And then we can have this natural tension, where we can have centaurs be more nomadic, they sort of move around the landscape. The centaurs are this group that lives out in the wild and they hunt the mammoths. And that’s where we thought the centaurs would be cool. “But then we explore the sacred animal through a different cultural lens of something like the sacred beast. I think that idea shows up in the game - we have some mammoth burial grounds giants are protecting and tending to. Maybe they do the elephant burial ground thing from the real world. They eat the cheese but they don’t butcher the mammoths. We had been thinking maybe the giants are vegetarians but not vegans. And we came around the idea of like, sometimes you have sacred animals. “The centaurs didn’t have a lot of lore around them, they were something new that maybe had been mentioned in some old lore book. “And then we also had the centaurs,” Burgess says. As Burgess puts it, from a “capital V video game perspective,” giant camps are official points of interest and involve different kinds of combat, from the mammoths’ sweep attacks to giants doing area-of-effect damage with their clubs.
It’s also evidently designed to be a unique encounter type.
Giants and mammoths obviously made it into the final game, with elements from the original vision feeding into their relationship - we can clearly see the practice of animal husbandry and the inherent companionship shared between the two species. We liked this idea of the giants being gentle and peaceful - they were just extremely powerful, like a powerful dog that you antagonize at the park is going to hurt you when it bites you, but only because you went and poked him with a sharp stick.” They should feel like a sacred creature that is iconic and symbolic of a land like Skyrim. So we’re sitting trying to figure out, like, what is the connection between everything? We had talked as a group and worked on this idea that the mammoths should feel really special and sacrosanct. In those early days, we didn’t know we were going to cut them. “But they didn’t get past the concept stage. “We knew we wanted to have giant mammoths, we knew we wanted giants, and we knew we wanted centaurs because those are all in the early sketches,” Burgess says. One of the most fascinating cuts from Skyrim saw the removal of a whole new species: centaurs. Bet you didn’t know how much effort went into scripting butterflies, either - but more on that latter. If something wasn’t going to plan, and was exhausting too much cash and too many resources, there would come a time where a decision would need to be made about whether to continue spending time and money on it, or cut it. Naturally, there was also an opposite, unnamed process. The reason it did was thanks to a process called spotlighting, which allowed the devs to pay extra attention to aspects of the game that were promising but needed some extra love. We recently published a lengthy interview with Skyrim lead level designer Joel Burgess on how Blackreach, one of the game’s most famous dungeons, could have never existed.
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