Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith had a wide-ranging chat with The Examined Game recently, touching upon topics like the importance of institutional knowledge, what he liked about Baldur's Gate 3, and what he wants to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. But he also dropped a pithy maxim (and less pithy explanation) about his—and Bethesda's—approach to design in general. Here's what he said.
"If you look at the history of triple-A studios that do sequels… you'll see the best game in a sequence frequently was able to maintain a vision, and was very player-centric-forward: 'You're not playing my game, I'm making your game' kind of thing.
One of the things I've always felt, and [Bethesda] felt it too [is] once we've made a game, it's not ours anymore. It's yours. I, once upon a time, actually had a developer complain to me that the people playing his game—it wasn't anything Bethesda produced—were playing it wrong.
I immediately told him, 'they're not playing it wrong, they cannot play it wrong, it's their game. It's not yours anymore. However they are choosing to play it is the right way to play it'... If you embrace that on the developer side, you find yourself making all different kinds of content, both artistically and design, and for programming in terms of the systems that are available, so that everyone can play the game the way they want to".
I'm not sure I've ever heard a more succinct summation of the Bethesda school of game design than "You're not playing my game, I'm making your game". Accessibility, openness, a sanding down of edges that may scare off the normies (like ability scores and character classes—gone but not forgotten), and a general refusal to foreclose story branches or quest chains based on player decisions: these things are Bethesda to me.
In this maxim you find all the strengths and weaknesses of the studio's approach to open-world RPG design. On the one hand, the world is your oyster. If a questline is losing your interest, flip to another one. Don't like your build? Convert to something new. Bethesda's worlds are all-you-can-eat buffets and you have precisely zero dietary restrictions. True freedom!
And yet, and yet, to a certain kind of tedious grognard (me), it also leaves everything feeling a touch… limp—colourless in content and utterly unresponsive. You might be the head of every guild in the land and the bloodletter-in-chief of the local murder society, but the world is too shy to reply to it. After all, it can't. If your choices impacted things too hard you might experience a consequence, you might rub up against a rough edge, and then suddenly you might not be playing "your" game anymore.
