Skyrim may have a fairly linear main questline, what with you defeating the dragon apocalypse before it can really get started, but there are plenty of other big decisions left for players to make about the lands of the Nords and the wider area around them. Bruce Nesmith, lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Bethesda veteran, may no longer be with the company, but he can explain how some of those big decisions played out.
In a thorough interview with PressBoxPR, Nesmith was asked if we would see a canonized ending for The Elder Scrolls V before The Elder Scrolls VI launches. “I don’t know but if I were to hazard a guess, and this is just pure swag, I’d say they’ll either leave it undefined or leave it because neither side really wins,” Nesmith said, referring to Skyrim’s civil war questline.
“For a certain level of storyline, you want to reset things back to the way they are now so you don’t make massive changes,” he explained. “Now, big big stories, you want them to make big changes. That’s what’s cool and exciting, that the world is dynamic. But if I’m doing a thieves’ guild storyline, I usually want to keep my toys. I want to make sure that the next person who has to do a thieves’ guild storyline isn’t too limited or constrained by what I’m doing.”
“If I were to hazard a guess, I would say don’t deal with what happened in the civil war or walk away from it and say there was a civil war but it doesn’t really come to a complete conclusion or some kind of détente, but that’s just my guess.” he concluded.
Even with there often being hundreds of years between The Elder Scrolls game entries (in lore, that is, since we’re only waiting a few decades for new entries nowadays), it seems that Skyrim’s civil war is too big an event to provide a proper answer. Of course, Nesmith hasn’t worked at Bethesda for a long time, so he’s not up to date on the studio’s latest, but it looks like this could be our “canon” ending for Skyrim.
date:2026-02-07 10:43:00
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