The stealth nerd behind your Skyrim archer
If you have ever spent an entire Skyrim playthrough crouch walking everywhere with a bow glued to your hands, you are in good company. The Stealth Archer has become a meme for a reason. It is one of the most popular and beloved ways to play Bethesda games, from The Elder Scrolls to Fallout and beyond.
What a lot of players do not realize is that a big part of why Bethesda stealth feels so good comes from a very specific source. Design director Emil Pagliarulo, who has worked on every Bethesda RPG since Oblivion, started his career at one of the most legendary stealth studios of the nineties: Looking Glass.
Looking Glass Studios might not be a household name anymore, but its impact is huge. This was the team behind Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and most importantly for stealth fans, the Thief series. Pagliarulo worked on Thief 2 and brought a lot of that knowledge straight into Bethesda’s open worlds.
In a recent chat about Bethesda’s Fallout games, he opened up about how much Looking Glass shaped his approach to stealth, and how that eventually helped give birth to playstyles like the Skyrim Stealth Archer.
From Thief 2 rooftops to Cyrodiil back alleys
Pagliarulo describes his time at Looking Glass as like being thrown into game development grad school. He was the kid from South Boston working with a crew full of MIT level minds who treated game design like a serious science experiment. They were obsessed with simulation, systems, and tiny details that made worlds feel alive.
He worked on two of Thief 2’s standout missions.
Life of the Party a rooftop crawl into a high society party that lets you sneak across an entire city skyline before slipping into a lavish gala.
Precious Cargo a mission set in a secret pirate cove hiding a steampunk style submarine that you have to infiltrate and stow away on.
These levels are all about careful movement, sound, light, and player freedom. You are not just following waypoints. You are reading the environment and solving problems your own way. That mindset followed Pagliarulo when he joined Bethesda.
According to him, one of the first things Todd Howard asked when he was hired was simple. What do you think of stealth in our games? Can you break it down for us?
Pagliarulo went full stealth nerd. He wrote a long document analyzing stealth in twenty different games, comparing how they handled things like sound, line of sight, player feedback, and enemy behavior. One of the games he looked at was Hidden and Dangerous, a 1999 tactical shooter where you parachute behind enemy lines in World War 2 and sneak around on sabotage missions.
That analysis became the foundation for upgrading stealth in The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion.
Why Oblivion made sneaking actually fun
Morrowind and Daggerfall already had stealth systems, but they were clunky and inconsistent. You could sneak, but it rarely felt smooth or readable. Oblivion is where stealth in Bethesda RPGs started to click into something recognizable and fun.
Pagliarulo and the team brought in ideas from Thief and other stealth classics, but had to adjust them for Bethesda’s huge open worlds. Instead of crafting tightly controlled stealth missions, they needed systems that worked across an entire continent full of caves, cities, and dungeons.
Some of the key upgrades in Oblivion included:
Consistent rules Sound and line of sight finally behaved in ways players could predict. If you made noise or stepped into a lit corridor, it made sense when enemies reacted.
Clear feedback The game gave obvious indicators about whether you were hidden or detected. That tiny sneak eye icon became your best friend.
Dedicated stealth content The Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines took full advantage of the new systems, giving you missions built around infiltration, pickpocketing, and silent assassinations.
Pagliarulo explains the difference between Thief and Bethesda games like this. Thief is a deep stealth simulation. It focuses almost entirely on one thing and pushes that as far as it can go. Bethesda RPGs on the other hand have to handle magic, melee combat, archery, dialog, crime, crafting, exploration, and more. Critics sometimes call that an inch deep and a mile wide. He thinks that is unfair, but admits there is a real balancing act.
Bethesda wants crime systems, stealth, and simulation, but they also have to support dozens of other playstyles. They cannot go as insanely deep as Thief, but they can make stealth good enough that it feels satisfying inside a huge open world full of other options.
How that led to the rise of the Skyrim Stealth Archer
All that work on Oblivion paid off big time when Skyrim arrived. By then, Bethesda had years of iteration on stealth. The systems were reliable, readable, and flexible enough to support a huge variety of sneaky builds.
That is how the infamous Stealth Archer was born. Players realized they could crouch in the shadows, line up shots, and clear entire dungeons before enemies even knew what hit them. It became a meme because it was so fun and so effective that people kept defaulting to it, even when they swore they would try something different this time.
Pagliarulo sees that popularity as proof that the lessons from Looking Glass worked. Even though Bethesda could not build pure stealth sims like Thief anymore, the DNA is still there underneath all the dragons and daedric artifacts.
For players, that is the sweet spot. You get the freedom to be whoever you want. Maybe you are an Orc who refuses to wear armor and just sneaks with a bow. Maybe you are a Dark Elf assassin clearing out entire forts without being seen. The fact that these options exist at all in such huge worlds is part of what makes Bethesda RPGs so endlessly replayable.
Pagliarulo says he is genuinely happy with where they landed on stealth over the years. For him, every sneaky character people roll in Skyrim or Fallout is a small victory for that old Looking Glass spirit, living on inside some of the biggest RPGs on the planet.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/the-elder-scrolls/we-owe-skyrims-beloved-stealth-archer-to-one-of-the-designers-of-an-all-time-classic-pc-stealth-game-who-wrote-todd-howard-a-big-document-of-stealth-in-20-different-games/
