Shortly before the launch of the classic The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a developer implemented realistic ants that nearly destroyed the game due to its severe slowdown.
Why ants in Skyrim? Skyrim is a highly detailed game for its release time. In addition to countless NPCs with their own backstories, the vibrant world of Tamriel was particularly impressive. Animals that fled in danger or insects that buzzed around – Bethesda made every effort to create a lively world, but there should have been even more.
Developer Jeff Gardiner wanted to create an even more realistic world and said (via PCGamer): “It’s the feeling that there’s a living world out there and things are constantly happening.”
“Why is the game running so slow?”
How did the ants destroy the game? Developer and designer Mark Teare was too enthusiastic about the details and implemented ants that caused a significant drop in game performance. He implemented them as “shadow casters.”
This meant that every light source had to calculate how the ant reacted to it and cast shadows. An action that required an enormous amount of computing power. And this was despite the fact that the ants were mostly not visible – which caused problems.
It wasn’t just ants that were the problem: Developers were also asking elsewhere: “Why is the game running so slow?” It turned out that another developer had programmed a special ability for butterflies.
If the player had flowers in their inventory, the butterflies were supposed to smell them and possibly follow the player. While this could have been a great gimmick, it also consumed a lot of computing power.
This required a script that had every butterfly near the player “check” whether the player had flowers in their inventory. This was also not conducive to the performance of the game.
The fact that several things were still uncertain before the release that we love about Skyrim today is also proven by the following story. The popular werewolves almost didn’t make it into the game if not for 2 developers secretly working overtime to ensure that the favorite creature makes it into Skyrim.
