Bethesda’s associate art director really did try to fit 7,000 actual steps into Skyrim’s 7,000 Steps: ‘I take no responsibility for the Frost Troll’

When the Greybeards invite you to High Hrothgar in Skyrim, you have to climb a mountain to reach them. There’s a messenger called Klimmek waiting in the village of Ivarstead at the bottom to warn you what an arduous journey this is going to be. To get to the top of the Throat of the World, he says, you have to work your way up The 7,000 Steps.

It’s well-documented that there aren’t actually 7,000 steps carved into the side of the mountain. Some of them are buried under the snow, making an exact count impossible, but the actual number is closer to 700. And even if you argue that The 7,000 Steps refers to the number of footsteps it takes to ascend the mountain, according to the dedicated researchers at the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal it only takes “approximately 2,400 footsteps” to get there.

As part of Bethesda’s 40th anniversary, which included the reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6’s subtitle, the studio reminisced about their previous work, which is how we know they really did try to get 7,000 steps into the side of the mountain.

Of course, like most open world games, Skyrim isn’t designed to scale—otherwise the capital city of Solitude would have a population of less than 100 people. But in the same way that for every named NPC we should assume there are a bunch of people off-camera, distances are compressed so that it doesn’t take a week to get anywhere. For every step we watched the Dragonborn climb there are another nine implied steps we don’t see, and even more frost trolls.