Bruce Nesmith Wants Better Mounts and Ladders in The Elder Scrolls VI

The next Elder Scrolls game has been discussed under the reported subtitle Sentinel, but firm official detail remains scarce. That leaves plenty of room for wish lists, and former Bethesda design director Bruce Nesmith has supplied a particularly revealing one: improve mounts, and make ladders work properly.

It is an amusing pairing on the surface. One request suggests heroic mounted combat, companion animals and more useful travel. The other is a plea for a humble piece of level geometry that many players scarcely notice until it breaks. Together, though, they get at the same challenge for a giant role-playing game: the world feels more believable when the player, companions, enemies and environments all obey the same useful rules.

Nesmith no longer works on the series and has no stated involvement in the next game, so these should be read as an experienced former developer’s preferences rather than a description of features in development. Still, his explanation of why Skyrim avoided ordinary ladder climbing offers a useful glimpse at how an apparently tiny interaction can expand into an expensive design problem.

Why a horse should be more than fast travel with hooves

Nesmith’s first request is direct. In Skyrim, a horse can be ridden, but its role is narrow. He would like the player to be able to do more with a mount, including fighting while mounted or having the animal participate in combat.

“You can ride a horse, but that’s all you can do in Skyrim,” Nesmith said. “I should be able to do other things with the horse, too, like maybe fight on the horse, or have it fight with me.”

That difference matters because a mount can be either a transport tool or a full part of the player’s build and moment-to-moment decision-making. Travel-only mounts reduce time spent crossing terrain. A more interactive mount potentially changes how a player begins an encounter, retreats from danger, carries equipment or positions themselves around threats.

Mounted combat generally means attacks, defensive actions or abilities performed while the character remains on a riding animal. It sounds straightforward, but it needs systems to agree with one another: weapon animations must fit the rider’s position; targeting needs to make sense at speed; enemies need a reliable response; the camera must retain useful visibility; and the game needs clear rules for when the rider or mount takes damage.

A fighting mount introduces another layer. If it can independently attack or react to danger, it is effectively a companion character with pathfinding, combat behavior and survivability concerns of its own. That can make the world feel livelier, but it also raises practical questions: Does the creature stay nearby? Can it be killed or incapacitated? Does it block narrow spaces? How does it behave indoors, on steep terrain or near non-player characters?

None of those questions confirms a particular system for the next Elder Scrolls. They explain why “better horses” is a larger ask than an extra attack button. The useful version of the idea is not necessarily a mount that does everything. It is a mount with a clearly defined role that is dependable enough to use in an open world without becoming a navigation nuisance or an unpredictable liability.

There is also a broader design opportunity in making travel less passive. If riding offers tactical choices, players may think differently about distance and terrain. A road, a ridge and an open field can become distinct approaches rather than just scenery between quest markers. The trade-off is that additional interactivity has to be worth the controls, balancing work and technical complexity it demands.

The ladder problem is really an AI problem

The request for ladders may sound smaller, but Nesmith described it as a limitation on what the art team could build in Skyrim. The game commonly handles ladders as transitions: a player activates one and appears at the other end, rather than climbing its rungs in real time. Stairs are used where continuous vertical movement is needed.

“You don’t climb up and down ladders,” Nesmith said, adding that this can limit how artists approach multi-level spaces. In Skyrim, ladder use is typically a click-and-transition rather than a climb.

That approach is not merely cosmetic. A real ladder creates a vulnerable, constrained state. The character has limited movement, limited options for turning or attacking, and needs an animation that lines up precisely with the ladder at both ends. The game also needs to decide what happens if the character is interrupted, takes damage, reaches a blocked landing, or tries to get on while another character is using it.

Most importantly, the same rules have to be considered for enemies. AI, or artificial intelligence in this context, refers to the systems that govern non-player-character decisions and movement. An enemy that sees the player climb needs understandable behavior: it might pursue up the ladder, wait at the top, look for another route, or disengage. Each option needs to work reliably with combat, collision and navigation.

Nesmith said that when he pushed for ladders during Skyrim’s development, programmers posed a long list of legitimate questions whose answers would determine the required work. He specifically highlighted the difficulty of deciding whether enemies should wait at the top or climb back down in pursuit.

This is a classic example of a feature’s hidden scope. A ladder is not only an object placed by an environment artist. It touches animation, player controls, collision detection, camera behavior, combat rules, enemy pathfinding and quality assurance. Pathfinding is the process that allows a non-player character to find and follow a valid route through a space. A ladder adds a special route type with special states at its entrance and exit. In a game built around broad player freedom, edge cases multiply quickly.

What ladders could change for world design

If a future game solved those issues cleanly, the reward could reach beyond the ladder itself. Designers could make more convincing towers, platforms, docks, mining structures and layered interiors without choosing between a staircase and an instantaneous transition. Vertical routes could become part of exploration, escape and combat positioning.

But “solved” does not mean every ladder must become a combat arena. Sometimes a simple transition is the clearest solution, particularly when a space is not meant to support a chase or fight. The real improvement would be deliberate consistency: physical climbing where the world and gameplay benefit from it, and concise transitions where they do not.

That is why the request is more interesting than it first appears. Proper ladders are a test of how deeply a game simulates spaces that look ordinary. Players may never praise the thousands of decisions behind an uneventful climb, but they quickly notice when enemies cannot follow, when the camera misbehaves, or when the safest solution is to avoid using the object at all.

Old constraints, new expectations

Skyrim released in 2011, and Nesmith’s comments make clear that its team had to prioritize among many competing features. The decision not to build full ladder behavior was therefore not presented as a mystery or a trivial oversight. It was a scope choice: programming time spent answering every ladder question could not simultaneously go to something else in a massive RPG.

That context should temper expectations for the next game. More advanced hardware or newer development tools do not erase design decisions. A feature remains costly when it must function across a large open world and interact with the rest of the game’s systems. Better technology may expand what is possible, but polish still depends on the team defining rules, building exceptions and testing the strange situations players inevitably discover.

There is a useful parallel in the argument that a major sequel should bring a genuine new idea rather than simply repeat its predecessor’s winning formula. That question of meaningful iteration applies just as readily to role-playing games: the most memorable improvement may be a new headline feature, but it may also be a collection of ordinary interactions that make a world more coherent.

What players can reasonably take from Nesmith’s comments

For now, the practical takeaway is modest. Nesmith’s desires do not verify mounted combat, fighting animal companions, real-time ladder climbing, ship combat or any other feature in the next Elder Scrolls. He is a former Bethesda design director, now writing novels, speaking as someone outside the project.

His comments do, however, identify two areas where a sequel could make an immediate difference to the feel of exploration. Mounts could become systems players actively use rather than equipment they summon only for distance. Vertical structures could become more natural spaces rather than places designed around stairs and interaction prompts.

Both ambitions ultimately depend on the same standard: the player needs to trust that the world will respond sensibly. A horse should not feel like a detached movement mode, and a ladder should not reveal a gap between a detailed building and the characters supposedly inhabiting it. If the next Elder Scrolls can improve those small, connective interactions, even a ride across the wilderness or a climb to a rooftop could carry more of the adventure than they did before.