The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge. The High King of Skyrim has been murdered. Alliances form as claims to the throne are made. In the midst of this conflict, a far more dangerous, ancient evil is awakened. Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned to Tamriel. The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance as they wait for the prophesized Dragonborn to come; a hero born with the power of The Voice, and the only one who can stand amongst the dragons.
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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.
Todd Howard told PC Gamer that many of the gameplay changes made since Oblivion were directly inspired by Bethesda's work on Fallout 3, the game the studio released in the years between its two Elder Scrolls titles.
Composer Jeremy Soule's choral theme 'Dragonborn' is sung entirely in the fictional Dovahzul language, and its lyrics were crafted so carefully that they rhyme both in the invented Dragon tongue and in their English translation.
Before becoming the peaceful grandmaster of the Greybeards atop the Throat of the World, Paarthurnax served as Alduin's trusted lieutenant during the Dragon War, reportedly committing atrocities against mankind before ultimately betraying his brother and teaching the first mortals the power of the Thu'um.
Paarthurnax's name breaks down into three Dragon-language words, Paar, Thur, and Nax, translating to 'Ambition Overlord Cruelty,' a title that reflects the violent history he spent millennia trying to atone for through the Way of the Voice.
The blind, feral Falmer players fight in Skyrim's ruins were once the Snow Elves, a proud and prosperous civilization that rivaled the High Elves before being driven underground by the Nords in the Merethic Era.
After taking in the defeated Snow Elves as refugees, the Dwemer forced them to eat a toxic fungus as a staple part of their diet, permanently blinding them and their descendants, before enslaving them entirely, ultimately shaping them into the Falmer creatures found underground today.
The guard line mocking players about a stolen sweetroll is rooted in a character-creation question going all the way back to 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena, where a gang of children demand the player's sweetroll in an alleyway, a scenario that shaped starting stats and later resurfaced across nearly every mainline Elder Scrolls game.
General Tullius, voiced by Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan, is the Imperial commander overseeing the botched execution at Helgen that opens the game, tying the political Civil War storyline directly into the very first cinematic players see when Alduin attacks the keep.
