Anyone who has ever trudged through Skyrim has probably already had one or the other unpleasant encounter with a werewolf. The terrifying monsters are not easy opponents and like to eat you up for breakfast at the beginning. Fortunately, because for a hair (werewolf) the nasty monsters would have turned into cute lap dogs.
According to former Skyrim character artist Dennis Mejillones, werewolves were originally supposed to look like people with a dog or a wolf’s head. But since werewolves terrify everyone and give us players a certain sense of power, Mejillones was not enthusiastic about the original design, which is why he threw it over. So what was terribly cute became just terrible.
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A real monster in development too
You know the end result of the werewolf development. But the way to get there was just as monstrous as the goal, which is why Mejillone’s colleagues didn’t make great leaps of joy. The developer, however, got support from Game Director Todd Howard, who was so enthusiastic about the new concept for the werewolf that he insisted on implementing the monster in this way.
But only because the boss says We do that
, the work behind it doesn’t get any easier. The high speed of the werewolf meant that new areas of the world could not be reloaded quickly enough. The developers therefore resorted to a trick and changed the camera settings while sprinting. To the players it now seems as if they are sprinting even faster as werewolf than they actually do. The hybrid creatures still almost reach the speed of the Skyrim horses – clever!
Even more exciting backgrounds in the Skyrim documentary
The werewolf story by Dennis Mejillones is part of a Skyrim documentary by former developers that the character artist Jonah Lobe published on YouTube. If you are even a little interested in game development and are a Skyrim fan, you should definitely take a look at the video:
Link to YouTube content
Practical: The video is conveniently divided into sections, so you can pick out specific chapters that interest you. Among other things, the developers tell about the work on Skyrim’s animals, the animations of the character and how bees sabotaged the intro of the game. If the latter sounds familiar, it’s probably because we already covered this entertaining story:
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Skyrim: How bees almost destroyed the famous intro
What do you think of the werewolf’s original design? Would you have found people with wolf heads better than the nasty beasts that are now stalking you in the edge of heaven? Have you already turned yourself (in Skyrim) into a werewolf?
