Skyrim was set to feature dynamic civil war and real-time cart travel, but they didn't make the final cut
Kurt Kuhlmann, co-director of Skyrim and former keeper of The Elder Scrolls lore, revealed cut mechanics that would have significantly changed how players experienced the civil war. The system reached late-stage development but didn't survive to release due to technical limitations.
The original civil war concept tracked player actions in the open world. Killing Imperial soldiers weakened the Empire's position in specific holds, gradually shifting the balance of power toward the Stormcloaks. With sufficient advantage, Stormcloaks would automatically attack the hold's capital. Faction camps appeared across territories, and regional control changed the appearance of locations.
The final version of Skyrim retained only a small part of the system – the Battle for Whiterun, where players help Stormcloaks capture the city.
But we had it sort of working with attacks on all the main cities in all the holds in a systematic way. So I still feel like we maybe could have pulled that one off.
Performance was the problem. The Battle for Whiterun created enormous difficulties – NPCs on walls and inside the city heavily taxed the system. The team spent massive amounts of time optimizing this single battle, constantly applying special solutions for stable operation.
Kuhlmann recalls:
The production decision was: we cannot make this good and make sure the frame rate is good in all the cities under all circumstances.
Xbox 360 barely handled Skyrim in its original state – before all patches, mods and improvements for next-generation consoles. Considering Oblivion and Skyrim ran on the same platform, Bethesda was already pushing the hardware to its limits.
Given the performance issues in the release version, additional load from dynamic warfare would have made the situation critical. Still, Kuhlmann believes the team could have found a solution based on their experience with the Battle for Whiterun.
We were pretty disappointed that didn't ship. Probably, if people pull up the creation kit, they can find a lot of bits and pieces of that system, because we couldn't delete everything that was supporting that, so maybe, I don't know, I don't know if anybody's ever modded that back in, or something like that.
Modders actually resurrected the concept – the Skyrim at War mod implements large-scale battles on roads, in cities and villages with troop command, new units and combat formations.
The second cut mechanic involved real-time cart travel. Near each major settlement stands a wagon with a driver offering instant travel after a loading screen. Kuhlmann wanted to turn this into full journeys through the world using technology from the game's intro.
I had started, and I had it working to some extent … using the tech of the intro to the game. The horse is pathing through the world. It's pulling the cart. You're riding in it. I was like, well, if it works here, we should be able to make it work at other places.
The system didn't work on rails – the horse actually traveled through the game world with physics and pathfinding. Players could jump out of the cart upon seeing bandits fighting and intervene. But that same freedom created problems – the horse sometimes chose different routes with the slightest changes, and when climbing hills the physics broke down, flipping the entire contraption.
We couldn't possibly ship that.
Modders picked up this idea too – numerous mods exist for travel with full control over the journey, including ferries and other transport. Kuhlmann's dream came to life through community efforts, even when the developer ran out of time.
