Late last year, modders playing the PC version of Skyrim discovered that many of the familiar landmasses from previous Elder Scrolls titles like Morrowind and Oblivion were present in the game world of Skyrim. Though Bethesda was silent about the issue back then, Kotaku spoke to Todd Howard at DICE to find out why the older locations were included in Skyrim. “[W]hen we first built the landmass for Skyrim we knew we were going to have these tall mountains. And what can you see see? We have views early in the project where you can see into the province from the other game,” Howard detailed. “We needed to have something [there]. It's not high detail. If you walk there, from a distance it's... yeah, the stuff is there.”

Though Howard wouldn’t commit to whether or not Bethesda did have plans to allow players to return to those neighboring areas, he also didn’t say the company was never going back. “[T]he thinking is, maybe we'll use it one day,” he sais. “But our larger worry was, I'm going to climb up on top of a mountain and look that way. What will I be able to see there? We try to cover all those angles as much as we can."

While it’s not quite an outright declaration of what Skyrim’s DLC will actually entail, it’s clear that Bethesda is thinking about letting players return to the worlds they spent so many hours in over the past few iterations of the Elder Scrolls. Getting some new locations would be great too, but we’d be just as excited to see what our old stomping grounds looked like with the new and improved graphics engine.

SOURCE: Why you can see Morrowind from Skyrim [Kotaku]