General:Fred Zeleny's Posts

Fred Zeleny's Posts
Medium/Format	Online Forum
Interviewee(s)	Fred Zeleny
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These are a few notable comments from Fred Zeleny on The Elder Scrolls setting.

2020

On the Bard's College questline for Skyrim (11-16-2020)

Hi! I was one of the quest designers at Bethesda working on Skyrim back in the day, and one of the storylines I was working on before I left was the Bardic College.

Originally, the college invited you to join as an inspiration to the other bards, and as such they would assign you a bard to follow you around and witness your deeds so that they may be remembered in song. I had planned to give the player a bardic companion who would sing songs based on things the player might do.

There was a quest with a fun junior bard who would compose a song about you based on how you acted in the quest and solved problems, and have that song spread through the inns in the world. This sort of heavy branching-and-remembering is something I loved doing in Fallout 3's Wasteland Survival Guide, so I felt the extra dialogue budget would pay off. The goal was to give the player their own version of Sir Robin's minstrels in Holy Grail, because we knew what sort of nonsense players get up to.

(Speaking of "nonsense players get up to", I also designed the Sanguine quest where you retrace your drunken steps, loosely inspired by the classic "I played Oblivion blackout drunk and here's what I found the next day". We unofficially called it "Dude, Where's my Horse?" But that's a different story.)

Anyway, they ended up cutting that quest along with the orc clans storyline and a bunch of other things I had in the works. That sort of thing happens a lot, especially in ambitious open-world games

On the original version of the Sheogorath quest for Skyrim (12-18-2020)

A while ago, I believe I promised you a story about riddles. Well, it's well into the holiday season, so here's a little early present for you all: a story about a Skyrim moment that almost came to be.

I left Bethesda after working on Skyrim for a year and change, writing the first draft or so of a bunch of quests, and the last thing I wrote on my last day was a riddle from Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness. It was a totally optional bit towards the end of his quest -- more of an easter egg, really -- and he would warn you several times that a high-stakes game with the Mad God is a bad idea, because of course it fucking is.

After all, who wouldn't want to test wits with the semi-devine embodiment of madness, and hidden touches like that are what makes open-world games (and especially Bethesda games) so fun to explore. Plus, I absolutely adore writing for the character (who's voiced by my family friend and absolute delight of a human, Wes Johnson) and the idea made me laugh like a fiend, which seemed like a good enough reason for Sheogorath to do anything.

If you finally convinced him you were determined to answer his riddle, his riddle was simply this: "What is the opposite of a chicken?"

The player had a bunch of plausible answers to choose from: an egg, a rooster, a fox, a brave man, etc. And, as you'd expect from him, good old Sheo had a different explanation for why each answer was woefully wrong.

"A brave man? No, actually this chicken is really quite courageous, in its way. / Pecked a troll right in the eye to protect its brood! What a heroic little nugget it made. / You two have a lot in common. I'd introduce you, but you'll be busy falling to your death."

Picking a wrong answer (which is to say, any of them) got you teleported a mile above the highest mountain in the game, giving you a lovely view of the world before falling to your death. I remember the biggest issue was that I didn't want to make the player wait through a long loadtime just to die - especially since loading into a new space would end up replacing their autosave with a new one where they're inescapably falling to their doom.

I mean, Sheogorath may be a smartass, but he's not about to ruin your playthrough. Although you really should be making separate backup saves, you know.

The best part was that I wanted to give an achievement when you had tried one (or all) of the answers unsuccessfully and realized none of them were right. That way, when you reloaded and tried again, the dialogue system could see that you had the achievement and then you'd mysteriously get a new dialogue option to complain that he was cheating. Naturally, Sheogorath's response was to grin and remind you that he had said the whole thing was a bad idea in the first place.

But he'd take some sort of mercy on you and let you live with that answer. It'd just serve to be a reminder not to bet your life with a god that delights in breaking the rules. Sometimes, the way to overcome an obvious deathtrap is to not walk into its jaws.

The best and most devious part of my plan was that the only way to win the riddle contest was to go into the editor or debug menu and set a flag to turn on a hidden answer in the dialogue tree ("SheoRiddleAnswer = true", I think? It's been a while).

At that point, Sheogorath would recognize that you had altered the fundamental rules of the universe just to win a riddling contest, applaud your trivial misuse of phenomenal cosmic power, and give you a sweet roll or something.

Nothing too great, because the real reward of a dumb little thing like that is having the story to tell your friends afterwards. If you wanted a more game-breaking reward, there were plenty of other options to choose from (may I suggest anything involving the Wabbajack?). Plus, you clearly have access to the editor/debug menu, so what more do you need?

When I left, I handed the quest to my friend and colleague (the excellent Nate Ellis), who went on to do wonderful things with it. But I'm pretty sure the riddle contest got cut before release, possibly because of limited dialogue budgets or because it was a hassle to implement. More likely, it got cut because it's kind of a dick move for a designer to do to the player, and Nate is a much kinder DM than I am.

Knowing that engine, bits of the riddle contest may still be hidden in the quest's code somewhere. I haven't gone digging through the editor to check, because I'd rather let it live on in my memory untainted by cruel reality. As I often say, gamedevs never really get to play the game we made, we just play the game we *almost* made. Besides, I have other games to work on these days.

But that riddle contest will always be part of my personal lore about Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness. And now it can be part of yours, too!

2023

Are you allowed to talk about what Skyrim things you worked on? (01-02-2023)

Dunno if I'm allowed to or not, but if they sue me for talking about what I did in the game, they might have to acknowledge that I did, in fact, work on the game and put my name back in the credits.

But yeah, I've talked about some of what I wrote and designed in Skyrim in a few posts here before, from the Bard's College quest line that never came to be to Sheogorath's quest and the game of riddles. All in all, I did the general design and first passes for about five quests (the Daedric quests for Sheogorath, Sanguine, and Clavicus Vile, as well as a couple quest lines that got cut/truncated: the Bardic College and the Orsimer Gathering storyline) and built the webs of characters and relationships for a few towns (it's been years, but I recall Falkreath and Darkwater Crossing). I left after a year and a half of work on it, and handed those tasks to other fine colleagues, and some of that material was changed or cut — as happens with any big game as you approach your ship date.

But much of my work made it through production in largely the same shape as I designed it, from the "Night to Remember" quest with Sanguine (or "Dude, Where's My Horse?" as we joked about it internally) to a fair bit of dialogue I wrote for Sheogorath (including the tiny You Look Nice Today reference) to the various townsfolk I named after my friends. It was pretty delightful to play through after it launched and see what nuggets of my work had made it through intact — and in other cases, what my friends and colleagues had done to improve it.