Yet another hilarious glitch has surfaced in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, causing a guard to speedily slide back and forth across the player’s screen. The best-selling fantasy role-playing game is much beloved by its community even more than a decade after Skyrim's initial launch in 2011. The many glitches present in Skyrim often bring players more entertainment than irritation, as demonstrated by the plethora of posts displaying them in the Skyrim subreddit.
Guards in Skyrim are particularly victimized by the Creation Engine's farcical shenanigans. This is not only because they are NPCs that will semi-frequently initiate contact with the player, but also because of their forgetful, imperceptive, and overall incompetent tendencies. Guards and other unfortunate victims being tricked into saying classic lines like "must have been the wind" and "must have been imagining things" as their fellows are picked off one by one by a stealthy player are classic bits in the Elder Scrolls fanbase that will never grow old.
An article was published by Game Rant earlier today about a clip posted by ArmandTheDon to the Skyrim subreddit, in which a guard is seen swiftly drifting back and forth in the background as the player tries to talk to another NPC. Unlike the usual unbothered pace of Skyrim guards this one seems to be in quite the hurry, almost as if he's wearing rollerblades or ice skates. Skating guards would certainly be a sight to behold, and a squadron of them sliding into battle would likely unnerve even the most hardened criminal.
Are you serious? from skyrim
See the original post on Reddit here.
When the bug manifested, ArmandTheDon was in the process of trying to have a conversation with Grelka, an armor and weapons merchant in Riften, home of Skyrim's elusive thieves' guild. Upon going to investigate, the player found the guard scooting along the ground, quickly sitting upon a nearby bench before smoothly sliding away again. It is possible that the glitch in the guard's movement is caused by some strange interaction with his movement animation, as the guard begins the motion of sitting down at the very beginning of the slide toward the bench, although that does nothing to explain why the action repeated multiple times with the same glitch.
Skyrim is well-known for having an infinite variety of entertaining, inexplicable, and ridiculous glitches. From sliding guards to slain Skyrim giants being sent flying, the game never fails to provide new glitches to the bemused joy of its online community. It would be easy to criticize Bethesda for permitting such bugs to persist a decade after Skyrim's release, but many players would agree that at this point such occurrences are simply a part of the charm of the Elder Scrolls franchise and removing them would simply deprive players of the joy of watching random NPCs slide around like Sonic on rollerskates.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is available to play now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S platforms.
Sources: ArmandTheDon/Reddit (via Game Rant)