Elder Scrolls co-creator believed bugs were a necessary evil for Bethesda's massive RPGs: "I think the trade-off has proven to be acceptable by the fans"

Every time a Bethesda RPG launches, even the studio’s most stalwart fans know to prepare themselves for an array of bugs ranging from the amusing to the infuriating. But that’s not a modern problem, as the bugs have been around ever since the first Elder Scrolls title launched way back in 1994. Series co-creator Vijay Lakshman figured these issues were more or less inevitable when you built RPGs of this scale.

“The Elder Scrolls was (and continues to be) a very complex system of statistical generation of appropriate events,” Lakshman, who served as lead designer on The Elder Scrolls: Arena, said in an interview for the January 2014 issue of GamesTM. “This kind of game is difficult to test because you simply cannot duplicate every test instance. That being said, this system gives you an open-ended world and allows a player to play infinitely. I think the trade-off has proven to be acceptable by the fans.”

Arguably, the glitches were a lot worse in the ’90s, when players weren’t guaranteed to have internet access and you didn’t get patches automatically distributed through a launcher like Steam. Bethesda did issue some patches, and those were rolled into the later Deluxe Edition release, but many of the players who bought the buggier launch version of the game were simply out of luck.

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Still, Bethesda might’ve earned a little slack because of how small it was at the time. “Back then we had small testing budgets and most of the testing was done by me and a small team of high school interns,” Lakshman explained. “It was both crazy and inspiring that such a small team could’ve gotten so much done in a relatively short space of time.”