Not to be confused with TES VI locations.

Just curious about some of the ideas out there. Did it happen in Skyrim, maybe Landfall, etc.

Well, considering that the Fifth Era apparently has advanced technology as we know from "Love Letter from the Fifth Era", so their must be an industrial revolution of some sort. Though I suspect the Love Letter will become non-canon because Bethesda won't turn their fantasy series into a sci-fantasy series to appease Kirkbride lore fanatics.

For all we know that could be something like 5E 8500, and much of the early 5th era was still at medieval technological levels.

Well be finding out very soon -

Landfall is coming.

Very ominous. "Landfall" sounds like an event as big as the Oblivion Crisis, perhaps bigger. Say what you like about Oblivion, the game did a good job of creating a threat to the entirety of Tamriel. That is something I think Morrowind and Skyrim didn't do as well at. They traded the natural disaster-esque nature of the Oblivion Crisis for the more personal enemies of Dagoth-Ur and Alduin. I guess there are pros and cons to each.

Every era, at least since the Second, seems to have a single unifying theme. The era was changed from First to Second with the end of the Reman Dynasty, and the Second Era's theme is therefore the consequences of that empty throne, up until it was filled again by Tiber. The Third Era is literally the era of the Septim Dynasty, and like the First it ended when its dynasty did. That leads us to a couple of different options for the Fourth Era. We could be waiting for another Dragonborn Emperor to sit on the throne and found a new, divinely-inspired dynasty, with the Medes acting like the Akaviri Potentates as a means of keeping things together for the first couple of centuries and an Interregnum afterwards (I doubt this will be the case, considering that it's highly unlikely that the LDB will be sitting on any thrones, and moreover the Covenant with Akatosh is no longer in force anyway). Or the dynasty in question might already be staring us in the face. I'm partial to the idea that the Thalmor is the unifying factor of the Fourth Era, considering that it gained power at the beginning of the era and has basically defined Tamrielic policy from that time onward. The final defeat of the Thalmor would therefore end the Fourth Era--and since I imagine that the Thalmor will act as the plot arc of the games from Skyrim onward until Beth gets bored of it, in the same way that Uriel VII acted as a single plot arc for the previous four games, I have to imagine that there won't be any major time skips this time around, and the Fourth Era will end very, very shortly.

Part of me really doesn't like that interpretation, though, because the eras are getting so short at this point that there's really no reason to call them "eras" anymore. The Merethic lasted two thousand, five hundred years; the First Era lasted almost three thousand. But the Second was less than nine hundred, the Third was less than half of that, and the Fourth might well be about half of that. It's really quite worrying.

All that said, perhaps I'm thinking too much in terms of Tamrielic history, and not enough in terms of metaphysical interference. After all, as Toesock points out, Landfall is coming... eventually. Perhaps that's the cut-off. No telling when we'll get to see that, however, so whether or not it is the cut-off, we still have no idea when it will arrive (or even what it is, for that matter, so we have no idea what to look for... though I wouldn't be surprised to find the Thalmor in the middle of it, considering its apparently-Death Star-like qualities).

Much bigger, at least according to its hype.