10 Genius Ways Video Game Developers Outsmarted You
5. Small Tables Are Actually Buried Shelves - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda strikes again with another totally radical feat of deception in the Elder Scrolls series, albeit a considerably more innocuous one than literally restarting your console.
In Skyrim, any of the small tables you come across in the game world are actually shelves which have been half-buried in the geometry of the map, because in the time-consuming world of AAA gamedev, any minute you can save is absolutely worth it.
Though there's been some debate about the efficiency of burying objects underground given that it still exists within the game world and will therefore present a "cost" to the system memory, it's certainly a creative way to recycle existing assets, that's for sure.
For 99.999% of players, this went unnoticed even after hundreds or even thousands of hours of play, and yet, it's so deliciously, elegantly simple, as the best tricks so often are.