It might seem ironic given its status as one of the world’s most ubiquitous games, but there’s quite a lot we don’t know about Skyrim. Up until now, we’ve never heard many details about what changed between Oblivion and Fallout 3 — and subsequently between Fallout 3 and Skyrim itself — for Bethesda’s fifth Elder Scrolls game to achieve the acclaim it did. Of all these details, one of the strangest things to learn is that Blackreach, one of Skyrim’s most famous locations, was never supposed to exist. There’s a story behind that.
This is according to former Bethesda lead level designer Joel Burgess, who joined the company in June 2005 and worked there through Fallout 4. While that’s an impressive tenure, it’s interesting to note that Burgess wasn’t always a level designer at Bethesda — at the time he joined the studio, that wasn’t even technically a job. Dungeon artists built locations using a small suite of basic assets, while quest designers wrote all the dialogue and implemented all the quest logic. The concept of ‘level design’ in the modern sense just wasn’t in Bethesda’s head yet.
When Burgess arrived on the project, most of the game was already built. He came in on his first day, went through an hour of training, and received his first task via email — he had to make 20 dungeons for Oblivion in two weeks. This consisted of snapping together premade assets from test cells called ‘warehouses’ with 100 rooms you could copy, paste, and slightly change to quickly build different dungeons.
“When you do it that way, you can go pretty fast,” Burgess tells FTW. “You snap the rooms together, you put in a few enemy encounters, put in your pathfinding, hook it up to the world, and you’re done. So for the first period of time I was at Bethesda, that’s how I built dungeons. We were doing like 20 dungeons in two weeks — ten business days, two dungeons a day. That was possible, but we weren’t super satisfied.”
This dissatisfaction instigated a slow-burning yet major change in Bethesda’s design ethos. While understated and mostly hidden at first, Burgess and a co-worker started to think about what they could do differently in dungeon design. The turning point occurred shortly before Oblivion went gold — which, in the games industry, means to reach the final state a game is expected to be shipped in. With little time left on the clock, Burgess and his colleague started experimenting with an Ayleid ruin just across from Oblivion’s introductory sewer sequence: Vilverin.
“I didn’t use any of the preassembled rooms,” Burgess says. “I built the thing more or less from scratch, because I realised it wasn’t just that I recognised the walls and ceilings — I recognised crates and configuration.”
While working on Vilverin, Burgess noticed that even minor things like adding a button puzzle to a room, giving a boss a unique name, and having a note in said boss’ pocket that refers to a friend he has in the city all contribute to how unique and memorable any given location can be. Obviously there wasn’t enough time to scrap entire dungeons, but after impressing leadership with this prototype, Burgess and his colleague were given a month to improve as many other dungeons as possible before shipping — in total, they did around 12.
“What we were doing was trying to shift the mindset from ‘dungeons are places where a quest designer puts the dagger you’re sent to get and the quest designer doesn’t really care,’” Burgess explains. Instead, each quest would feel more like a cohesive, crafted experience, where the aforementioned dagger is where it is for a reason as opposed to just being placed in a random chest.
Believe it or not, this small experiment late in the day was somewhat of a watershed moment for Bethesda. While Oblivion shipped with Burgess’ 12 tailored dungeons and a bunch of others built using pieces from the “warehouses” mentioned above, the idea of creating unique dungeons had at least partially taken root. Bear in mind that the concept of ‘DLC’ was still in its youth — which is where all the Oblivion horse armour memes come from — and that the closest you could get to it at this time was to buy Master Chief plates for your Xbox 360 dashboard.
Hindsight tells us that the Mehrunes’ Razor expansion was about to revolutionize DLC to a point closer to what we know it as today, although there’s a story there, too. As it turns out, that expansion was designed by Burgess and his friend while they were bored. They built the biggest dungeon they could without adding any new programming or quest dialogue.
“We spent a while working on it,” Burgess says. “We showed it and said, ‘We made this when you guys weren’t looking’, and then that got put out as DLC. Mehrunes’ Razor was really just the two of us plus the QA team.”
Once Oblivion was fully wrapped and work on Fallout 3 officially began, people started to leave Bethesda. Burgess all of a sudden found himself gravitating towards a lead level designer role for the latter, having proved his point on Oblivion that this was an important part of developing a game — and so the level design department formed in earnest. The flipside of this was that the pressure was on: The guys who were making cool dungeons in the corner were now in leads meetings demanding resources and hiring people.
“We were still kind of seen as these rascally misfits who were rocking the boat and shaking up the status quo,” Burgess explains. “Fallout 3 was like, the most punk rock era of level design at Bethesda.
“We really had to buck this expectation of how things were done, and the best way to do it was just to do a really good job. We just tried to prove our merit the best that we could, and then with Skyrim it was much more established. At that point, I think we had kind of gotten our wings and were able to just go and do our thing with a lot more understanding.”
Fallout 3 played an essential role in cultivating this understanding. The thing about Oblivion is that most of the dungeons are holes in the ground, surrounded by forestry, cities, and other kinds of looming structures that lend themselves to vertical scale. Burgess used what he learned from Oblivion to draw up design docs for Fallout, but soon realised that the mentality didn’t quite translate. While Oblivion’s density is part of what made the world feel big, Fallout’s flat plains made it pretty easy to pick out the raider camp on the horizon. It just didn’t feel lonely enough. Burgess had to go back and redesign quite a bit of the Capital Wasteland with this new lesson in mind, moving dungeons around to create a wider spread between them and adding a lot more points of interest to the northwest region of the map in particular.
“On Oblivion, we were just kind of led into the room to fend for ourselves,” Burgess says. “For Fallout, we were trying to prove ourselves to everybody. And on Skyrim, I think we had a really good synergy with the team. The environment artists, world artists, and quest designers all knew what level design brought to the table.”
Being able to synergise different design disciplines is what allowed the devs at Bethesda to fuse dungeons and quests together in Skyrim, which in turn contributes to why it has such a cohesive, holistic world. One particular dungeon Burgess points to is Karthspire Camp, the massive valley near Markarth that’s essentially a conventional dungeon, but outdoors. Another is Blackreach, which is perhaps Skyrim’s most widely lauded location across the board.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t supposed to be in the game.
“Part of the reason why that is, is not necessarily because we all sat and said like, ‘We’re smart, we’re gonna make this big thing that we’re not gonna tell anybody about’,” Burgess explains. “It happened because it wasn’t supposed to exist. Blackreach was to be very clear not my idea, not Purkey’s (Nate Purkenpile), the artist who helped start it with me. Blackreach was an older idea that predated Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls lore. I think it was Bruce Nesmith, who was a design director, who had the idea to have this big, underground cavernous space that was meant to be kind of a highway that connected the different Dwarven dungeons.”
Burgess attributes part of what has made Blackreach so enduring to the fact it was never included in any marketing materials, meaning that it was always going to be a surprise when someone arrived there for the first time. “You’re also not sent there by anything,” he adds. “There’s not a Mages Guild quest about Labyrinthian with ten minutes of dialogue about this ancient cave system — it feels like a really authentic discovery, both to you as the player holding the controller, but also to you as the player inhabiting the world.
“The scholars don’t know that Blackreach exists. They’ve read about it, but you’re the first person to actually set foot here in like, 2,000 years or something. That dovetails really nicely with the mystery of the Dwemer and the disappearance of the Dwemer race. I think that matters because for many players, the first time they step into Blackreach they’ve been through the pattern. They’ve played a dozen or three dozen Skyrim dungeons and they kind of know ‘Okay, I go in and I play the thing and there’s usually a boss encounter and a chest that has the best loot and then I go back into the world.’ If you play one of those dungeons that connect to Blackreach, the pattern gets flipped, where it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go through this door back out to the world, Blackreach must be a region.’ And then the door opens and you’re out of the dungeon and you’re like, ‘What the ****,’ right? You’re in this thing you didn’t expect.”
All of this makes sense — although again, Blackreach wasn’t technically planned for Skyrim. It might seem difficult to believe now, looking at its sprawling caverns lined with giant, iridescent mushrooms, but it’s true. To reiterate, it largely works because of the fact it wasn’t part of any marketing campaign, but it’s not as if it was just held back for the sake of it.
Burgess points out that one of the most fascinating aspects of The Elder Scrolls’ dwarves is the mystery imbued in them — where did they go? By incorporating something like Blackreach into the lore, which was supposed to be a whole lot bigger — “basically a subway system that connected all of the Dwarven dungeons in the entire province of Skyrim” — Bethesda would be able to really lean into that same sense of mystery. It was still just an idea, though.
“There was the idea that had come from somebody like Bruce or come from the lore,” Burgess says. “But it was too ambitious. The game was too big and so we didn’t do it. I always really, really liked the idea of Blackreach. And so there we are, probably a year and a half or so before the game launched, and Purkey and I decide we’re going to take a stab at putting in Blackreach — we know how we would build it, right? We think we can do it feasibly. And I think there’s still a little bit of that hair up our ass from the punk rock Fallout 3 era.”
Burgess explains that his friend, Purkey, is currently making a game by himself and is to this day the “fastest artist” he knows. For him, it’s all about embracing the challenge — if all the pieces are there, why not try to fit them together? If it doesn’t work, nobody ever needs to know. Plus, they already did the same thing with the Mehrunes Razor DLC in Oblivion.
“And so we did this sort of skunkworks project of sketching out Blackreach and sort of figured like, ****, it’s kind of working,” Burgess explains. “We had space to connect these various dungeons and brought the big stalks down into the cave and roughed it out. So we got to the point where like, okay, we’re gonna check this thing in and we’ll show it to some people and generate some excitement. There were definitely some people who weren’t thrilled about it because it wasn’t on the schedule, and it wasn’t really supposed to happen.
“I tried to do the grown-up thing at that point, trying to bridge that gap from like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to put stuff in the game.’ A lot of times what that results in is work that’s unpolished and work that makes your peers end up having to crunch, right? This is a common thing you’ll see in games. Like, ‘Oh, I’m a genius, I’m going to put in this pistol that shoots a better type of thing,’ whatever. The guy who put in that pistol he wasn’t supposed to feels like a genius because he put in the pistol, but now QA has to test it and a programmer has to fix bugs. So at that point we kind of formalised it and put it onto a schedule. Purkey and I basically had under the table done the first two passes of the thing that would end up taking three or four passes.”
Once Blackreach was officially added to the schedule and the rest of the team were brought on board, it started to be envisioned as a sort of ‘mini Skyrim’, which is why the scale ended up being so massive relative to other areas in the game. This also led to the integration of concepts like Crimson Nirnroot, a special plant that only grows here and plays a central role in a quest about a long-dead alchemist.
Of all the things Blackreach is known for, however, perhaps the most famous element of this locale is one of its biggest and best secrets: a subterranean dragon.
“I put that in in an afternoon,” Burgess says. “I knew how to spawn dragons. I was systems designer for the dragons, so I knew how the dragons worked. I was a reasonably competent scripter. A big part of it was just having the idea. I messed around with a dragon for an hour and I thought we could make a dragon work in the cave. So, how am I going to summon the dragon? Button? Lever? Lame. What if you Shout at a thing? I think I scripted this big like, “Bong!” and that was enough.”
Most of the magic made manifest in Blackreach was only possible because Burgess and the producers would generally keep about 20% of the schedule free to focus on a process called ‘spotlighting’, which involved paying extra attention to good ideas that could really benefit from it. If not for this, Blackreach wouldn’t have been doable without serious crunch.
Still, thanks to clever scheduling, a conviction born of revolutionising level design at Bethesda with Oblivion, and a lingering punk rock attitude fostered during Fallout 3, Burgess, Purkey, and the rest of their team somehow managed to make Blackreach work. Now, all these years later, it has clearly stood the test of time as a remarkable feat of creativity and passion
And to think it might never have existed!
Written by Cian Maher on behalf of GLHF.
