Skyrim was a revolutionary game when it was first released in 2011, and its influence on open-world game design can still be seen in new games like Horizon Forbidden West. However, Skyrim is now two console generations old, and as games continue to advance in technical design and scripting, cracks which players would have ignored while first playing Skyrim are standing out more and more.
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Searching through Skyrim community posts online will almost certainly yield some kind of humorous or bizarre glitch or bug. One such example found recently by Reddit user aussi_88 is a fairly common bug among Skyrim’s NPCs which sees them sitting without a chair under them. The Reddit users screenshot shows elderly Whiterun resident Bergritte Battle-Born engaged in an indefinite power-squat that puts the player’s adventuring Dragonborn to shame.
The character’s casual demeanor as if really sitting on a bench does give the humorous sense that this squat position is the easiest thing in the world for Bergritte Battle-Born, and that she is simply showing off in front of the comparatively weak hero. Most funny glitches in Skyrim have to do with how the NPCs or animal AI interact with the world of the game.
Skyrim is such a huge game and the scripting of its NPCs is such a web of interaction possibilities that all it takes is one small interruption that the developer didn’t anticipate for things to go awry. Clearly Bergritte Battle-Borns script knew to walk over and sit down on a bench, but whether the player interrupted this process at the wrong time, or the path-finding simply got confused, the character ended up in a squat looking at the bench she was meant to sit on.
This kind of bug was reasonable in a 2011 game as massive and ambitious as Skyrim. Games released today, though, have equally, if not more, complicated scripting, but players now expect a much more polished experience. CD Projekt Red recently announced it was switching game engines for the next Witcher game due to the need for a more reliable platform than its aging in-house engine could provide. It is unknown yet if Bethesda is switching engines for The Elder Scrolls 6, or remaining with the Creation Engine, but it could run into the same issue.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - Anniversary Edition is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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