The team constantly finds new ideas to tweak and polish

Mar 21, 2014 03:16 GMT  ·  By

The development team at Bethesda is often praised for the huge amount of content it has managed to include in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and one senior designer at the company says that part of the company’s secret is the way it approaches the creation of its titles.

Joel Burgess explained during a session at the Game Developers Conference called Level Design in a Day: How We Used Iterative Level Design to Ship Skyrim and Fallout 3 that, towards the end of the game development process, his company enters the so-called Ship with Shame iteration phase.

According to the developer, quoted by The Escapist, this represents the moment in the game creation process when the title is technically complete but would not make the company proud if it were launched in that state.

The polishing phase comes after that, and the developer says companies should understand that no game, be it Skyrim or Fallout 3, is ever complete and that studios should simply try to deliver the best experience they can, while staying ready to fix all problems that the community notices.

Burgess also explains that Bethesda does not value the concept of “crunch time,” when developers are asked to work longer hours in order to ship a game.

He says teams should aim to be smarter about how they use their resources and only force longer days on their employees when that’s the only thing holding back a potentially superb game experience.

Bethesda has traditionally been known for the scope of its games, both in the Elder Scrolls and the Fallout franchises, but they often also came with problems on launch day, which frequently took a number of patches before they were fully fixed.

Players often blame developers for problems with the titles they buy, but the sheer complexity of today’s video games often means that, on launch, new issues that were never visible during the development and the testing process could crop up.

Rumors suggest that at the moment the company is working on new entries for both the Elder Scrolls and the Fallout universes, with at least one of them set to be officially unveiled before the end of the year.

Before that moment, the company will support the launch of The Elder Scrolls Online, the MMO created by ZeniMax Online, which will be offered on the PC and Mac on April 4 and will also get Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions during summer.