The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the biggest game of the year, we mean that both from a physical and hours-of-play perspective. Not only does Skyrim take countless hours to explore, there are literally an unlimited quests for players to pursue thanks to the game's Radiant quest system.

What if we told you that while this installment of The Elder Scrolls series is even bigger. The game takes place in the northern most province of Tamriel, but what if players could travel to the neighbouring provinces, areas we've explored in the previous two games in the series?

This news is rather mind-blowing if true so later we're going to go exploring ourselves to see, but what one Finnish player named Jesse has discovered is that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim actually includes the land masses of other Tamriel provinces. These can't be accessed since they're blocked by invisible walls bordering Skyrim, unless of course a curious PC player uses the command line to enable clipping.

Skyrim Passage to Morrowind

Heading to the South Eastern edge of the map, Jesse noticed a passageway between two mountains which contained a man-made archway. It's blocked with an invisible wall, so after entering no clip mode, Jesse proceeded through where there were trees, foliage and more mountains. These and the textures gradually disappeared but Jesse kept going and discovered that Bethesda had included the entire land mass of Morrowind, including of course the mountainous island of Vvardenfell where The Elder Scrolls III took place.

Skyrim Expansion Morrowind

The scaling and size of the province, he points out, is slightly off in relative terms but it's still there. He also traveled to Cyrodiil, where The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion takes place, and found the capital city there.

Skyrim Expansion Cyrodiil

Why is this stuff there? One could say that it helps the 3D map of Skyrim look more authentic in seeing the backgrounds but the more plausible answer is that Bethesda is thinking big. If you recall, back in June,  Skyrim game director Todd Howard said they are aiming for "substantial" content for the Skyrim DLC and/or expansions:

“We would like to do DLC; we don’t have any specific plans yet, but they’ve been really successful and we like making them. Right now I can say that we’d like to do less DLC but bigger ones — you know, more substantial. The Fallout 3 pace that we did was very chaotic. We did a lot of them — we had two overlapping groups. We don’t know what we’re going to make yet, but we’d like them to be closer to an expansion pack feel.”

I think they do know what they're going to make. How cool would it be to travel to Morrowind with the Skyrim game engine and graphics? Perhaps that's asking too much but if these are all-out expansions that could retail for half the price of a normal game, it's easily justified.

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We're going to turn on Skyrim now and try to travel there ourselves! Read our Skyrim review to see why it's a must-play game.

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Follow me on Twitter @rob_keyes.

Source: PPSH-41 (via Destructoid)