me: wow i didnt know there was a bard’s college in skyrim that you can join. will my character be able to play instruments? i wonder what kind of new and interesting quests are involved?
bard’s college: go into the Draugr Pit™ and find the Old Fucking Shit Drum for us
Hi! I was one of the quest designers at Bethesda working on Skyrim back in the day, and one of the storylines I was working on before I left was the Bardic College.
Originally, the college invited you to join as an inspiration to the other bards, and as such they would assign you a bard to follow you around and witness your deeds so that they may be remembered in song. I had planned to give the player a bardic companion who would sing songs based on things the player might do.
There was a quest with a fun junior bard who would compose a song about you based on how you acted in the quest and solved problems, and have that song spread through the inns in the world. This sort of heavy branching-and-remembering is something I loved doing in Fallout 3’s Wasteland Survival Guide, so I felt the extra dialogue budget would pay off. The goal was to give the player their own version of Sir Robin’s minstrels in Holy Grail, because we knew what sort of nonsense players get up to.
(Speaking of “nonsense players get up to”, I also designed the Sanguine quest where you retrace your drunken steps, loosely inspired by the classic “I played Oblivion blackout drunk and here’s what I found the next day”. We unofficially called it “Dude, Where’s my Horse?” But that’s a different story.)
Anyway, they ended up cutting that quest along with the orc clans storyline and a bunch of other things I had in the works. That sort of thing happens a lot, especially in ambitious open-world games, but between that and the terrible pay and other issues, I ended up leaving Bethesda to work at another studio. In return, they bumped my name out of the designers’ credits and down to “Special Thanks”, with people’s kids and dogs and the like. Shame we don’t have a union or anything to prevent that, but that’s hardly the biggest problem in the industry.
And that’s the tale of the Bard’s College Quest That Cold Have Been! And if Bsoft doesn’t sue me into Oblivion for saying all this, maybe someday I’ll tell you about the game of riddles that I wrote for Sheogorath.