Whether or not you played The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of Besthesda Game Studios' most popular titles, you probably know of the iconic "you're finally awake" scene, which plays at the start of the game. While the scene is remembered fondly, a former developer recently detailed how the most iconic scene in the game caused headaches for the development team.
The news comes from Nate Purkeypile, a former developer at Bethesda, who created a Twitter thread explaining how Skyrim's intro caused many issues for the development team. Purkeypile explains how the developers could not figure out why the cart would suddenly lose control. "Something was telling that cart to just f*ck right off and to get off that road... Nobody knew what was going on at first," Purkeypile tweeted.
What was the culprit exactly? Well, it turns out that the issue was a bug — as in a virtual bug in the game and not a software bug — that was causing the cart to freak out and start flying off the road.
"So it turns out there was another bug where the bee in the game couldn't be picked up. So then some potions couldn't be made," he tweeted. "That bug got fixed. Only the type of collision put on the bee didn't just let it get picked up. It also made it collide into things."
The issue with this digital bee, as Purkeypile notes, is that it was an "immovable force of nature." Meaning that if the cart and the bee crossed paths at a particular moment in the game, it would cause the cart to freak out and get flung off the road, like a medieval rocket ship.
While the story is quite funny, I think it is important to express that this is a good example of why game development is no cakewalk.
Purkeypile never did explain how this literal bug was fixed, perhaps bees were removed from the area during the cutscene, but it's yet another story in Skyrim's saga. Read IGN's original Skyrim review here where we encountered no unmovable bees.
Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
Continue reading...
The news comes from Nate Purkeypile, a former developer at Bethesda, who created a Twitter thread explaining how Skyrim's intro caused many issues for the development team. Purkeypile explains how the developers could not figure out why the cart would suddenly lose control. "Something was telling that cart to just f*ck right off and to get off that road... Nobody knew what was going on at first," Purkeypile tweeted.
What was the culprit exactly? Well, it turns out that the issue was a bug — as in a virtual bug in the game and not a software bug — that was causing the cart to freak out and start flying off the road.
"So it turns out there was another bug where the bee in the game couldn't be picked up. So then some potions couldn't be made," he tweeted. "That bug got fixed. Only the type of collision put on the bee didn't just let it get picked up. It also made it collide into things."
The issue with this digital bee, as Purkeypile notes, is that it was an "immovable force of nature." Meaning that if the cart and the bee crossed paths at a particular moment in the game, it would cause the cart to freak out and get flung off the road, like a medieval rocket ship.
While the story is quite funny, I think it is important to express that this is a good example of why game development is no cakewalk.
Purkeypile never did explain how this literal bug was fixed, perhaps bees were removed from the area during the cutscene, but it's yet another story in Skyrim's saga. Read IGN's original Skyrim review here where we encountered no unmovable bees.
Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
Continue reading...