With excitement for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel slowly climbing up again following the game’s official title reveal, former design director for Bethesda, Bruce Nesmith, spoke about what he would like to see in the RPG. In a recent episode of the Examined Game podcast, Nesmith – who previously worked on major releases like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim – said that he had two distinct things he would like to see in the upcoming RPG: improved mounts and better ladders.
Discussing the mount system in Skyrim, Nesmith mentioned how “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 other things with the horse too, like maybe fight on the horse, or have it fight with me, or you know, stuff like that.” Mounts in The Elder Scrolls games have traditionally involved little utility aside from traversal, and the addition of a mounted combat system or even a pet/ally system would be a major addition to the series.
As for ladders, Nesmith mentioned how the mundane objects were surprisingly useless in Skyrim, since “you don’t climb up and down ladders. It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don’t climb up and down ladders, which 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, and poof, you’re at the top. Or you have to climb a stair.”
This limitation with ladders in Skyrim likely came about due to the fact that the developers at Bethesda were working with much weaker hardware: the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Both consoles were known for only having 512 MB of RAM each, and even their processing power was limited due to their unique architectures – the PS3 was built on the Cell architecture while the Xbox 360 used PowerPC. Modern consoles, on the other hand, are capable of much more thanks to their 16 GB of RAM, faster processors, and x86 processors – the latter playing a major role in making development easier than having to work with the potential headaches of something like Cell.
Nesmith further spoke about the difficulties in developing Skyrim where, “to do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions that our programmers very legitimately put in front of us and said, ‘you give me answers to these, I’ll tell you how much programming time it’s going to take to make them.’ and that caused problems right there.”
While ladders are relatively simple objects even in games, with titles as far back as the 1990s being able to make them functional, the fact that The Elder Scrolls titles tend to have expansive worlds that give players incredible amounts of freedom likely adds constraints where there wouldn’t be any otherwise.
As for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, Bethesda itself hasn’t yet announced a release date, and according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, it’s still more than two years away at this point. The studio itself has said that it is going to need more time before details are revealed.
