8 Video Game Mysteries Developers Had To Solve
7. The Bug Jars - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda games and pesky bugs - name a more iconic duo. But in the case of the Bug Jar Mystery, it caused a very different kind of frustration for players.
For more than five years after Skyrim was released, fans remained absolutely besotted with a mystery that, given the sheer amount of things to do in the game, probably should've been quickly forgotten about.
But the Bug Jar Mystery took on a life of its own as players failed to make sense of what could be done with five jars, each of them containing bugs and a symbol on the lid, which could be found around the game world.
What could players possibly hope to do with jaws containing a bee, butterfly, dragonfly, moth, and torchbug, right?
But Bethesda being Bethesda, everything was surely in the game by some sort of design, and the symbols seemed to suggest the jars could be united in some way to reveal... something.
By 2017, players were still stumped, and so the game's level designer Ryan Jenkins finally jumped in to put players out of their misery.
Well, sort of.
Jenkins didn't so much provide a solution as reveal why players couldn't figure out what to do with them. The jars were in fact part of a planned game quest which was scrapped mid-development, ensuring they're about as useful as a digital chocolate teapot.