Skyrim lead admits “Bethesda games could have a higher degree of polish”, but some jank “could be forgiven” because of how much you can do in the RPGs

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith admits in a new interview that Bethesda games aren’t the most polished, but reckons fans are forgiving because of how much freedom the studio’s signature RPGs afford them.

Bethesda admitting its games are janky is hilariously belated; most games have bugs, but the bugs crawling around this particular studio’s otherwise beloved games has long-since become one of the most prominent memes in gaming. This isn’t the first time a Bethesda dev has acknowledged this aspect of the studio’s games, but as far as I can recall, it is one of the most explicitly phrased examples.

Nesmith told VideoGamer: “I will be the first person to say that Bethesda games could have a higher degree of polish.”

It’s very much worth noting that Nesmith retired from Bethesda in 2021, so he doesn’t necessarily have to answer to the higher ups at the studio or its parent company, Xbox, when he says stuff like this. That said, he does couch his statement with something of a justification for Bethesda’s lack of polish.

“They have benefited, and when I was there I benefited, from providing such a wide and vast array of gameplay that a certain amount of lack of polish could be forgiven,” Nesmith says. “Having an NPC run in place in front of a wall for a little while became acceptable because of the 17 things you could do with that NPC, whereas most games you’d be able to do two.”

Nesmith says there’s a balancing act in which developers need to weigh the cost of fixing a list of bugs they’ll never finish against a fast-approaching release deadline.

“Are you willing to let the game sit for six more months and be delayed six more months in order to try to polish it? You’re still not going to get perfection, it’s just going to be better,” he says. “So at some point you have to make the decision to publish, and to publish something you know has bugs. You’ve got a list of them—all 700 or whatever—and they’re out there anyway because I can’t fix them all.”

Just last month, Nesmith said it’ll be “almost impossible” for The Elder Scrolls 6 to meet fan expectations even though he thinks it’ll “undoubtedly” be “an amazing game.” Now he adds a little more color to those comments by saying “the players’ expectations are that the game is flawless, that it has no bugs.”

What Bethesda should do, in Nesmith’s view, is ask itself “‘how can we get as close as possible to that expectation. How can we make it so these guys don’t hate us for what’s wrong and love us for what’s right?'”

On that note, here’s everything we know about The Elder Scrolls 6.