There are multiple possible endings in The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, and rather than focus on a fixed conclusion for Morrowind, Bethesda decided to simply make all of them canon due to magic and whatnot. While this may seem like a savvy way to dodge committing to a single timeline, it actually stems from a typo, says an ex-writer on the series.
During an appearance on the FRVR podcast, Kurt Kuhlmann, a writer and designer at Bethesda from 2003 to 2023, explains that Dragon Breaks – incidents of time getting all weird and distorted – stems from a small mistake they decided to keep, at least in his mind. “It came from the fact that there was this timeline that someone had made – this was from Daggerfall days – and there was this big gap in time,” he says.
“I’m 100% convinced that, in reality, in our world, that was a typo,” he recalls. “Someone just typed a date wrong in the timeline, skipped like 3,000 years or whatever by accident. It’s right between the end of one year and another. So the last date in this year, and then the first date [in the next], there’s this gap.”
Michael Kirkbride, a concept artist, writer and designer on The Elder Scrolls series, loved the possibilities this opened up, and pitched embracing it within the lore. “He wrote up the thing about the Dragon Break, and I think he was using that also because there was the issue of Daggerfall,” Kuhlmann says.
“Normally, you don’t worry about that in a game,” he explains. “If you want to have a sequel refer to the past, you’re just going to have to pick one of those [endings] and move on, and just say in the sequel of the game, ‘What actually happened was this.’ The player could have done all these different things, but we can’t have that.”
Nobody’s found a completely graceful way around this. The Knights of the Old Republic games simply choose one of your possible options from the first installment; the Mass Effect trilogy eventually fell on the laser sword of the third having one finish; and Fable uses the Zelda trick of jumping forward each entry to distance itself from your choices in the predecessor. Those are three examples of many.
You accept it as an RPG fan. Dragon Breaks, named for Akatosh, the Dragon God of Time (who else?), let Bethesda do whatever and keep it all in a timey-wimey mess. “Mike was like, ‘No, what we’re gonna do: What if all of them happened, and you got Numidium, and it was all crazy metaphysical stuff. So why not?'” Kuhlmann adds. “Everyone sees all the different endings, and no one knows what really happened, and it’s this crazy metaphysical thing.”
It certainly hasn’t hindered the Elder Scrolls any, since the series is now one of the biggest in the industry. Perhaps this is a lesson for writers more broadly: When faced with a fork in the road, why not both? Time isn’t real anyway. Who cares? Hell yeah.