"Tamriel. Dawn’s Beauty in the language of the Aldmer, or Taazokaan in the Dragon Tongue, is the continent upon which all The Elder Scrolls games take place.
Home to many diverse races and even more conflicts, Tamriel has been host to countless adventures. You’ve experienced Tamriel in your own way, but want to learn more about its story.
Well, to get to the heart of that story, you have to go back to the beginning..."
Skyrim, ShoddyCast and the life I built while waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI
At 3:42 in the afternoon, I opened the first chapter of ShoddyCast’s Elder Scrolls lore series again.
That feeling of tuning into my favourite Saturday morning show hits again.
The images appear almost exactly as I remember: an impossible city arranged around an island, a white tower rising over the water, distant mountains softened by snow and light. Before the narration had properly begun, something inside me had already recognised the place. The response was immediate and physical. I knew the cadence that was coming. I knew the strange comfort of being told that Tamriel was Dawn’s Beauty in the language of the Alder, Taazokaan in the dragon’s tongue. I knew the promise contained in that introduction: the ordinary world could be set aside for ten minutes, and someone would tell me about another one.
I opened the comments and began writing to ShoddyCast. I intended to leave a brief thank-you. Instead, thirteen years of my life began coming out.
The prologue to ShoddyCast’s Elder Scrolls series appeared on 16 February 2013, followed by the first proper chapter, covering the Daedric Princes, on 2 March. I remember finding it almost immediately. The upload dates confirm that the memory is real rather than one of those personal timelines that gradually rearranges itself: I was there when the series was beginning. I had recently started university. I had moved back to my hometown after a period containing far too much upheaval for someone of my age. I was trying to establish a workable life beside the woman who would become my wife and, this year, the mother of our first child. I had also begun my first recognisably office-like job, the kind in which hours were divided into screens, desks, emails, documents, fluorescent rooms and the persistent suspicion that a human being should probably be doing something else.
I have remained employed ever since.
It feels strange to write that sentence because it is both an achievement and a measurement of how much time has passed. Since 2013, every working year has joined the next. Jobs have changed, responsibilities have expanded, and the young man who was trying to prove that he could hold together a routine eventually became someone whose continued presence at work was taken for granted. I learned how to arrive, perform, respond, endure, go home and return the next morning. I also learned that even a stable life can consume enormous amounts of internal fuel. In those early months, the ShoddyCast lore videos became part of how I replenished it.
I listened at my desk whenever I could. The videos accompanied the dull stretches between tasks and the silent periods in which the day appeared to have stopped moving. I could be physically present in an office while mentally following the histories of gods, provinces, emperors, wars, betrayals and disputed creation stories. Through headphones, a bland workplace could acquire a hidden second level. The computer remained open to whatever document I was meant to be handling, while somewhere behind it stood the mountains of Skyrim, the forests of Cyrodiil, the ashlands of Morrowind and the whole impossible cosmology of Nirn.
There was a particular coziness to those videos that I struggle to explain without making it sound trivial. They felt like sitting beside a fire while somebody opened an enormous book. The images moved gently. The narration was direct, enthusiastic and unembarrassed by the scale of the subject. Every name led to another name, every kingdom to an earlier kingdom, every god to an argument about whether that god had ever truly existed in the form people believed. I could listen without needing to make decisions. I could follow without needing to lead. For a little while, the real world did not require anything from me.
That feeling reaches further back than 2013, because the path to those videos began with Skyrim in 2011.
I cannot think about Skyrim’s original release without feeling the pressure of the life surrounding it. The game launched worldwide on 11 November 2011, a date deliberately made memorable as 11/11/11. For many people, that date recalls launch-night excitement, enormous queues, maps unfolded on bedroom floors and the pleasure of discovering the game alongside the rest of the world. I remember those things too, but they sit inside a far darker personal frame. Skyrim arrived during one of the most painful periods of my life.
There had been another relationship before the life I eventually built. Dragon Age: Origins was connected to that person. She played it, and my memories of Ferelden became entangled with my memories of her: the camp, the companions, the conversations, the sense of travelling with people whose histories could slowly be understood. I loved that game, and it helped me too, but it never became entirely private. It belonged to a shared space that eventually disappeared.
Skyrim was mine.
I do not mean ownership in the literal sense. I mean that it became a small private mercy. It arrived at a time when I had very little emotional shelter and gave me somewhere to go that carried no prior association. I could walk north through snow, enter an inn, hear voices around a fire, sleep until morning and continue. I could spend an hour following a road without needing to explain where I was going. I could disappear into caves, read books left on tables, stand beneath auroras, climb mountains and look down upon a country whose troubles had been arranged into quests with names, markers and possible endings.
Real pain is rarely so considerate. It does not identify itself cleanly or provide an objective. It does not tell you which conversation will complete it. It does not reward endurance with a musical cue and a line crossed from a journal. It can remain unresolved while everything around it continues. Skyrim gave me an orderly substitute at a point when my own experiences had become difficult to sequence. Something was wrong; I could go somewhere. Someone needed help; I could help them. A path was blocked; I could search for another entrance. Night arrived; I could wait until dawn.
The game did not repair my life. It gave me a place in which I could remain intact long enough to begin repairing it myself.
I cry when I think about Skyrim in 2011 because I remember the person who needed it. I remember how young he was and how exhausted he already felt. I remember the silence after certain events, the repetition of the days, the sense that the future had narrowed into a passage he could barely fit through. I remember him sitting before a screen and hearing those first low notes. I remember the relief of looking away from himself.
By 2012, I was trying to put my life back into a usable form. There was no clean transformation. Rebuilding happened through repetitive actions that seemed insignificant while I was performing them: getting up, going where I had promised to go, completing forms, making calls, showing up, studying, working, answering people, resisting the urge to retreat, trying again after days that went poorly. Skyrim became the score beneath that year. Even when I was not playing it, its music accompanied the process. A few notes could return me to a particular room, a particular evening or the sensation of reaching a settlement after walking through darkness.
The game’s world became attached to movement. I was leaving one life without knowing whether the next would hold. Skyrim provided continuity while everything else shifted. The roads remained where I had left them. The mountains waited. A save file preserved the exact point at which I had stopped, even when my actual life seemed incapable of doing the same.
Then came 2013. University began. Work began. My relationship with the woman I loved took on a future tense. The life I had been trying to recover started becoming the life I would keep. In the middle of that transition, ShoddyCast began telling the story behind the world that had already helped me survive.
The videos arrived at precisely the right moment. Skyrim had given me refuge, while ShoddyCast gave that refuge depth. Places I had crossed casually became parts of histories extending far beyond my character. Names that had floated past in books or dialogue acquired connections. The world widened backward. I began to understand that the pleasure of fantasy could extend beyond seeing what happened next; there was equal pleasure in discovering what had happened long before I arrived.
There is a quality in good lore work that resembles archaeology. The creator gathers fragments, compares accounts, acknowledges contradictions and reconstructs something large enough to enter. ShoddyCast did this in an approachable form. The series never required me to become an academic specialist in fictional history. It invited me to sit down, listen and care. It transformed information into ritual.
For adults working behind screens, these rituals can become secret fuel. The world may assume that a person is processing a spreadsheet, reviewing a document or answering correspondence, while internally they are being reminded that imagination remains available to them. The job receives the hands. The story keeps another part alive.
That is what those videos did for me.
When the familiar introduction played, I experienced the same conditioned response I had once felt toward the opening themes of childhood television. As a child, a certain sound meant it was time to rush toward the screen with a bowl of cereal and surrender to the next half-hour. ShoddyCast recreated that invitation inside adulthood. The voice began, the map appeared, and I could feel some internal door opening. The sensation was innocent and restorative. It did not ask me to become younger. It allowed the younger part of me to remain present while I learned how to be an adult.
This is why returning to the first video now made me emotional before I had even reached the end.
The person watching it in 2026 possesses many of the things the person in 2013 was trying to secure. I am married to the love of my life. We have a daughter. I have worked continuously for more than thirteen years. I have endured office life long enough to understand its rhythms rather than merely fear them. I have also built a substantial creative life beside it. There are stories, drawings, symbols, worlds and years of work gathered under The Quantumyth. I am no longer waiting to discover whether I will make anything. I am making it.
Yet the sight of that old video revealed the distance between these lives so quickly that I could feel the years pressing against one another.
News about The Elder Scrolls VI recently produced the same reaction. Bethesda Game Studios has reiterated that the game remains its central development focus and says the team is where it expected to be, likes how the game is looking and is playing it regularly. Fallout 5 has entered pre-production, but Bethesda’s current major focus remains The Elder Scrolls VI. No release window has been announced, and Todd Howard declined to provide one in a July 2026 interview.
I was happy to read this. I am glad Fallout 5 exists in the studio’s plans. I understand why that world remains important and why Bethesda must think across several immense franchises. Still, the words I had been waiting to see were The Elder Scrolls VI. Confirmation that it is alive, advancing and being played every day should have produced uncomplicated excitement.
Instead, happiness arrived carrying sadness.
The sadness comes from understanding that I will meet this game as a different person from the one who began waiting for it. Bethesda’s teaser was shown on 10 June 2018, rather than 2017 as I sometimes remember it, and even that announcement now belongs to another stage of my life. In 2018, the wait still felt containable. The distant landscape in the teaser appeared, the title surfaced, and the future seemed to have placed a marker ahead of us. We would live for a while, then eventually arrive there.
Eight years have passed since that marker appeared. Fifteen have passed since Skyrim.
During that interval, I have become responsible for a family, a career and an enormous creative project of my own. My hours are spoken for before I wake. Money has uses attached to it. Even leisure must negotiate with fatigue, childcare, household needs, work and the knowledge that any unclaimed hour could be spent advancing The Quantumyth. The young man who could enter Skyrim and disappear for an entire evening no longer exists in the same form.
I may not have the spare money to purchase the machine on which The Elder Scrolls VI runs. I may not have the capacity to play it in the vast, unhurried way I once played games. By the time it arrives, a new console generation may be established. Perhaps someone will one day give me the game and a PlayStation 6 as an extraordinary gift. I can imagine opening them and crying, partly from gratitude and partly because they would place a bridge across years I had assumed could never be joined again.
My private hope is still a substantial trailer in 2027 and a release in 2028, perhaps on the next generation of hardware. This is a hope rather than information. Bethesda has provided no such schedule. Yet 2028 carries a personal symmetry: it is the year I turn forty. There would be something almost unbearably appropriate about meeting the next Elder Scrolls at that threshold, after spending my thirties building a world of my own.
Even then, I know the experience would be different. There might be no uninterrupted launch weekend. I might create a character, complete the opening sequence and then stop because the baby has woken, the house needs attention or the following morning begins early. I might advance through the game thirty minutes at a time. Weeks could pass between quests. The map might remain unfinished for years.
I hope I am given even that.
I hope there is one night when the house is quiet and the opening music begins. I hope I can sit with a controller and feel the old internal door open. I hope the first landscape contains enough space for 2011, 2012, 2013 and everything after them to enter alongside me. I hope I can recognise the person who once needed Skyrim while remaining fully present as the husband, father, worker and creator I have become.
I also know now why I will not abandon The Quantumyth.
I have said this to myself before, but returning to ShoddyCast made the reason plain. Fictional worlds have accompanied me through periods when ordinary life could offer stability without offering relief. They have preserved parts of me that responsibility might otherwise have worn away. They have provided vocabulary for grief, courage, transformation, exile, return, guilt, forgiveness and hope. Skyrim did this through a game. ShoddyCast did it through narration, research, imagery and the conviction that imagined history deserved to be treated with care.
The Quantumyth is my response to everything those worlds gave me.
I cannot know whether it will ever possess a large audience. I cannot know whether I will have the resources to realise every part of it in the form I can see internally. I have no guarantee of a studio, a publishing arrangement, a development team or the uninterrupted years such a project would ideally receive. I have work, family, limited hours and the accumulating fatigue of adulthood.
I also have the project itself.
It has survived beside every demand placed upon me. Tale by tale, image by image and name by name, it continues. Sometimes I move it forward with a large act of invention. Sometimes the available progress is a paragraph, a corrected design, a title or a single connection between two ideas. The work accumulates because I return to it. The act of returning has become its foundation.
I will not let it go because I understand what a constructed world can do for a person who encounters it at the right time. Somewhere, perhaps years from now, somebody may find one of these stories while sitting at a desk, travelling home, recovering from loss or trying to imagine a future beyond the room they occupy. They may enter for a few minutes and leave carrying enough internal fuel to continue. I received that gift repeatedly. I want to place my own version of it into the world.
There is also something I want to leave for my daughter: evidence that her father protected his imagination while building a life around her. I want her to know that devotion to family did not require the destruction of the self that entered the family. I want her to inherit stories made during the years in which she grew, stories carrying traces of interrupted nights, crowded days, love, fear, persistence and the refusal to become entirely practical.
Perhaps she will never care about Tamriel. Perhaps she will find Skyrim ancient and strange. Perhaps the technology that once seemed miraculous to me will look primitive to her. Even so, I hope she understands why her father could hear a few notes from an old game and become silent. I hope she recognises that certain works enter our lives at the exact point when we need somewhere else to stand.
When I look back at 2011, I feel grief for the person I was. When I look at 2012, I feel the effort of rebuilding. When I reach 2013, I see the beginnings of continuity: university, employment, love, a desk, a pair of headphones and a lore series opening an invisible route into another world. From there, the years no longer appear as separate rooms. They form a road.
The road has been longer than I expected. I cannot return to its beginning, and I would not surrender the life I possess now in exchange for the time I once had. I love my wife. I love our child. I value the work I have completed and the work still ahead. The sadness remains because every gained life contains the lives that became impossible along the way. I can be grateful for where I arrived while mourning the younger person who had endless evenings, fewer obligations and no understanding of how quickly thirteen years could pass.
I hope The Elder Scrolls VI comes.
I hope the team receives the time and support required to make it worthy of the wait. I hope its world feels handcrafted, mysterious, old and large enough to become a private country for another generation. I hope there are roads I can walk without urgency, books I can read beside unfamiliar beds, distant lights in valleys and music capable of reaching the part of me that still remembers 2011.
I hope ShoddyCast returns to chronicle some of it, in whatever form remains possible. I hope the people who made those old videos understand what they created beyond the information itself. They gave thousands of workers, students, lonely people, exhausted people and people quietly rebuilding their lives somewhere to go. They made fictional history feel intimate. They turned lunch breaks, commutes and office hours into small passages leading toward Nirn.
Dear ShoddyCast, thank you for all you were and all you made. I found your Elder Scrolls series when I was beginning university, beginning a job and trying to prove that a damaged period of my life would not determine everything that followed. I listened at my desk because your work gave me oxygen. I returned thirteen years later as a husband, a father, a continuously employed office worker and the creator of a world I now know I will never willingly abandon.
Thank you for the maps, the histories, the names, the fireside calm and the familiar words that still call me toward the screen. Thank you for helping me survive hours that once seemed impossible to cross. Thank you for showing me that lore could become companionship and that a fictional world could remain available even when the person visiting it had changed completely.
One day, perhaps in 2028, perhaps later, I hope to hear the opening notes of The Elder Scrolls VI. I may be playing on a console someone was kind enough to give me. My daughter may be asleep nearby. My wife may be reading or resting beside me. Tomorrow’s work may already be waiting. The Quantumyth may remain open on another screen, another story unfinished.
I will look toward a new horizon in Tamriel and remember every life that carried me there.
I hope I cry.
I think I will.
