„I had this fight with the designers at the time.” Skyrim's producer personally balanced one of the biggest RPG hits just before release
The producer of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Jeff Gardiner, talked about how he undertook the balancing of the hit game on his own a few weeks before the release.
Released in 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim turned out to be a big hit. However, it is unknown whether the cult RPG would have received such recognition if it weren't for the contribution of Jeff Gardiner in its improvements during the final stages before the release.
In an interview with PC Gamer, a Bethesda veteran revealed that a few weeks before the launch of Skyrim, there was a dispute between the producer and the rest of the team regarding the game's balance. According to Gardiner, the designers relied too heavily on "data and simulation," which didn't reflect the actual behavior of the players.
I had this fight with the designers at the time. They wanted to do things through data and simulations. […] And they would run AI simulations, where an NPC and a monster would fight each other, and if over 10 times the simulated player won more than 50%, then it was balanced. But I was like, 'They're not backing up. The AI only does so many things.'
Instead, the artificial intelligence was limited only to attack. Gardiner itted that he had seen something like this in the case of Oblivion.
So you had this problem in Oblivion with Clannfear, where they'd get you into these things called stun locks, which is the most frustrating thing to a player. But the AI, when it got stun-locked, would be doing something different than the player would be doing.
So Gardiner decided to take matters into his own hands and spent two weeks fine-tuning the balance of combat in Skyrim.
[…] I played the game with all these different archetypes, and then would tweak the creatures and the weapons and stuff. Right before it shipped I spent two weeks doing that and was like, 'Well, I hope this is good.' - he added.
The developer acknowledged that he was able to take such action due to his relevant experience and the respect he had earned from the designers. However, in his opinion, not all producers can engage in this way.
There's a lot of producers who don't, and there's probably a lot of producers who shouldn't. Not to cast stones against my fellow producers. I was in a unique position where I had done the creative work for a lot of years, and at a high level, where I was responsible for these decisions.
In the end, Skyrim achieved an average media score of 96/100 on Metacritic (and 8.6/10 from players), and on Steam, it boasts 94% positive reviews.
