The bugs in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are practically folklore at this point. Giants launching players into the stratosphere, NPCs clipping through floors, quests breaking silently in the background. Fifteen years later, some of those issues are still there. Turns out, Bethesda knew about most of them before the game ever hit store shelves.
Former Bethesda senior artist Dennis Mejillones, who worked on both Skyrim and Fallout titles at the studio, recently resurfaced in a 2025 Kiwi Talkz interview with a pretty candid admission: approximately 95% of the bugs players report after a Bethesda launch were already documented internally before the game shipped.
"We're gamers. We play the game. We play and see the same things that the gamers do," Mejillones said. "We're like, 'ah this is not fun, or as fun, or we need to do this differently.'" The team was aware. The issues just didn't get fixed in time.
The mantra behind the madness
Here's the thing that makes this more than just a confession: Mejillones says Todd Howard had a specific saying he'd repeat in development meetings to frame the situation. "We can do anything, but we can't do everything." That line, according to Mejillones, was a regular fixture in internal discussions at Bethesda.
It's a surprisingly honest philosophy for a studio that builds some of the most sprawling open-world RPGs in the industry. The key here is that Bethesda's games aren't just big, they're systems-on-systems-on-systems, with hundreds of interacting variables that make exhaustive bug-fixing before launch a genuinely enormous task. That doesn't make the bugs less frustrating, but it does explain the pattern.
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Mejillones' comments come from a 2025 Kiwi Talkz interview that resurfaced this week, with a clip shared on social media on April 6, 2026.
What most players miss about Bethesda's post-launch track record
Mejillones doesn't just stop at the admission. He also pushes back against the idea that Bethesda simply abandons its games after launch. His go-to example is Fallout 76, which launched in a state that generated significant backlash and became a reference point for rough Bethesda releases.
"Look at 76. Look at how far they pushed it. They could've dropped the game, they could've just let it go and whatever, but they didn't," he said. "They kept pushing it and improving it, and my understanding is that 76 is really fun now."
That arc from Fallout 76's troubled debut to its current state is worth acknowledging. The studio has consistently supported its games after launch with free updates and substantial new content, which has rebuilt goodwill with communities that were initially burned.
Fallout 76's post-launch recovery
This isn't an isolated perspective from Mejillones either. He previously commented that a lot of people at Bethesda were afraid to say no to Howard, which he suggested created some blind spots in the development process. The "we can't do everything" framing reads as Howard's way of managing those constraints out loud, even if it didn't always result in cleaner launches.
Why this keeps coming up as Elder Scrolls 6 looms
The timing of this conversation matters. With The Elder Scrolls 6 somewhere on the horizon and Bethesda still carrying the reputation built across Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, the question of whether the studio can ship something tighter is very much alive. Howard has spoken publicly about returning to a more "classic" Bethesda style with the next Elder Scrolls entry, which fans are hoping translates to a more focused scope.
A narrower game, in theory, means fewer systems colliding in unexpected ways. Whether that actually results in a cleaner launch is something the studio will have to prove. For now, Mejillones' candid take gives players a clearer picture of how the sausage gets made at one of gaming's most beloved and most bug-prone studios.
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