In an interview with KIWI TALKZ, developer Dennis Mejillones talked about working at Bethesda on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Together with another developer, he saved a creature from being cut from the game: the werewolf.
Which creatures are we talking about? The werewolves are powerful creatures in Skyrim. Players can become one themselves by completing the Companions questline. Infected with lycanthropy, players can transform into a werewolf at any time and slay their enemies with bare claws.
The werewolves were “really bad”
Why shouldn’t there be werewolves? According to Dennis Mejillones, the original concept of werewolves was “really bad”. They were essentially just humans with a dog head. It was a kind of Khajiit, just in dog form.
With this concept, Bethesda did not want werewolves in their game and discarded the idea for a while.
Developers secretly work overtime
This is what the developers did: Developers Dennis Mejillones and his colleague Jeremy Bryant were not satisfied with that. Secretly, they worked on another demo of the werewolves outside of their working hours.
They came up with a new concept for the creatures. They should not be normal humans, but must truly be monsters. Just like they are depicted in other media.
Dennis Mejillones states in the interview:
I basically designed a large, animalistic werewolf, and Jeremy and I worked on getting it into the game. We really did it secretly – we stayed late at night, did everything possible to get a playable demo together. I remember we kept it very, very quiet.
Eventually, they presented their new concept and demo to Todd Howard himself. He was thrilled and included the werewolves, as we know them now, in Skyrim. Todd Howard even ignored the objections and concerns of other developers who still doubted the werewolves.
You can watch the entire interview on YouTube here:
In conclusion, Dennis Mejillones says that the idea was probably only taken because he could present a playable demo. If it had only stayed at models, the werewolves wouldn’t have made it into the role-playing game.
Working at Bethesda doesn’t seem to have always been satisfactory for all developers. This developer left the studio because there were simply too many meetings he had to attend: He left Bethesda because there were too many meetings – Now he is making an open world that is much larger than Skyrim
