Without a doubt, this is the most frustrating bug/glitch in all of Skyrim. Raise your hand if you can’t stand when your follower gets stuck in a doorway.
We have all been in this situation: you and your companion have just fought a long, hard battle against a really tough enemy (maybe it is a Dragon Priest, or Draugar Death Overlord), we collect the loot from the grand chest in the back of the enemies’ throne room, then as you turn to leave for another adventure…you find your companion is standing in the doorway.
“No problem,” you may have said if you were new to the game. “I’ll just run into them, and they’ll move”. Yeah, one would have assumed it would have been that easy.
As you press the sprint button and charge headfirst into your faithful follower, your Dragonborn gets rocked back a few feet. Yet, your follower is still standing in the doorway unscathed. You try sprinting at them again and get the same result. After a dozen or so more tries, you realize your follower has turned into an immovable rock wall.
(Bethesda-Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim-Lydia)
“Great,” you have probably thought when this happened to you. “I guess I have to shout Unrelenting Force at them to move them out of the way.”
I know I thought this the first time this happened to me. And as soon as I released the all-powerful shout at my follower, guess what happened….she died!
Lydia, my faithful Whiterun housecarl, who has carried all of my burdens from the start of the game, was rag-dolled against the stone walls of the tomb and disintegrated into a thousand little ash particles as the power of my shout killed her instantly.
Like the idiot I am, I didn’t realize she only had a few health-points left after our fight. Now, not only did I lose my follower, but I also lost her ability to carry the excess 200 weapons, potions, books, food, spell tomes, armor pieces, etc. that I have accumulated since the start of the game.
So, I had two choices on how to proceed: I could log the 400+items Lydia and I were carrying to my nearest home (which was always on the other side of the map when this kind of situation happened) at a slow walk or restart that boss fight again because the game didn’t autosave before I accidently killed Lydia.
My plight is definitely not an uncommon occurrence across the Skyrim community. You can find hundreds, if not thousands of videos, of people suffering from the same annoying follower glitch. Some of these videos are even more tragic and ridicules than my own experience.
Therefore, Todd Howard and the other Bethesda game designers, I’m begging you to fix the followers AI tracking system so that they no longer bunch up in small doorways for Elder Scrolls 6. I don’t want to have to rage quit another Skyrim playthrough because my followers become walls when standing in the doorway. I guess the only good thing is that at least Serena is marked essential.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Bethesda) (The Elder Scrolls VI – Official Announcement Teaser – YouTube)
In Text Image 1: (Bethesda) (Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim)
