The beauty standard for werewolves is a confusing thing – should the beasts have opposable thumbs? Tails? Is it ok for them to be clean-shaven, or should every inch of their bodies be matted in dog fur? These questions with no answers initially made the werewolves in Skyrim look like embarrassing atrocities, but then former Bethesda senior artist Dennis Mejillones graciously gave them a total makeover to save them from being cut from the RPG entirely.
In a new interview with YouTube channel Kiwi Talkz, Mejillones laments that the process of designing werewolves for Skyrim was originally “going in a really south direction.”
“It was bad,” he continues. “I mean, it was really bad, and a lot of people were like, ‘Oh man, this is bad.'” So, needless to say, it was bad. Having only seen the final product, I think that Skyrim’s werewolves are a perfect encapsulation of the action RPG’s balance of savagery and fantasy. But Bethesda’s first design for them was more of a science experiment – Mejillones says it “just had a head of a dog on a person, on a human body, with human hands and everything.”
So he took matters into his own human hands. The werewolves were about to be cut from Skyrim, but Mejillones didn’t want to let go. He imagined the player’s transformation into the moonlight beast as a “power trip” Skyrim was otherwise missing.
“So I created a big, brute animal werewolf, and [animator Jeremy Bryant] and I worked on bringing this thing together in the game.” They worked long nights putting together a playable demo that they kept secret until the opportunity to show director Todd Howard came up.
“We literally just started the game up, gave him the controller, gave him a few instructions on the werewolf,” Mejillones says. “He looked at it, and he was like, ‘This is fucking awesome.'” And the werewolves were saved.
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