Just two weeks before it launched, Bethesda producer Jeff Gardiner tweaked Skyrim because he didn’t trust AI player models.
Is Skyrim a perfect game? Absolutely not, but I think one place it does deserve some credit in is that when it works, it really works. But it’s entirely possible that there’s another universe out there where the game didn’t get some last minute tweaks that sound like it would have been a lot less fun of a game to play. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, senior producer on the game Jeff Gardiner shared that he tweaked Skyrim just two weeks before it even came out, all in the name of not relying on data models that didn’t behave how real people do.
“I had this fight with the designers at the time. They wanted to do things through data and simulations,” Gardiner explained. “And I was like, ‘But the player does things, like backs up and double taps’. And they would run AI simulations, where an NPC and a monster would fight each other, and if over 10 times the simulated player won more than 50%, then it was balanced. But I was like, ‘They’re not backing up. The AI only does so many things.'”
The point Gardiner was making at the time is that people are weird and they behave in particular, sometimes unpredictable ways, and in games can often be quite defensive, whereas the AI model was just attacking. In turn, that could have led to Skyrim being balanced towards combat focused players, but Gardiner had seen a similar issue on Oblivion.
“So you had this problem in Oblivion with Clannfear, where they’d get you into these things called stun locks, which is the most frustrating thing to a player. But the AI, when it got stun-locked, would be doing something different than the player would be doing. So on Skyrim, I came in and I went through and I played the game with all these different archetypes, and then would tweak the creatures and the weapons and stuff. Right before it shipped I spent two weeks doing that and was like, ‘Well, I hope this is good.'”
Still, it clearly worked out well enough as even more than a decade later, Skyrim is still one of the most popular and beloved games around. Let’s just hope that recent Elder Scrolls 6 mention was a proper sign of life so we can at least start playing something new.