As tremendous as Bethesda’s RPG epic Skyrim is, there are a number of notorious bugs in the 2011 classic. Some of them are utterly bizarre, but they’re always fascinating. Here are some of the best.

Skyrim Bugs

A lot of these we bumped into whilst playing, but the fun YouTube account Bacon “just” likes to post random clips on his account. And a lot of them are weirdly amusing.

To Skyrim’s immense credit, whilst many of these bugs are ridiculous they don’t detract from the gameplay.

They happen every now and then, and some of them do ruin your immediate game, but they’re primarily thought of fondly amongst fans.

The most significant bug we’ve come across while playing on the Nintendo Switch version of Skyrim is when you quicksave when on your horse.

If you then load that save file, you and your horse will enter NASA mode and begin flying exuberantly across the world around you. Death soon follows.

We had a look and, sure enough, lots of other players have had this issue across other versions of the game. Bethesda ported Skyrim to the Switch in 2017, why didn’t it think to fix these issues?

Horses in general across Skyrim behave in a way that defies reality. Most of you will know they’re not supposed to fly through mid-air.

But some of the outrageous angles you can get your horse into are incredible.

For 2011 standards, Skyrim’s AI (artificial intelligence) and physics models remain impressive. But you can actually take a horse and scale an enormous mountain, if you so wish.

A lot of the bugs are just amusing. And aren’t necessarily bugs, sometimes it’s just the outdated AI being a bit thick.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way since 2011, so in similar titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild the AI is highly impressive.

And while that’s often the case in Skyrim as well, you also get some really weird happenings.

Our favourite of the lot is an incident in Riften. In the game, you can discard unwanted materials if you no longer need them. Or if you need to ditch excess weight.

So you can just drop a bunch of weapons on the floor infront of commonors, if you so wish.

And the AI is advanced enough for a guard to recognise that’s a bit dodgy. Then the locals go crazy in pursuit of the loot.

So at once you have something that’s incredibly advanced, but also a bit stupid in how outdated it is.

Such abrupt endings are common in Skyrim. You can have something as horrendous as murder take place, then seconds later NPCs will walk off as if nothing out of the ordinary took place.

And that’s why we love Skyrim. At once so exceptional in its vision, but now showing its age in darkly humourous fashion.

An Arrow in the Knee

This popular internet meme really took off. It’s the most famous quote from Skyrim and it comes from none of the main characters, just a bunch of lowly town guards.

As they stride about their respective destinations, they utter a lot of stock phrases. Technology limitations mean you can’t have every character with reams of dialogue.

But Bethesda clearly didn’t realise the mistake they were committing to. As pretty much every guard you speak to utters the legend:

"I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee..."

As such, it creates this strange world where hundreds, if not thousands, of town guards had their adventuring careers ended by a very specific, recurring injury.

We’re sure many adventurers took an arrow to the knee in the distant past. But this bizarrely coincidental number of them?

Added issue here is absolutely none of them are limping in any way. Realism? Pfffft.