Venture into the plains outside of Whiterun or Solitude, and you’ll likely encounter one of the most memorable NPCs in the Elder Scrolls series. Anytime after 10:00 p.m., Skyrim’s ghostly Headless Horseman will trot past, leaving a trail of intrigue and mystery as he leads you toward Hamvir’s Rest. It’s a wonderful homage to fantasy and role-playing tropes, cleverly woven into Skyrim by Fallout and Starfield creator Bethesda. But the Headless Horseman hides a terrifying secret: his programming and scripts mean he’s bound to suffer, again and again, every time he appears in Skyrim.
Emergiendo del mismo archivo de secrets de déarrollo de juegos que el camión con cámara voladora de GTA 5, par hacer que el jinete sin cabeza de Skyrim funcione, Bethesda tuvo que ser bastante creativa y someter al pobre NPC a una muerte espantosa, una y otra time.
Steve Lee, a level designer who worked on Dishonored 2 and BioShock Infinite, recently interviewed three other level designers behind the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. Justin Schram and Joel Burgess, who collaborated on both Fallout 4 and Skyrim, reveal the dark technical tricks needed to render the Headless Horseman…well, headless.
“Joel had just figured out how to make a headless character,” Schram begins. “I forgot how you found out about that.”
“Well,” Burgess explains, “you would call a script command at some point in his generation. It had to be done at the right time. And you could dismember body parts by script, and it didn’t actually kill them. If you were there at the time, you would see their heads exploding, so we had to pop them into corners and stuff.”
“So I spawned this rider,” Schram continues, “and gave him this little story and a place in the world to go. We put a ghost shader on it. His head explodes in the background. And then he travels up to this single point, his grave in the world. It’s a simple, stupid thing, but I’m so proud of it.”
Essentially, Skyrim’s Headless Horseman is just a normal NPC, with a head. But when he appears, somewhere offscreen, there’s a little command that blows his head off, but he’s not written to die. And ready. Instant Headless Horseman.
It’s one of those complex game development solutions that gamers would never notice, but actually makes weird sense. If you have a system for exploding heads, why bother creating a whole new headless character model? Discreetly pop the head out of an existing head.
Nate Purkeypile, a global Fallout and Skyrim artist, also describes a famous and troubling Bethesda bug involving characters that the games had marked as “essential” to the main story and therefore needed to stay alive.
“There was a bug we had sometimes where a character would be marked ‘essential’ later on,” Purkeypile explains, “but that meant you could have a character who died and you could have shot them. But then they would become “essential”, which means they have to be alive, then this guy would come up to you with his head exploding like “hi, how are you?”
You might not find headless horsemen with explosive warheads, but check out the other top games like Skyrim. Alternatively, the latest and greatest Skyrim mods will help keep the RPG fresh, even a decade after its original release.