The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

THE BUZZ: Bethesda’s Todd Howard has said that the models of Morrowind and Cyrodiil discovered in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim were added as window dressing for long distance viewing.

The two areas were discovered last year when PC players hacked their way past the invisible barrier at the end of a road in Skyrim and discovered framework for Morrowind’s Solstheim and Vvardfell along with Cyrodiil’s Imperial City. This led many to begin speculating that these areas would be added as DLC at some point in the future.

However, Howard has told Kotaku that these areas were added in such a small scale form as window dressing for when players look into the distance.

“The reason they are there – and I will not say if we are or are not using them in the future – is when we first built the landmass for Skyrim we knew we were going to have these tall mountains,” he explained. ”And what can you see? We have views early in the project where you can see into the [neighbouring] province from the other game. We needed to have something.”

“It’s not high detail. If you walk there, from a distance it’s…yeah, the stuff is there. And the thinking is, maybe we’ll use it one day, but our larger worry was, I’m going to climb up on top of a mountain and look that way. What will I be able to see there? We try to cover all those angles as much as we can,” he concluded.

EGM’s TAKE: It’s interesting how he didn’t flat out deny that these areas would be used as DLC in the future, and the fact that a road leads to an invisible wall does tend to suggest that it may one day be opened up. Skyrim needs a least one massive expansion pack, which one of these areas could easily offer. There’s tons of space for new quests, NPCs and enemies. It would be a major undertaking, but considering Bethesda already has the framework in place it would just be a process of transferring texturing to create the areas. If the team decides to do this they expect it to make a lot of cash from hungry Elder Scrolls fans dying to see these areas in Skyrim’s engine.

Would you like to see these areas added as DLC? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: Kotaku