Skyrim's Co-lead Designer Was Building Real-time Horse And Cart... (2026)

Kurt Kuhlmann was co-lead on Skyrim and Bethesda's Elder Scrolls loremaster.

Bethesda RPGs are so big and take such a long time to develop that there's naturally a lot left on the cutting room floor, leaving them to be discovered by modders and given a second life. One such dropped idea was Skyrim's fully dynamic civil war, co-lead designer and former Elder Scrolls loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann tells us. And it was "pretty far along before it got cut," he says.

"The civil war was originally intended to be much more dynamic, in the sense that we were tracking if you went around and killed Imperial soldiers … and we would say, OK, you're harming the Empire in this hold … so we could see the balance of power in this hold is shifting towards the Stormcloaks, and at some point, if it shifts far enough through your open world actions, it could trigger the Stormcloaks to attack the capital city."

The hold you're helping one side take over would change in other ways, too, like encampments belonging to that faction appearing all over it.

We ended up seeing a tiny glimmer of this in the Battle for Whiterun quest, where you assist the Stormcloaks in seizing the city, and thus the hold. "But we had it sort of working with attacks on all the main cities in all the holds [in a] systematic way," says Kuhlmann. "So I still feel like we maybe could have pulled that one off."

It was complicated, though. In the Whiterun battle, the team "had so much trouble getting it to run; it had to have so much special handling". There were all the NPCs up on the walls and fighting inside the city, adding to the load.

Ultimately, the performance cost was too great. "The production decision was: we cannot make this good and make sure the frame rate is good in all the cities under all circumstances," Kuhlmann recalls. "That's just too much right now. I mean, it's still hard for me to believe that the game shipped on the 360. Oblivion and Skyrim, same platform originally, so we were really pushing it on the 360."

And you might recall the state Skyrim was in back then, before all the patches and mods and next-gen improvements. There were performance issues all over the shop. So imagine how it would have been with all these extra complications.

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But Kuhlmann is still convinced that the team could have made it work.

Source: PC Gamer