Todd Howard Comments on Decision to Show Skyrim Game Jam Video

If you have been following our news in the last few days you should already know what The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s “Game Jam 2011” video is, but if you haven’t, it’s essentially a video that showcases a host of features the folks at Bethesda have been managed to implement in a week after the release of the game, and was shown for the first time during Todd Howard’s keynote speech at D.I.C.E 2012. Understandably, this has generated quite a lot of anticipation, and since we have no idea whether the features showcased will ever see the light of day or not, could also generate quite the disappointment. Questioned by 1UP, Todd Howard commented on this situation:

Speaking with 1UP earlier today, Howard said he was “debating whether [the video] was a good idea or not.” Asked if this is setting fans up for disappointment, he said, “Uh, I don’t know yet. Don’t be disappointed yet!

“We wanted to show it just to kind of give some inside baseball on how we do some things. I think a lot of studios do that on some level — ‘we messed with this; we messed with this.’ And we really try to get things in the game in any format quickly. There are things in [the video] that we like a lot, that we are digging deeper on right now.”

Howard was reluctant to identify which of the features were being looked at specifically “because some of them are up in the air,” but the interest in getting them out there does exist. “We think they’re as cool as the fans do.

“Noting that the video showed only a fraction of the content made during the Game Jam — he estimated it to be in the “60-some percent” range — Howard said the goal is to begin offering new features in the monthly updates released for the game. He couldn’t provide an estimate for how long it would take to complete everything seen in the video, “but each of those things individually take — to get them in a final game and polished — take much longer than a week. Some of them are almost ready to go, but a lot of them aren’t.”

I’d be willing to bet we’ll at least see some of those experiments expanded on.