The Player is in the Imperial Prison when the Emperor and his bodyguards need to go through his cell to escape from the Imperial City. The Emperors sons are asassinated. The Player goes to Kvatch where he finds the last heir of the Septim Bloodline. The emperor has been killed while escaping from the City. The Player must help the heir Martin Septim to save the world from the Oblivion Crisis. And joining the Blades, Save Kvatch from Oblivion, Save Bruma, and be the Champion Of Cyrodiil.
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Before Sean Bean was locked in to play Martin Septim, voice actor Wes Johnson recorded a full set of lines for the character as a backup plan. Once Bean was officially cast, most of Johnson's takes were scrapped from the final game, but a handful of orphaned files reportedly still sit buried in the game's data to this day.
Getting Patrick Stewart to voice Emperor Uriel Septim VII was a genuinely big deal back in 2006, when big-name actors in games were still pretty rare. Funnily enough, all that star power gets used up fast - Uriel is killed off within the opening stretch of the game, making his one of gaming's shortest celebrity cameos with the biggest opening impact.
Before launch, Bethesda talked up Radiant AI as a system where hungry guards could wander off duty, letting opportunistic NPCs steal from unguarded shops and spark full-blown street fights the player might stumble across later. In testing it caused way too much unpredictable carnage, so a lot of that ambition got quietly dialled back before the game ever shipped.
Cyrodiil was originally meant to include a settlement called Sutch, sitting where Fort Sutch stands in the finished game. It got cut somewhere along the way, along with a rumoured questline about the Elder Council helping rebuild Kvatch, leaving only scattered file remnants as evidence it was ever planned.
The development team designed Skyrim's world around a philosophy they called 'epic-realism,' a deliberate break from what they saw as Oblivion's more generic 'classic' western-fantasy look, aiming for a grounded world with room for stranger, more unique creatures and conflicts.
