Whilst replaying Portal recently, I was again struck by the game's highly interesting, and entirely optional, developer commentary. For those who haven't played it, you can play through the game again once you've beaten it, this time hearing audio commentary by the game's developers about your immediate surroundings- the reasoning behind certain design decisions, and all sorts of interesting background information. How cool would it be to have this in Skyrim? You could be on a mission, when suddenly that mission's game designer starts talking about the mission's development; or you might be in an ice cavern, when an artist decides it appropriate to wax lyrical about the ice walls that he is responsible for; or, after casting a spell, the game's sound designer could very well begin talking about why the spell sounds the way it does, and the complicated processes involved in coming up with a two-second sound effect.

I know that this is pretty superfluous stuff, and that our main concern is that Skyrim is as good as it can be. But some sort of director's commentary, in the manner that it is performed in Portal, or some other commentary system, would be really, really cool.

Would be neat, but I'd let them worry about the actual game at he moment.

Maybe some kind of later Skyrim GOTY addition could have something like that.

That's Valve's thing
It'd be neat though, I like listening to the commentary in their games.

No, see with an awesome game like portal, its entirely linear, they can have the actual development commentary there. With a game like Skyrim, or any of the Elder Scrolls games, its just too big and expansive to include a commentary. It would be a nice feature sure, it just could NOT happen. Not without a couple years of advancement in technology and a lot of enw emploies at Bethesda to spend time recording that much stuff for every situation

todd howard must dance!!!!!!!!!!!! dance todd dance

Last option. That is all.

It would probably take a year to get a complete commentary on the game but that would be pretty cool to hear all the devs' opinions on how things worked out.

VALVe, of course, was incredible for adding this all into their games, especially getting the actors to do commentary too which I found absolutely squee-worthy. I would love to have Dev commentary scattered about the map, in front of buildings and at crucial junctions whilst they tell us their favorite things about the process. I would really love to hear Max Von Sydow's take on Esbern.

How about just a making of documentary with the CE? I'm fine with that.

My problem with this is that it lacks proper context. In a making-of, they can only talk in general terms about the most evident parts of the game and only lightly touch upon the small things which may have been their favorites. With a commentary, there is full scope on what's being said since the player is directly in the proximity of what is being talked about.

I think that Todd has said there's no way he's ever again having an intrusive film crew filming them whilst they're working. And a documentary would be cool, but in-game commentary would be so much more interesting.

naw id rather them save the money for making skyrim the best it can be :celebrate: besides once the games done im sure theyl be more then happy to give us the commentary personally over this very forum :celebration:

A "making of" dvd is good enough for me.

After their experience of viewing the original and unreleased "making of" video for Oblivion, where, as Todd puts it, the tone of the film was a defeatist "this is never going to work", there may not be a similar video this time round.

Collectors edition will be fine for me.

I think the game is about 10000x too big to do this. Maybe only on the main quest... Portal took like 3 hrs to beat, that easy to commentary for. With a game that takes 100+ hours to do everything in, not so much.

Well, in the options in the main menu, there could be an option to do Developer's Commentary, and then it would take you to an isolated dungeon, where they could add certain things like lighting, certain animations, etc. that they want to comment on with in that dungeon. You don't have to have the commentary be through out the entire game, just do something like HL2's Lost Coast.

They wouldn't need to commentate on everything in the game... just selected things that they reckon we would find interesting. My suggestion that they would talk about the apples in the game was in jest!