Everyone knows it, almost everyone loves it: The intro sequence of Skyrim in the carriage has become famous beyond the game. Numerous memes refer to the strong opening scene that set the tone for the role-playing game. What most don’t know: It was a catastrophic design decision.
How cutscenes are made:
- For film and television, cameras capture the movement of people and objects. Camera movements and angles create effects.
- Most intros for video games are created from 3D models in a 3D world. The objects and all movements are scripted.
- This gives the objects attributes that simulate speed, transparency, material, color, texture, mass, and more.
- In the real world, physics is naturally present, while in virtual worlds, the computer calculates the physics.
What is shown in the famous intro of Skyrim? Your hero in Skyrim wakes up in a carriage. As a prisoner, he is being transported and gets his first impression of the game world. This relatively simple action has thrilled players worldwide because it contains far more than the first impression suggests.
The game world in Skyrim is fascinating, the trailer for the title is still eye-catching today:
Why did this become a downfall for the Skyrim intro? To represent a scene like in Skyrim, there are several options. One of the most commonly used methods is invisible tracks on which the object moves, ignoring the rest of the game’s physics. Animations that do not interact with the game world could also have been an option.
Instead, Bethesda decided to physically simulate the carriage and actually let it drive through the game world. As a result, all objects in the way had an impact on the carriage.
What is the problem? If every object can affect another object, unforeseen problems arise. Amusing glitches where cars, bodies and items are catapulted through the game world have already been experienced by many players in various games. Nevertheless, some titles continue to claim realistic physics.
Nate Purkepyle, former developer at Bethesda, recounts: “When I was working on the carriage, it started to shake violently and suddenly it shot off like a rocket into the sky.”
No one at Bethesda understood why the carriage suddenly shot off
Can’t you just remove the objects? Yes and no. For developers, it is difficult to find the object that triggers the error. Sometimes nothing happens at all, and the carriage continues without any problems. Then the error appears only on the second or third attempt, as Nate explains: “It doesn’t always happen. No one knew what was going on.”
Bees made the carriage unstable
What were the consequences? The developers worked for months on a solution and found a particularly strange bug: The altered collision attribute of the in-game bees caused the physics that allowed players to collect flying bees to collide with the carriage.
Nate on this: “The carriage wanted to move along the road, but the bee didn’t want that, so the carriage took off and flew away.” Why Bethesda chose this method remains unknown to Nate Purkepyle to this day.
The problem with the carriage has long been solved, and Nate concludes:
Developing video games is difficult. Every time you solve a problem in an open-world game, something else may stop working. The interaction of all systems is just super interesting.
This article originally appeared on the gaming site 3DJuegos, our partner. 3DJuegos, like MeinMMO, GameStar, and GamePro, belongs to the Webedia network. We translated it into German.
