Shortly before the launch of the classic The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a developer implemented realistic ants that almost destroyed the game because it slowly became.
Why should ants in Skyrim? Skyrim is a very detailed game for his release time. In addition to countless NPCs with its own background story, the lively world of Himmelsrand was particularly convincing. Animals that fled in the event of danger or insects that were floating around – Bethesda put everything on creating a lively world, but there should be more.
The developer Jeff Gardiner wanted to create a more realistic world and said (via PCGamer): “It is the feeling that there is a living world out there and things happen all the time.”
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“Why is the game going slowly?”
How did the ants destroy the game? The developer and designer Mark Teare meant too well with the details and implemented ants, which ensured that the performance of the game broke. He implemented them as “shadow launcher.”
This meant that every light source had to calculate how the ant reacted to it and throw shadows. An action that took up a lot of computing power. And that despite the fact that the ants could not be seen most of the time – that caused problems.
The problem was not just ants: The developers also wondered elsewhere: “Why is the game going slowly?” It turned out that another developer had programmed a special ability of the butterflies.
If the player had flowers in his inventory, the butterflies should smell and if necessary fly afterwards. Which might have been a great gimmick, but also took too much computing power.
Because this meant that a script had to be installed that every butterfly, near the player, had to “look” whether the player has flowers in his inventory. This was also not beneficial for the performance of the game.
The following story also proves that there was still a lot on the brink before the release, which we love about Skyrim today. The popular werewolves would almost not have made it into play if 2 developers had not secretly put overtime so that it could make the favorite creature in Skyrim.