Skyrim veteran says he got into fights with his Bethesda colleagues over the RPG’s most notoriously heavy item: “You can’t just give the player everything they want”
A former Skyrim developer says he got in fights with colleagues over some of the RPG’s most notoriously heavy items.
In an interview with the Boss Rush Network podcast, Bethesda veteran Jeff Gardiner outlined his time as senior producer on Skyrim. Having previously worked on 2005’s Fantastic Four game, Gardiner says the degree of freedom he had when he arrived at Bethesda meant that he “got to shape a lot of those games.”
As a senior producer in the design department, Gardiner explains how “there was a small cabal of main tastemakers on Skyrim,” that he was part of along with Todd Howard, Emil Pagliarulo, and level designer Joel Burgess. That team aimed to work out what Bethesda needed to do to Skyrim in its last six months in development, and it’s something that Gardiner says was “a privilege and an honor to be a part of.”
He also says, however, that “you can thank me for why Dragon Bones weigh so much.” At a weight of 15, Dragon Bone is the heaviest crafting material in the game by a substantial margin. Frankly, it’s up there with some of the heaviest individual items in the entire game, with large weapons or heavy armor pieces being some of the few items that weigh more. The material is valuable but can only be crafted by players who have unlocked the required Smithing perk at level 100, and with all that weight, it’s not the kind of thing you want to be lugging around.
That’s all thanks to Gardiner, apparently. “I was like ‘something in the game has to be hard to carry’, so we made it Dragon Bones. I literally got in a fighting match with the lead producer over that. A shouting match. He was like, ‘This is terrible,’ and I said, ‘No, not everything can be that way. They’re big. They’re supposed to be heavy, and there’s got to be a penalty at some point. You can’t just give the player everything they want all the time’.”
Gardiner won that particular battle, but there are plenty that he didn’t win. He fought to prevent friendly fire from spells killing companions – “you load Lydia up with 400lbs of crap, and she falls down a hole, and she’s dead, and you lose all your shit” – but says that “the designers made me keep it in.” While he “lost those fights,” however, he would eventually succeed. “Fallout I didn’t lose,” he laughs. “Fallout 4, I was the lead producer, so they had to listen to me more.” Still, at least you know who to curse next time you’re trying to make yourself some fancy Dragonbone armor.