It was constantly on the chopping block for the project. Originally the civil war was a much bigger thing that you got involved in, with these big battles, and some of it remains, but the battle parts ended up being pretty small. “A lot of our games have this main quest, this big threat that gets resolved – and then you keep playing and you’re like, now what? We wanted to have a tension in the game world that didn’t necessarily go away. “There’s a civil war that’s going on in the game, and it was a great idea from our designers to have some backstory and conflict that didn’t necessarily get fully resolved,” explains Howard. Partly thanks to the fact that everyone involved had a good sense of what felt right for the world, there wasn’t actually that much that had to be cut as development went on, says Todd – though one element of Skyrim’s world was originally intended to be a much bigger part of it.
The Conan statue Todd Howard had on his desk during the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim. We wanted to ground everything in a reality that you believe, so that when the dragons and magic come in you feel it more.” “We kept using the term ‘epic reality’… it wasn’t super high fantasy, it felt very grounded, that was the tone we were going for. “To me that was the feeling of the game,” he says. We call that the glue, that’s the phrase we use … Once we’re going, once we have the world and the tone, our designers and everybody else are really in sync about what’s going to be appropriate.” Howard had a statue of Conan the Barbarian on his desk during early development that was a strong design inspiration. “We have so much stuff – landmass, locations, quests, themes – and it mustn’t feel like 50 different games, it has to come together. Working from a base of a map, concept art and music – “we always do music really early”, Todd says, “I find that’s a really good thing to get you into the mood and tone of a game” – the team began constructing the different regions of Skyrim: mountains, tundra, pine forests, settlements. Todd Howard, now Bethesda Game Studios’ director and executive producer, led development on Skyrim, as he had for all the Elder Scrolls games since 2000. If Oblivion felt like a Roman legend, and its intriguingly weird predecessor Morrowind resembled a tattered novel from an unknown author plucked from the back of the fantasy shelf at your local library, Skyrim is like one of those brutal Scandinavian folk stories where someone always gets an axe to the head. Its aesthetic is more Nordic: furs and leather, snow and stone. Unlike The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), a glossy, classical high-fantasy set in the most gilded area of the world of Tamriel, Skyrim is grimy and cold. Coming straight from wrapping up development on Fallout 3, a post-nuclear-apocalypse role playing game, the team quickly found a tone and direction that they were excited by. Skyrim was made at Bethesda Game Studios by a team of around 100 people – far fewer than the 400-strong team working on its forthcoming game, Starfield. At a wedding a few weeks ago, I met someone whose wife had played Skyrim as her first ever game a decade later, she’s still playing it. It’s still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it’s become a gaming in-joke. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. I s there anyone who’s played video games over the last 10 years who hasn’t played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons.
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