The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has enjoyed an incredible amount of longevity owing largely to its sprawling open-world world, intricate lore, fleshed-out characters, and complex but solid gameplay. However, not every concept that was originally added to the game made it in, and some of the concepts that did were never properly implemented. One Skyrim fan has a great idea for a Winterhold DLC that could go back to an unfinished quest and allow players to finally complete it properly.
Winterhold is a former major city that once rivaled Solitude in size and importance, but became a hollow shell of itself in the wake of the Great Collapse. Its main claim to fame is the College of Winterhold, a college of magic that players can enroll at or even become the Archmage of.
Redditor MDRNassassin recently posted an idea for a Skyrim DLC that would allow players to rebuild Winterhold one building at a time in the style of a homesteading game. In other words, players would manually gather supplies and construct each building personally. Not only would this finally allow players to start bringing the broken city back to life, but it could also hook in with the College of Winterhold questline. Since the College of Winterhold questline is notorious for its underwhelming ending and a treasure trove of cut content, this would be a great opportunity for Bethesda to go back and fix the quest.
Apparently, the original plans for the College of Winterhold questline would end with the player going back in time to the era of the disaster that wrecked the city. There, the player would stop the Great Collapse in the past and return to the present to find that Winterhold had transformed back into the major city it once was. While this may sound compelling, the quest as implemented in the game has a rather underwhelming ending that left many players expressing disappointment.
It seems that a number of elements of Winterhold and its quests that didn't make it into the final cut of Skyrim can still be accessed in the game. This includes a quest that would have allowed players to go find the college's missing students -although the quest itself is missing, the bodies of the students can be found, along with a unique dagger that would have been a quest item. A Winterhold DLC could be used to expand on these dropped plot threads and give the city's questline a stronger ending.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.