Skyrim's co-lead designer was building real-time horse and cart travel and a dynamic civil war: 'We were pretty disappointed that didn't ship'

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.

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

Bethesda managed to solve the problems in Whiterun, hence why the Battle of Whiterun persevered. "I think that we could have taken what we learned there," Kuhlmann says, but it wasn't meant to be.

"We were pretty disappointed that didn't ship," he says. "Probably, if people pull up the creation kit, they can find a lot of bits and pieces of that system, because we couldn't delete everything that was supporting that, so maybe, I don't know, I don't know if anybody's ever modded that back in, or something like that."

The good news is that they have! There are a bunch of civil war mods that have come out over the years, like Skyrim at War. "As you travel Skyrim, every single road, town, city, or village has the potential to be a bloody civil war battle ground. Battles can start as swift small skirmishes and may escalate into intense large bloody battles that stretch on for over a mile," says modder OperatorYoRHa.

It's not quite the same as Bethesda's original concept, but there are a bunch of cool features, like being able to command troops, along with new units and battle formations.

This isn't the only feature Kuhlmann wishes Skyrim shipped with. There was another the team was tinkering with which would have pleased all the anti-fast-travel diehards: real-time horse and cart travel.

Every major settlement in Skyrim has a horse and cart sitting outside it. When you talk to the driver, you're able to select another city and then you'll appear there instantly (after some loading, naturally). But you'll also almost certainly remember another cart ride. One that sees you sitting in the back, making your way to a settlement in real-time. Before you get to the executioner's block and a dragon accidentally saves you.

This intro sequence became the foundation for Kuhlmann's real-time system.

"I had started, and I had it working to some extent … using the tech of the intro to the game. The horse is pathing through the world. It's pulling the cart. You're riding in it. I was like, well, if it works here, we should be able to make it work at other places."

The fact that it wasn't "fake" or running on rails meant it could be adapted, but that also created some issues in the intro. "If something changed or some little thing went wrong, the horse could decide to take a different path," says Kuhlmann. "So we had some restrictions we had to put on it, but fundamentally it worked."

You could even get out of the cart if you wanted. If you saw some bandits fighting people, you could just jump out and help. But it also went a bit haywire sometimes. "The cart could flip over," Kuhlmann remembers. This would happen when the horse went up a hill, and the physics would freak out. "We couldn't possibly ship that."

Honestly, I think players could have lived with a haywire horse and cart. There's a lot of forgiveness in our hearts for Bethesda jank.

Once again, though, the fantasy of riding a horse and cart through Skyrim was too tantalising to ignore, so modders made it happen. There are plenty of travel mods, some that give you complete control over your ride, and some even introduce things like ferries. So even though Kuhlmann ran out of time, the dream lived on.