A player of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has released a funny video online of one of the Daedric quests breaking, after an important NPC was stuck on a staircase. While the quest isn't the most important in Skyrim, it's notoriously long, meaning any lost progress would be extremely frustrating for players – especially if they haven't saved in a while.
Skyrim is one of the largest RPGs of all time, even eleven years post-release. The game features a staggering amount of side quests and hidden content, still serving as a gold standard for other games to live up to. So while bugs like this happen frequently in Skyrim, there's plenty of other content for players to explore if anything does break. With DLC-sized mods like Skyblivion coming to the game, there's no limit to the amount of content that the game could eventually have.
In the clip taken from the Daedric quest Waking Nightmare, the Skyrim player watches as Erandur struggles to make it up the staircase, walking in place. If the NPC was able to make it a little further, the quest would be able to continue, making this agonizingly hard to watch. The quests in the game are notoriously bugged, with one player even claiming to have completed over 4 billion quests via a glitch. While the Radiant Quests system would technically allow for unlimited quests, 4 billion is definitely a stretch even after all this time.
Users were quick to propose a solution to the user's problem. Redditor CeleryCountry said "3 words: fus ro dah." It's true, the player could simply have used their Dragonborn shout to ragdoll the NPC across the room. But with the game already bugged, any player would be concerned about breaking it further. One user in the thread claims to have already tried this method for this glitch, with the only complete solution being a save reload.
While fans have come to love Skyrim for its many bugs and quirks, demand for a sequel is rising. The Elder Scrolls 6 has been announced, with almost complete radio silence ever since its 2018 announcement. At twelve years old, Skyrim is kept alive by its devoted fan base and thriving modding community, which continues to bring the game into the modern era of gaming. When Bethesda does finally release a sequel, the studio has huge expectations to live up to.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.