, which they’ve been sort of nibbling at for a while is you don’t climb up and down ladders,” Nesmith said. “It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don’t climb up and down ladders, which really limits the art team in terms of how they can do multi-layer things. You know, 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.”
Morrowind handed us levitation magic to reach wizards in their giant mushroom towers, which, bizarrely, I imagine would be easier to program than ladders. But it would certainly be nice to have verticality in an Elder Scrolls game that doesn’t boil down to snail’s pace noclip. Think layered cities, more interesting dungeons, buildings with upper floors, attics in your house.
Whatever Bethesda does with Sentinel, it’s interesting that even Skyrim’s lead designer wants to give players more freedom in the next game, something they’ve been banging on about for years.
- Released
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2026
- ESRB
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m
- Developer(s)
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Bethesda Game Studios
- Publisher(s)
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Bethesda Softworks
