After over ten years since release and countless ports, there have been plenty of opportunities for fans to find things within Bethesda's open-world heavyweight Skyrim that don't quite work as intended. Though some glitches can be frustrating when trying to complete a normal playthrough of the game, other times players find Skykrim NPCs and creatures behaving hilariously and enhancing the overall experience as a result.
One recent clip shared by Reddit user BladeMLG to the Skyrim subreddit showcases a glitch that appears to be fairly rare, considering that the original poster had never seen it before. Looking at the behavior on display in the clip, it seems like the type of glitch that may have required some very specific things to occur in order for players to run into it.
In the clip, an NPC appears to be chasing the player, but instead of running towards the camera as one might expect, the character instead starts swimming through the air. The animation is the same that would normally happen if the player had dipped into water, even though the NPC was far from the nearby river and should have been solidly on dry land. As a result, the player gets a hilarious interaction as one of Skyrim's many NPCs starts flying through the air, something that normally takes players hours of gameplay and befriending a dragon in order to accomplish.
It's unclear exactly what caused the glitch, given how short the clip is and the fact that it doesn't start from when the NPC first begins floating above the ground. According to comments on the original post, some other players have seen this glitch before, and others have even seen the same behavior in Fallout 4, which uses the same game engine. So this might be more than a simple issue of the Switch port causing errors with Skyrim NPCs floating around and is likely a misread on the location of the nearby water.
With how large Skyrim is, and how many moving parts there are to make the world feel lived in, there are tons of opportunities for glitches to happen. Considering that early development was hindered by a bee interrupting Skyrim's intro sequence, it can often be unclear exactly what causes different clipping issues or NPCs behaving strangely. Over a decade after the game has released, finding these glitches can still be one of the more interesting parts of jumping into the open world again and again.
Skyrim is available now for PC, PS3, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
