Skyrim Dev Recounts How a Pesky Bee Conspired to Ruin the Game's Opening Cart Ride

Skyrim Dev Recounts How a Pesky Bee Conspired to Ruin the Game's Opening Cart Ride

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Richard Walker

Now the subject of many a meme, the intro to 2011's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with its infamous cart ride, has since passed into video game legend. But, the sequence was much harder to make than you might think, with one former developer on the game recalling how difficult the opening segment was to create.

“So, I have a story about the Skyrim Intro and how hard game development is,” Skyrim artist Nate Purkeypile tweeted. “That intro is famous now, but back then, it was just that one thing that we had to keep working and working on forever. I lost track of how many times I've seen that cart ride. Easily hundreds.”

Purkeypile then goes into detail in a fairly lengthy thread, noting how a simple cart ride transformed into a colossal headache for the dev team. This was thanks to it being physically simulated, rather than a straightforward ‘on-rails’ affair, which “meant that all kinds of things would cause the cart to start to freak out and fly off the road,” he said.

“Maybe the road was too bumpy. Maybe there was just a physics bug. Maybe somebody accidentally put a rock too close to the road. The cart had a path it wanted to follow, but that doesn't mean it was a path it COULD follow. Big difference.", the thread continues. “Well one time, riding that cart yet again, the cart starts to shake violently and all of a sudden WHOOSH! The cart goes up into the sky like a rocket ship. Like WAY up there.”

Purkeypile notes that “something was telling that cart to just fuck right off and to get off that road,” adding that the issue didn't seem to happen every time, leading developers uncertain of what exactly was happening. Eventually, the culprit was identified as pesky bee,  a particularly irksome bug causing it to become “an immovable force of nature”, according to Purkeypile.

“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. 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,” he explains. “Meaning, that bee was an immovable force of nature if it ever happened to cross the path of the cart. The cart wanted to move down the road. The bee did not want to move. So up the cart goes!”

Of course, we all know that the problem was eventually resolved, and that cart ride lives on as one of many memorable sequences in Skyrim, but it's still a sobering story of how many problems developers can run into during the making of a game, especially one as ambitious as The Elder Scrolls V.

“So game development is hard,” Purkeypile's Twitter thread concludes. “Every time you fix one thing, you might be breaking another. This is especially true about open world games. Yet, that interplay of all the systems is what ends up making them all super interesting.”

While Skyrim was plagued by a litany of bugs upon its November 2011 launch, it's widely considered to be an RPG masterpiece, our own review at the time granting one of the highest scores we've ever handed out.

Comments
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  • people actually remember the cart ride? i thought that was just boring bit that you were forced to sit through before the real fun began...
  • @1 Guess you haven’t seen all the memes...
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