Probably between the games we will see that the Empire hit back hard enough for the Thalmor to give in and allow other races on their island. Of course the Thalmor will find ways to spin this in their favor, besides making it easier to get their hands on men and beasts to do horrible thing too, to would also make it easy for them to drum up nationalistic support and racist propaganda by actually having other races there to blame all of life's problems on.

I seriously hope the Thalmar angle is D lC and not TES6. It feels way too small to be the foundation of an entire game. Summerset Isle would be fun, but the Thalmar conflict isn't a good way to get there

Read the book series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a medieval fantasy series that is heavy in political intrigue. Beth can easily make a new game with the Emmpire vs Thalmor (vs Stormcloaks?) as it's MQ and still have a bonefide Elder Scrolls game if they take a hint from RR Martin (the author of A Song of Ice and Fire).

In fact, I can already see ASoIaF influences in Skyrim. The whole overarching plot if ASoIaF is a kingdom in civil war and infighting is threatened by an inhuman "kill everyone that's not us" army, that most people ignore as a fairy tale. That can (kinda) be seen as similar to the Stormcloack rebellion as dragons ravage Skyrim (there's also the Thalmor).

I think thats a stretch, trying to overlap his story onto that of Skyrims. Fact is all this has been in the planning since the start. Each game has been literally leading up to one another.

Yes this is what I was thinking to. In my mind the next TES will take place on Summerset and the player character will play a huge role in a full out political war. However I don't think this game will be TESVI, I think it will be a spinoff made by a sub company of Bethesda, much like what Beth did with New Vegas.

Hammerfell will be the center of the next conflict.

I hope it's in the Summerset Isle. High Elves need some love, plus it sounds like the best place in Tamriel (next to Valenwood).

I do think Empire vs Thalmor will be the plot of the next game, but I think the province will depend on which side it is that goes on the offensive. If the Thalmor are attacking, then yeah, I agree Hammerfell would be the reasonable choice; aside from Cyrodiil (which they aren't going to do as a setting again, certainly not anytime soon) Hammerfell's the only other place the Thalmor tried and failed to capture.

If it's the Empire that's on the offensive, then the logical choice would be one of Alinor/Summerset's client states, so either Elswyer or Vallenwood.

I predict that this is all that we will see of the Thalmor. In TES VI there will be a book called "The Great War, round 2" were all humans unite and slaugher the Thalmor.

Don't forget they literally blew up Vvardenfell.

But basically this. The games are their own thing, and choices will not carry over within Lore. Either TES VI will take place in Summerset, or the Thalmor will be an excuse to move the series away from Tamriel and onto either A'kivir or the Lost Continent where Humanity first came from. Honestly? I keep hoping for a A'kiviri themed game - they've been shown to have interacted with the Empire in the past, after all. Plus: Snake People and Monkey People.

I'd honestly truly love to see some sort of naga-like serpent-man race... but I'm afraid they wouldn't actually let us have such a thing because it would take up too much effort to code and have armors that would fit to a snake body.

The Mages Guild is no more and the College of Winterhold is specific to Skyrim. How many locations feature their own group of individuals dedicated to learning, preserving, and abusing magicka?

YES.I totally agree.The High Elves have nearly become the tolkien orcs of TES.
And I just hope we get to meet some reasonable Altmer as well,portraying a race as pure evil is so immature and it was what I loved about TES,that none of the races were absolute evil.Up until Skyrim.Has anyone seen a non-villainous Altmer in Skyrim yet?

Plus I don't really see what's so wrong with Thalmor.(The game is trying to portray them as evil,but...)

Alduin was overthrown.The Empire was founded after a rebellion,overthrowing the reign before it.And now,the Dominion is overthrowing the Septim Empire.When they do,they will glorify their doings and the generations after that will acknowledge them as heroes.
TES has always taken place in the Septim Empire.So we always played characters from that "next generations".We believed what the Empire told us,but no one knows to what extent those claims were honest.Maybe the Empire had been fooling us too,polishing themselves and mocking what came before.

This is how the history flows,people.

TES 3 hinted at Cyrodiil when Caius Cosades was called back and worried about the Emperor's death. (and his worries became reality since hell literally broke loose)

TES 4 hinted at Skyrim. (I don't remember anything as specific as MW's Caius Cosades, but I remember remember of something happening in the North)

So yeah, I agree TES 6 is already set and will take place in the Summerset Isles

(I have already posted this in the next location thread before discovering this thread)

They are trying to recreate the fabled and lost "Ancient Elven Empire" in which they will serve as the master race, and all other races, including humans and the beast races, are slaves. That is, if they don't just commit genocide against the too-populous humans to clear up more space for elves to live on. Plus, they see even the other elves as "impure" and second-class or worse.

Godwin's Law, I know, but the allegories to the Nazis are pretty darn strong in this one.

Which is why I seriously doubt the Thalmor will actually be a major part of the next game - they're too obviously evil. Besides, since when has a TES game ever been about anything besides some ancient prophecy and a magic macguffin that lets the holder channel the power of the gods in some way? Just directly making a game all about a war is too direct and in-the-trenches for the loopy fantasy world of TES.

The Thalmor exist as a reason to erase the effects of your actions in the previous games. The Warp in the West destroyed the effects of your playthrough in Daggerfall, the explosion of Vvardenfell erases the effects of what you do in Morrowind, the burning of Cyrodiil by the Thalmor erases the effects of what you do in Oblivion, and next, the Thalmor are simply going to conquer Skyrim in some surprise attack, rendering which side you helped (or if you helped any side at all) completely moot, and we're probably going to have TES VI set after another time skip of at least a couple generations when the Thalmor are all gone.

Hey, remember expansion packs? This might be too little for a new game, or too much for a DLC, but it's just about perfect for an expansion. A focus on the Thalmor doesn't necessarily mean something in Alinor or Valenwood, either. Skyrim is basically about the Thalmor vs the Empire, and it's set in Skyrim.

All those hints as to the content of the next game were pretty small. Caius's comment about the emperor's dying didn't tell anyone what Oblivion would be about, except in hindsight. Considering the trouble in Skyrim started about 170 years after Oblivion, I doubt any comment about trouble in the north was actually related to the plot of Skyrim anyway, but let's assume it was. That's one comment. That didn't tell us TES5 would be Skyrim any more than the rumors about the great houses told us it would be in mainland Morrowind. It's only there to notice after the fact. So whatever little thing in Skyrim leads into the troubles in TES6, we're probably all overlooking it.

I completely disagree with the characterization of "choices" and erasing them in this thread. The Warp in the West had to account for multiple endings...never a good idea, especially in an ongoing series. But since then? Morrowind didn't really have alternate endings. The only choice of any consequence is whether you killed Vivec, a choice which no special plot element has been invented to get rid of. It's covered by characters just saying "Vivec died, or left" when they have to talk about it. The end. The destruction of Morrowind is more "nice job breaking it, hero": it doesn't erase the main quest, it happens because of it. Your actions did have an effect. The Tribunal are gone. Same goes for Oblivion. There weren't alternate endings. The 200 years that have passed weren't to make it less important whether or not you found a way to save Martin. You just didn't. And it certainly had an effect. The empire fell apart, and the current one is a much weaker, smaller empire recaptured one place at a time by the Medes. Parts of it were recaptured by the Thalmor instead. So we don't have three games worth of player-erasing catastrophes to draw patterns from at all.

I don't know if they will do a warp sort of thing for who owns Skyrim now or not. Maybe they will write that both potential rulers died at nearly the same time, after much fighting between the legion and rebellion, and so the new high jarl was some other guy who took whatever side. It would be that simple, really. But the Thalmor are an important part of the plot, not some plot eraser. The main quest is actually the Dragonborn stuff anyway. The civil war is somewhere in between a main quest, and which great house you happened to be in.

I predict High Rock, for the same reasons Skyrim seemed like such a good idea. I think anywhere where the majority of people aren't human is out. TES is trying to be less alien than Morrowind was now, for better or for worse. That leaves us with Hammerfell and High Rock, and High Rock is more of medieval Europe. Though Hammerfell makes a better game title and I'd rather play it.

The problem with saying that "The next game will be about fighting the Thalmor" is that it completely goes against how all the TES games have worked before.

In this game, we have a civil war between Stormcloaks and Imperials, but that's not really what the game's about, it's about dragons returning and a prophecy and killing a god.

In Oblivion, there weren't really any humanoid conflicts going on, except for the cult of one of the gods, it was all about a prophecy and a handful of artifacts and a cosmic battle between different gods.

In Morrowind, it was about a prophecy and a handful of artifacts and fights between gods.

Admittedly, there was a lot more politics and affairs of men in Daggerfall (and Arena), but it was still involving reality-warping artifacts and breaking gods.

At most, I think the Thalmor / Imperial conflict will be a sideshow in the next game, as well, while some new prophecy that can be pulled out of any orifice on Tamriel involving the next batch of world-bending artifacts will pop up to be the main plot. There's no reason it can't be the Hist or the Adamantine Tower or Ceporah Tower or something completely created wholecloth.



You miss the point I was making about the choices - you have more choices than whether you complete the main quest or not.

In Morrowind, you could help or harm the various great houses, and so they needed to have a way to say that no house wound up on top lest that conflict with the player's choices in-game. In fact, you could potentially choose to just go on a killing spree and wipe out whole houses or cities.

You can assume that the main quest is completed, but what if I didn't want to join the Fighter's Guild? For that matter, what if I joined the Thieves' Guild? I can't join both those guilds in the same play-through, so you can't just say the results of those questlines are both what canonically happen (not without another Dragon Break).

The only way to wrap up all the plotlines without Dragon Breaking after every single game is to have a canon intervening event that completely wipes out all possible consequences of the player's free will. That means rocks fall, everyone dies, even, in the case of Morrowind, literally. The state of Cyrodiil, and what portions of the plot you accomplished, or what guilds you did or did not join are made irrelevant by burning the whole freakin' province to the ground. Plus 200 years of history to wipe out anything but the vampires and maybe a few altmer, dunmer, and bosmer who would nevertheless be quite old.

What if the player kills Paarthurnax? It's part of a potential questline you can take, so it's just as canon as not killing him. Clearly, Paarthurnax can't appear again without contradicting canon, the way that Vivec had to disappear. Paarthumax says that he'll try to teach other dragons to be peaceful... but he obviously can't do that if he's dead, so obviously the choice you make can have no future impact upon game lore.

So yes, I'm saying Thalmor invades, everyone dies is the way they'll probably clean up the mess potentially made by player choices in Skyrim. Granted, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's some other cosmic anvil falling from on high, but basically, the only way to tie up the loose ends is to kill off anyone who might potentially have been impacted in more than one way by the player.