Skyrim was getting ready to launch—it was mere weeks away—but former Bethesda producer Jeff Gardiner and the designers were in the midst of a disagreement over balance. This led Gardiner, who also had years of creative and design experience, to take matters into his own hands.
“I had this fight with the designers at the time,” says Gardiner. “They wanted to do things through data and simulations. And I was like, ‘But the player does things, like backs up and double taps’. 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.'”
Essentially: the AI was not acting like a human player. It was just attacking. Thus, Skyrim would only feel balanced for players who ignored a lot of basic combat mechanics. And Gardiner had already seen something like this happen in the previous Elder Scrolls, 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 on Skyrim, I came in and I went through and 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.'”
This was something he felt he could do, though, because he “had built respect with [the designers]”. But not all producers come from a design background, and so don’t get into the nitty gritty. “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.”
It’s been so long since I played Skyrim for the first time that I don’t recall if it ended up feeling balanced, though I do remember my first adventure having a lot of peaks and troughs—effortlessly slaughtering caves full of critters one minute, and then getting annihilated by vampires and dragons the next. And that’s what I want from an RPG.