Skyrim video shows fantastic unused features: colossal crabs, spear fighting, house building

This video is from Todd Howard's speech at the DICE 2012 keynote in Las Vegas, spotted on Eurogamer . It shows the results of a week-long Bethesda game jam, in which developers were given one task: "Do anything you want, and add it to the game." The results were impressive. Enormous crab monsters, a lycanthrope skill tree, seasonal foliage, moving platforms, adoption and house building were just a few of the ideas the team came up with.

Our first reaction to most of them is "why didn't you just PUT THIS IN THE GAME?" Watching spear-fighting work for five seconds on a demo reel doesn't sum up the number of bugs that it might cause over the course of 50 hours, of course, but surely some of them could be slotted in without too much trouble.

Todd Howard mentions in the video that these features could appear in future updates. If they're not, Skyrim's modding community is bound to take up the challenge. The release of the Skyrim Creation Kit yesterday has given even more encouragement to Skyrim modders. There are now more than 700 mods currently listed on the Steam Workshop , check out our round-up of the best and weirdest Steam Workshop creations for highlights.

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.