The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim continues to captivate players for many years. This surprises the creators themselves.
Recently, lead designer of TES V Skyrim, Bruce Nesmith, admitted during a conversation with FRVR that he is "always amazed" by the project's continued popularity:
"By all accounts, some other game should have eclipsed it a year later. And then two more years passed, three, five, ten. The question arises: \"What the *** is going on here?\""
Bruce recalled how Todd Howard once showed them the game's metrics, confirming its popularity:
"Todd even went to meetings and showed us information (details of which I cannot reveal to you) about how many people are playing it. I thought: \"Are you kidding me?\" Seriously, even after so many years?"
Bruce attributes Skyrim's popularity to the fact that there are no analogues — the developers presented such a concept of the world that no one has been able to repeat so far, and the presence of bugs only benefited it:
"I think that in Skyrim, the open world was implemented in a way that no one had done before, and few have tried to do it since. And one of the things that we accepted, and that many other developers don't accept, is the presence of \"quirks\". Strange things will happen. And if you say it's okay, you can get that diamond.
However, if you try to smooth everything out and make sure that there are no oddities, which people sometimes call bugs, you will lose some of that magic. And we didn't make that decision consciously. It just happened somehow. You know, we kind of prioritize functionally and say: \"Okay, this bug is acceptable. This behavior is not ideal, but we can live with it, because look what we get\"".
