Bruce Nesmith, lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, has put climbable ladders on his wishlist for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel.
Nesmith is a former Bethesda design director who now writes novels and is not working on Sentinel. His comments describe something he would like the studio to address, not a feature reveal from its development team.
Skyrim's ladder interaction
Why ladders became a design problem
Skyrim sidestepped the act of climbing. As Nesmith explained, clicking a ladder moves the player straight to the top; stairs provide another way between levels. He said the absence of direct ladder climbing limited the art team's options for building spaces with multiple layers. The restriction affected environment design, not just character movement.
Bethesda considered implementing ladders during Skyrim's development, but the programmers needed answers to a series of design questions before they could estimate the work involved.
“You give me answers to these, I'll tell you how much programming time it's going to take to make them,” Nesmith recalled the programmers telling the team. Those unresolved decisions became an obstacle before the feature could move forward.
The team ultimately prioritized other parts of the game. Nesmith's account puts the difficulty in defining how ladders should behave and finding development time for that work, despite the interaction sounding straightforward.
Enemy behavior was one complication. In RPG games, a route between floors also creates navigation decisions for pursuing enemies. Nesmith described questions such as whether an enemy should wait at the top of a ladder or climb back down to come after the player.
