Travel to the plains outside of Whiterun or Solitude and you’ll likely come across one of the most memorable Elder Scrolls NPCs. Anytime after 10:00pm, Skyrim’s ghostly Headless Horseman will trot out, leaving an intriguing and sinister trail behind him as it leads to Hamvir’s Rest. It’s a wonderful homage to the fantasy and role-playing genres cleverly woven into Skyrim by the creators of Fallout and Starfield Bethesda. But the Headless Horseman hides a terrible secret: his programming and scripts mean he’s doomed to suffer over and over again every time he appears in Skyrim.
Issu des mêmes archives de secrets de developpeurs de jeux that the camion-caméra volant de GTA 5 pour faire functionner le cavalier sans tête de Skyrim, il s’avère que Bethesda a dû faire preuve de créativité et soumettre un pauvre PNJ à una mort horrible and again.
Steve Lee, a level designer who has worked on Dishonored 2 and BioShock Infinite, recently interviewed three other level designers who have worked on the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. Justin Schram and Joel Burgess, who worked on Fallout 4 and Skyrim, reveal the dark techniques needed to create the Headless Horseman… well, Headless.
“Joel just figured out how to make the character headless,” Scar begins. “I forgot how you found out.
“Well,” Burgess says, “you would call a script command sometime when it came up. You should have done it at the right time. And you could dismember body parts according to the script, and it didn’t actually kill them. If you had been there at the time, you would have seen their heads explode, so we had to frame them in the corners and stuff.”
“So I sired this horseman,” Scar continues, “and gave him this little story and a place in the world that he can go. Put a ghost shader on it. His head explodes in the background. And then he goes to that one point, his grave in the world. It’s kind of simple and stupid, but I’m very proud of it.”
In fact, the Skyrim Headless Horseman is an ordinary NPC with a head. But when he appears somewhere off screen, there’s a little command that makes his head explode, but in the script he doesn’t die. And he hello. Instant Headless Horseman.
It’s one of those complicated game development solutions that gamers will never notice, but actually makes some weird sense. If you have a head blast system, why create a whole new headless character model? Just gently remove the head from the existing one.
Nate Purcapile, Global Fallout and Skyrim Artist, also talks about one of Bethesda’s most embarrassing bugs involving characters the games called “essential” to the main story and therefore needed to be kept alive.
“There was a bug where the character would later be marked as ‘required’,” Purkeypile explains, “but that meant the character could die and you could shoot them. But then they would become ‘essential’, which means they have to be alive, so this guy would just come up to you with popping hooves like “hi, how are you?”
You may not find headless horsemen with exploding warheads, but check out other games like Skyrim. Alternatively, the latest and greatest Skyrim mods will help keep the RPG fresh even a decade after its initial release.
Source : PC Gamesn
