Bethesda’s RPGs are beloved for their depth, world-building, and intricate details—some of which players may never even notice. Former Bethesda producer Jeff Gardiner recently shared a story highlighting just how much creative freedom developers had when working on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—sometimes to hilarious, unintended consequences.
Gardiner, who left Bethesda in 2021 to found Wyrdsong developer Something Wicked Games, reflected on his 15 years with the company and the many quirks that emerged from the development process. According to him, the team had a lot of room to experiment. Once they completed their core tasks, they were encouraged to add “cool stuff” to make the worlds of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls feel more alive.
However, this creative freedom occasionally led to unexpected problems. One notable example involved butterflies. Developers initially gave these insects the ability to detect flowers in a player's inventory, making them follow the player around. But this feature turned out to be computationally expensive. “All the butterflies in the game had to detect whether or not the player had flowers,” Gardiner recalled. “And we were like, ‘Why is the game running slow?’” It took hours to figure out that this simple, immersive feature was affecting performance.
Yet, butterflies weren’t the only tiny creatures to cause big issues. Artist Mark Teare introduced ants into the game, aiming to add another layer of realism. However, he accidentally made them “shadow casters,” which meant that every single ant generated its own shadow. At a time when shadow rendering was one of the most resource-intensive processes in gaming, this small oversight had a massive impact. “Thousands of ants that you can barely see, casting little tiny shadows,” Gardiner explained. The issue significantly slowed down the game and had to be corrected before launch.
Despite these amusing technical hiccups, Gardiner looks back on these moments fondly. He credits Bethesda’s hands-off approach—thanks to the success of their games—for allowing developers to experiment freely. “That’s the fun of it,” he said. “The beauty of Bethesda was, because of the success of our games, our parent company, Zenimax, basically left us alone. We set our own internal milestones, our own goals, and as long as we earned the trust of them, they left us alone. Which is so important as a creative.”
While Skyrim’s pre-launch development had its share of bizarre bugs (both literal and figurative), it’s these small details and the passion of its developers that helped make it one of the most immersive RPGs of all time. And the next time your game runs unexpectedly slow, you might want to check for tiny shadow-casting ants.
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