A Skyrim dev broke the game before launch when they made thousands of tiny ants cast individual shadows: ‘Why is the game running so slow?’

Bethesda RPGs are typically jam-packed with tiny details that most players will never notice, but which all contribute to the sense that you’re existing in this reactive, believable world. “It’s not just that I kill someone with a sword and there’s a reaction to the crime,” says former Bethesda producer Jeff Gardiner. “It’s the sense that there’s this living world around you and things happen.”

Gardiner left Bethesda in 2021 and founded Wyrdsong developer Something Wicked Games, but after 15 years with the company, he’s got plenty of stories. He recalls how much freedom the teams were given, and how, once they were finished with their assigned tasks, they were “free to do the cool stuff”, which blessed Fallout and The Elder Scrolls with all their tiny details.

But this could sometimes create problems. “Those also result in some of the headaches at the end of the game, when you’re trying to ship,” Gardiner says. One headache stemmed from Skyrim’s nosy butterflies.

“They put butterflies in Skyrim, and they put a system in where the butterflies would smell flowers in your inventory and start following you around the game. But it was very expensive—by this I mean there was a lot of processing that had to happen, because all the butterflies in the game had to detect whether or not the player had flowers. And we were like, ‘Why is the game running slow?’ And then you spend hours figuring out, ‘Oh, it’s because so-and-so put the script in the game that makes it so, if you’re carrying flowers, butterflies are attracted to you.'”

Coincidentally, ants created a similar problem. Gardiner remembers how artist Mark Teare added these wee beasties to the game, but he accidentally “made them shadow casters by mistake, meaning the light had to cast a shadow”. Back then, shadow casting was “the most expensive thing in the rendering”, so it caused another headache. “Thousands of ants that you can barely see, casting little tiny shadows.”

They may have caused some issues, but these are fond memories for Gardiner. “That’s the fun of it,” he says. “The beauty of Bethesda was, because of the success of our games, our parent company, Zenimax, basically left us alone. We set our own internal milestones, our own goals, and as long as we earned the trust of them, they left us alone. Which is so important as a creative.”