It did, over 4,000 years before the Third Era, when the ancient Elves called the Dwemer ruled Vvardenfall.

They made massive metal cities, computers, robots, factories, assembly lines, electric lights, steam power, deep underground mines, and a God fashioned from the very heart of the world.

It's hard to get more steampunk than that without Vangelis playing in the background as Harrison Ford eats Ramen.

It should happen when the Dwemer return.

If you await for that then you might as well get comfy. Hard to return when your body and soul was used for skin of a giant robot.

NO.

TES is primarily a medieval fantasy series to me, and the day that changes is the day I lose interest. Pockets of Dwemer culture here and there is fine and works well for the series, but I don't want anything more than that.

Really? You don't see that many rank-and-file grunts flinging fireballs around in any of the games. The Telvanni Guard are the only that come to mind (though they just summon stuff).

Do you know what people said about guns when they were invented? "Why use them when bows are better?". Well, turned out guns were easier to make and use than bows. Same can be applied to magic. It's probably easier to teach a soldier to fire a gun than to teach him magic.

That's not really true. For game mechanics certainly, but lore wise not everyone and their grandmother is adept or even novice in magicka. That said, technology is by far a more practical then spending years in training and service to learning the arcane arts. Tech makes sense and magicka isn't the answer to everything. That doesn't mean that I want to see it represented in game, but to simply say magicka nulls tech is just silly.

In what way does "a God fashioned from the very heart of the world" sound like anything other than magic? For that matter, the geo-thermal power sources they use for steam are fully magical, since Nirn does not operate on rational physics, but on "Earth Bones".

Like I said, dwemer don't have steampunk, they have sufficiently anolyzed magic that just looks like technology because they've refined it to the point where it has predictable results.

How, exactly, are those "steam-powered" automatons moving around when not hooked up to any steam, and have no fuel source to generate steam? Because they aren't steam-powered, they're powered by the souls of formerly living creatures (in this case, probably the dwemer themselves). The magic just creates steam that powers pneumatic moving parts. Just like all the other magical apparatii in the game. The dwemer simply have a distinct architectural style and an understanding of pneumatics.

After all, how can a steam-powered machine even discern friend from foe, much less attain sentience, if it's just steam driving it? (To quote Yahtzee / Zero Punctuation: "I was unaware that boiled water was capable of forming allegiances.") It obviously has to be magic.

People are to afraid to invest in technology after what they think happen to the Dwemer, also TES already has some steampunk in it, the Dwemer ruins . And that is enough for me.
TES should stay sword and sorcery, also this topic has been discussed to death, and the answer is always a firm NO!!!!!!
So my answer is NOOOO!!!!!!!!!

Essentially, TES should try to hit the Internet-/Digital-age without even having an industrial revolution :>
I laugh in the face of wizards who haven't invented texting and tweeting yet.

---- except we already have dreamsleeve transmissions*. And ancestor mothic instant messaging.*
goddamit.


on a funny note, i used to read this one scifi where the world's population grew increasingly psychic (a la X-men ish)
Thought bubbles and all that. Eventually so many wizards that we'd have one fused internet megamind metaconcert thing.

------
edit,
*Nu-Mantia Intercept.
Whatever you call that obscure/expanded/noncanon devpost thing.

I think it should go beyond steampunk. Fantasy settings almost always have medieval technology, and when they don't, it's usually renaissance or industrial era. I'd like to see what Tamriel would be like a thousand years later.

Steampunk is at least 100 times more original than Conan the Barbarian.Just couldn't keep quiet in that aspect.



Now,as for TES going Steampunk,well,Dwemer could use some more spotlight,but I wouldn't want the game to go entirely Steampunk.Some Dwemer Cultists taking the dwemer technology further to invent new dwemer stuff,or even Dwemer coming back (even 1 or two people)...Yes,I would want this...

Well played you caught my location.

NO!! Leave this to Risen 2. Pirates of the Caribbean! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOR7cW4262E

Dude.That is not steampunk.It's just pirates.