Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey dev recalls the 36-hour Hell just before releasing the series’ most obscure entry yet

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has just revived Bethesda’s almost 20-year-old RPG as The Elder Scrolls VI continues its long cycle of development. Right now, the series is buzzing with fans hurtling through the freshly rendered version of Cyrodil alongside their demonic-looking Adoring Fan. It’s like 2006 all over again.

While nostalgia is always high for the older games in Bethesda’s fantasy franchise, a number of titles have gone under the radar. Battlespire and Redguard are often forgotten but meme’d upon by the community, but rarely anyone talks about The Elder Scolls Travels: Shadowkey, the last entry in the series’ mobile-focused spin-off series designed for the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage.

The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey is a bizarrely competent game for a largely incompetent platform. It’s fully open world, has actual player choice, allows players to pick their race, class and gender and genuinely plays like a cut-down version of Daggerfall on the go. Surpsingly, the game even has 4-player multiplayer.

Speaking to VideoGamer on an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer podcast, lead scriptor for Shadowkey, Daniele Nanni, discussed the process of creating the often-forgotten entry in Bethesda’s series. Working at the now-deceased TKO Software, Shadowkey was one of many titles the studio was churning out, and the studio was ramping up to make its N-Gage exclusive spin-off.

“It was like developing with one arm behind your back. No matter how hard you tried, you were just trying to bypass the limit [of the hardware].”

THE ELDER SCROLLS TRAVELS: SHADOWKEY LEAD SCRIPTOR DAN NANNI

“There were a couple of games we were working on and it was just, ‘we need bodies’,” the developer explained. “And they’re like, ‘you can script, right?’ and I’m like,’well, I just learned how to write script like last week’. I guess it was an investor coming through and they introduced me: ‘This is Dan. He’s our lead scriptor’. I’m sitting there, my eyes wipe open, like ‘uh, by lead scriptor do you mean only scriptor?’

Trained as an artist, Nanni and a “couple of programmers” were tasked with bringing a full RPG experience to the Nokia N-Gage. While the game eventually launched to middling reviews due to poor controls and a poor draw distance, many chalked the title’s issues down to the hardware it was stuck on and, even then, it was a standout title for the platform.

“It was a love-hate relationship,” Nanni described working on the failed phone/console hybrid. “Like, we were getting paid to make video games! This is awesome! But, man, it would be so cool if we weren’t working on the N-Gage. It’s not that you didn’t want to make video games, but you were just hamstrung. It was like developing with one arm behind your back. No matter how hard you tried, you were just trying to bypass the limit [of the hardware].”

For all of its faults, Shadowkey was a ridiculously ambitious title for Nokia’s handheld. Bringing a streamlined Elder Scrolls game to a handheld was hard enough, but doing it in 3D was even harder. Despite all the 3D games that came to the system, the N-Gage rendered all of its graphics in software. Essentially, every developer was brute-forcing 3D graphics onto a 2D system.

Due to limitations like this, and the fact that the console had historically terrible controls, everything the team did required a lot of out-of-the-box thinking.

“It was a lot of hours,” the developer said. “It wasn’t just the open world. Again, it was like multiplayer. These scripts that I had to do to get the final boss to travel throughout the map and be able to follow individual players… it was ridiculous. There was a final door I remember that took into account all actions that the player had to do throughout the entire experience and based off of what they did, when they opened the door a different object would be there. It’s like 700 lines just to make the door open and spawn in the right object. It was too complicated and I was so proud ot it because it was so much effort.”

After months of crunch working on The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey, the team was all set to bring the game to retail on the N-Gage until disaster struck. While the game worked perfectly fine during testing, the team discovered something awful: despite there only being 3 million units of the N-Gage period, there were far more variations than were documented, and one of them had a hard file size limit the team exceeded.

“At the end of development, when we were actually printing out cartridges and getting everything on there and going through the final tests, it failed,” Nanni explaiend. “And it was a hard fail. It was, we can’t ship the game. We’re like, ‘what’s wrong?’ Apparently, there are multiple versions of the N-Gages that they have launched and released. Even though they looked the same, they made the newer one that looked a little bit more different, but the older ones, there were multiple versions of them.”

“The original one also had a file limit, the amount of files that we had in the game in order to ship it was too big for the original N-Gage’s capacity,” he continued. “And so it couldn’t launch it because it couldn’t process. We’re done. We’re finished. We’re like gold mastering, get it out there to a distributor, get it all set up to print out on cartridge.”

The team had no idea how many N-Gage owners even had that variation of Nokia’s handheld, and of that tiny percentage many of them might not even try the game. Nevertheless, the team went straight back to the office, working for “32 hours straight… making constant coffee runs throughout the day… just to get it to ship on time”.

“Whenever you play a game and if it’s not perfect, it doesn’t mean that love was not poured into it.”

DAN NANNI ON THE ELDER SCROLLS TRAVELS: SHADOWKEY

In the end, Shadowkey’s file size was drastically reduced at the expense of performance. Every file in the game was compressed into segmented files that would be uncompressed while playing, losing the game 5 frames-per-second in the process.

Nowadays, The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey is a very overlooked game, and the N-Gage is an industry laughing stock, but Nanni remembers the sheer amount of care that went into that game.

“Whenever you play a game and if it’s not perfect, it doesn’t mean that love was not poured into it,” It’s sometimes just a matter of situation: time, budget or a lot of times it’s just not enough hands on deck. You can only make so many decisions and do so many things with the two hands that you have and the time given to you.”

The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey would be the last entry in the spin-off series, although it wouldn’t be the final entry to enter development. As it turns out, the final Travels game was a linear spin-off of Oblivion that was designed for PSP. While builds of the game have circulated the internet for years, the game was never finished.