14 DAY TRIAL // Bethesda has talked about the bare-bone models for territories like Morrowind or Cyrodiil that it has included in its recent The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim role playing game, saying that it could use them in future downloadable expansions.
Skyrim has impressed legions of gamers across the PC, PS3 or Xbox 360 platforms by delivering a massive open world that could be explored by players in whatever way they wanted.
For some players, however, the world of Skyrim wasn’t enough so, with the help of the in-game command console on the PC, they were able to go past the invisible walls set in place by developer Bethesda. As such, they discovered different landmarks situated in other territories like Cyrodiil or Morrowind, in which previous Elder Scrolls games were set.
According to Bethesda’s Todd Howard, the studio put those things there only to make players believe that Skyrim was just another province of the bigger continent of Tamriel.
"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 to Kotaku. "And what can you see? We have views early in the project where you can see into the [neighboring] province from the other game. We needed to have something [there]."
Howard doesn’t exclude the fact that these models might be used in the near future when working on DLC for Skyrim but, at least for now, they’re just present to make sure players don’t believe Skyrim is set on a floating island or anything like that.
"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."
Bethesda has been hard at work patching Skyrim across its different platforms, while bringing mod support for the game’s PC version. Now that things are quieter, you can expect the studio to start working on downloadable expansions.