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Psst, hey kid, what are the big changes you’d like to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel? Because all have them, don’t we? We’ve all got our big lists for Todd Howard: Five Easy Ways to Turn This Enormously Profitable Ship Around.
You know who else has some changes he’d like to see in Sentinel? Bethesda alum and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, who recently sat down with The Examined Game and said that the things he’d really like Bethesda to knuckle down on in TES 6 are mounts and ladders.
“I’d like to see a much better implementation of mounts,” said Nesmith. “That’s been a common complaint; I’m not alone in that.” But, at least back when Nesmith was hands-on developing games like this, mounts can be hard to get right. “They’re really tricky, there’s a lot of hard decisions to be made in those.
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“You can ride a horse, but that’s all you can do in Skyrim. That’s it, you just ride the horse. Well, I should be able to do some other things too, maybe fight on the horse, or have it fight with me, you know, stuff like that.” In fairness, Skyrim does have some fairly rudimentary mounted combat—though players had to wait for it to be added in a patch back in the day—but I suspect Nesmith would like to see something a bit less awkward in future Elder Scrolls games.
I imagine a lot of players would echo Nesmith on mounts. I’m less sure they share his concern about ladders, which strikes me as a very charming and very game-designer-y fixation to have. “You don’t climb up and down ladders [in current Elder Scrolls games]. It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don’t climb up and down ladders!”
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But you know what? I’m on board. Not having proper ladders, says Nesmith, “really limits the art team in terms of how they can do multi-layer things. You know, all the ladders in Skyrim, you click on the ladder, poof you’re at the top, or you have to climb a stair.”
Advanced ladder tech has its costs, though. “To do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions, which our programmers very legitimately put in front of us, and said ‘You gimme answers to these, I’ll tell you how much programming time it’s gonna take to make them’. And that caused problems, right there”.
There are, it turns out, a whole lot of ladder questions that arise if you try to implement them in your game. If two people use a ladder at once, what happens? How do NPCs make strategic decisions about them? How do you create animations and behaviours for characters getting hit while climbing, or dying while climbing? All these things and more pile up, which is why Bethesda decided to spend its time on other stuff, historically.
Now, of course, it’s not Nesmith’s problem, and the man wants his mounts and ladders. Bravely, as someone else who also does not have to design The Elder Scrolls 6, I say give them to him.