Gaming: Skyrim Lead Designer's Biggest Lore Regret Is *checks Notes* One Of...

I don't mean to overreact, but someone needs to stop Skyrim design lead Bruce Nesmith before I actually start crying. The ex-Bethesda dev's been on a tear of late, chatting about everything from Todd Howard's tendency to "seagull" around the studio to his take on why Bethesda shouldn't ditch its venerable old in-house engine. That's all fine. Unforgivably, though, he's also told interviewers that he thinks anyone playing Morrowind today would "cringe" and that the game "would not stand the test of time."

Let me stop you right there, buster. I played Morrowind literally yesterday (via OpenMW) and that game is still the best thing Bethesda's ever done and one of the best games ever made. So jot that down.

Ahem. Anyway, the latest thing Nesmith has said in an attempt to hurt me specifically is that his biggest regret about the series' lore is something I regard as one of the coolest things it ever did. In a chat with PressBoxPR, Nesmith said "the big one" in terms of lore regrets "would be the time splitting thing that happened way back in the Daggerfall days."

That'd be the Dragon Break, a name you may dimly recall from the book Where Were You When The Dragon Broke? that you can find across multiple Elder Scrolls games. The "dragon" in this instance is Akatosh, TES' god of time (and also a large dragon; he's the fella you see at the end of Oblivion), and "Dragon Break" is really just a lore-appropriate way of saying "time got hell of screwy."

The Dragon Break at the end of Daggerfall—also called The Warp In The West—was Bethesda's way of accommodating that game's multiple endings in the stories of later games in the series. Daggerfall's ending depended on which faction gained control of Numidium, a giant brass god built by the Dwemer, but which the Dwemer never activated because they, uh, all disappeared (or they did activate it and thus caused their own disappearance, maybe? God, Elder Scrolls used to be cool).

How do you write The Elder Scrolls 3 when any of five factions could have seized the impossibly powerful brass god at the heart of The Elder Scrolls 2? Easy: you just say they all did, because time got incredibly weird and so every ending happened at once.

And if you want that explained, here's a passage from the in-game lore about it:

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"Do you mean, where were the Khajiit when the Dragon Broke? R'leyt tells you where: recording it. 'One thousan

Source: PC Gamer