A lead developer of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has already played his own game for around 1,000 hours, but about 950 of those hours it was “broken.” However, this is not only the case with Bethesda games, but happens in every studio that produces open-world games of this caliber.
Who is this developer? Bruce Nesmith joined Bethesda Game Studios in 1995 and left in 1998, before returning in 2004 for the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion . He even took on the position of lead designer for Skyrim.
In 2021, Nesmith left the company again. The last game he worked on there was Starfield. In an interview with the YouTube channel MinnMax, he talked about the origins of the space game, the evolution of Bethesda, and many other topics.
In this interview, the question also arose regarding how game developers draw new strength for the next project between large projects. These are usually quite exhausting for the team, and a major reason for this is, according to Nesmith, the repetitive nature of game development.
Developers spend hundreds of hours in a broken game
What does the developer mean by that? Nesmith explains: “I have probably played Skyrim for 1,000 hours. 950 of those hours it was broken.” That was it already by definition: “We were still developing the game, it couldn’t be anything other than broken.”
This is the reality of such large projects in any studio, not just Bethesda. “In every studio, you spend these 950 hours playing a broken game. And on top of that, you play the same damned thing over and over again…,” Nesmith says.
What helps, according to the developer, is variety:
Now the project is finished and we switch over to Fallout, or we are working on this DLC. We don’t start from the beginning of the process, and that’s the exciting part. And that actually helps to recover.
At this point, Nesmith praises his former employer. Bethesda is very good at giving its developers time to recover at the end of a project. One would not be placed directly from an exhausting project to the next.
At the end of a project, a lot is celebrated according to Nesmith, people take well-deserved vacations, and there is a “very relaxed atmosphere.” The studio is equally good at giving its developers something fresh to sink their teeth into.
The largest game that the Bethesda Game Studios is currently working on is likely The Elder Scrolls VI. Its release could even happen quite unexpectedly, like the remake of Oblivion. At least, if it depends on Todd Howard: The head of Bethesda can imagine releasing The Elder Scrolls 6 like Oblivion surprisingly, but that will take some time
