The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is closely approaching its 14th anniversary, and it’s still one of the most popular games around. At any given time, the ageing RPG has tens of thousands of players concurrently enjoying the game.
There’s an eternal popularity to Skyrim that has simply failed to drop, even in the wake of multiple Bethesda releases. At the time of publication, Skyrim: Special Edition has more than 12 times the active concurrent player count of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered on Steam.
Speaking on next week’s episode of the FRVR Podcast, Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith revealed that he’s “eternally shocked” at the constant popularity of the RPG a decade-and-a-half after release. Released before the rise of live-service games, Skyrim shouldn’t still be as popular as it is, and yet it will never die.
“I’m eternally shocked by that,” Nesmith said. “By all rights, a year later, some other game should have eclipsed it. And then two years later, three years later, five, ten. It’s like ‘what the hell is going on here?’
“Todd [Howard] would even go to these meetings and show us information, which I can’t give you the details of, about how many people are playing it. It’s like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me?’ Seriously, still, ten years later.”
“Very, very few games have mastered that because open world is now almost a cliché statement. ‘Oh yeah, we have open world.’”
Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith on the popularity of Skyrim’s world
But why is Skyrim so popular to this day, even in the wake of other Bethesda games like Fallout 4 and Starfield? In Nesmith’s mind. It’s because of the game’s open world, a true open world with reactive characters that respond to your actions. While every game is open world now, no game is open world like Skyrim is.
“I think Skyrim did the open world in a way that nobody had ever done before and very few people have really tried to do since,” Nesmith explained. “And one of those things that we accepted, which a lot of developers struggle to accept, is that this means you’re going to have quirkiness. You’re going to have weird stuff happen. And if you say that’s okay, you can get this diamond.
“But if you try to smooth everything out and make sure that you don’ t have any of these quirky things that people call bugs in some cases, you’re going to lose some of that magic. And we didn’t make that as a conscious decision. It just sort of happened. You know, we kind of prioritise functionally and ‘well, okay, that bug’s acceptable. This behaviour is less than ideal, but we can live with it because look what we’re getting over here.’”
Nesmith explained that, unlike pretty much any other game, Skyrim had a world that was so engaging that it “became free to them” saying “you could literally go anywhere”. A lot of games claim that, and some gamers will clown on Skyrim for having invisible walls and not being able to actually climb a lot of its mountains, but even 14 years on, it still feels more like an adventure than any other open world game.
“We didn’t put anything off limits. We didn’t try to manage the experience,” he explained. “ We let it be your experience, it was a player-driven experience. And very, very few games have mastered that because open world is now almost a cliché statement. ‘Oh yeah, we have open world.’”
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Skyrim wasn’t about just having an open world, it’s not about having a checklist of things to do, although you can certainly play it that way. At the end of the day, it’s a toolbox for you to do whatever you want with the correct AI and physics simulations to drive that open world.
Nesmith is entirely correct, there is no open world like Skyrim, not even by Bethesda, and as the game reaches yet another anniversary, it likely won’t be bested until the release of The Elder Scrolls 6… whenever that actually is.
