They said they wanted to do Skyrim because it featured the most lore, thus could make the game quicker. Now they can focus on creating new lore for another province, likely a more alien province such as Black Marsh.

Perhaps better in other forum but it moves too fast. But really where did you hear this?

My money is on Elswyr, Valenwood or Alinor

I am as uninformed about TES lore as about Icelandic cuisine. But aren't the other provinces already lore-drenched as well?
Me wants not a soup, a marsh.
Me wants big bigger gigantic forests.
Valenwood...just the name sounds epic.

To the OP: with Beth "new engine" I don't think they are ready for Black Marsh.

Engines can be upgraded. Look at the Unreal Engine.

True. But with Bethesda nowadays, I'm going to believe it when I see it.

Skyrim was originally going to be a next-gen game.

It's financially unwise to make an engine that can't be upgraded.

No it wasn't. They considered it, but decided the idea was terrible because they'd have to wait an enormous amount of time to get the game done and would have no idea what level of power the consoles would have. I made the reasoning up based on simple logic, but the fact that they decided against it before they began making it is true, as was said by Todd in an interview (His reasoning was that he thought they could get a lot more out of the current gen consoles). They did not start building the game with the intention on releasing it on ps4 and xbox 720. But anyway, what I believe lorca is trying to say is that they are not confident that Bethesda would improve the engine to an adequate degree to do justice to Black Marsh based on the rate of engine improvement in their previous games.

i hope the marsh is next. but i do agree skyrim was an easy sweetcake for them as far as writing lore and coming up with a story goes.

That's what I mean. The original idea was to make Skyrim for next-gen consoles.

Hey, you are correct in assuming what I meant.

Yeah, well AN original idea, not really THE. In the same way that it was probably AN original idea to have it in Hammerfell, but not THE original idea, just something they would have given some thought, however brief.

Makes me hearken back to a time when PC games were only for PC, dammit. You cant buy Daggerfall for the n64 or playstation. harumph.

Huh? Where'd you hear that? At the beginning of the Making of DVD, Kurt Kuhlmann (Co-lead designer) says:

"One of the reasons why we did Skyrim is it has more developed lore than some of the other places. We've written more about it, there's been more references in books, so we knew more about it. We had more of a starting place, and it was also-- we thought it was cool lore."

But I don't know how you could interpret that in the way you did. If they wanted to make the game quicker, they certainly messed that up considering it was in pre-production between the release of Oblivion and the release of Fallout 3 (~2 years), then in full development afterwards (~3 years). And I'm sure if they really wanted to make a game in another province they could have, there may have been more lore about Skyrim but there wasn't exactly such an overwhelming amount of lore that it was obvious TES V would be set there.