Skyrim might have had a fairly linear main questline, what with you defeating the dragon apocalypse before it can really begin, but there are a bunch of other big decisions left for the player to make about the land of the Nords and the wider areas around it. Bruce Nesmith, lead designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Bethesda veteran, may no longer be at the company, but he could shed some light on how some of those big decisions played out.
In a sweeping interview with PressBoxPR, Nesmith was asked whether we'll see an ending canonised for The Elder Scrolls V before The Elder Scrolls VI launches. "I don't know but if I were to hazard a guess, and this is just purely a swag, I would say they will leave it undefined or leave it as neither side really won," Nesmith said, referencing the Skyrim civil war questline.
"For certain levels of storyline, you want to reset things back the way they were so that you don't make sweeping changes," he explained. "Now, the big grand stories, you want those to make the sweeping changes. That's what is cool and exciting, that the world is dynamic. But if I'm doing a thieves guild storyline, I usually want to put my toys away. I want to make sure that the next guy who has to do a thieves guild storyline isn't highly limited or constrained by what I did."
"If I were to hazard a guess, I would say either just not deal with what happened in the civil war or leave it and say there was a civil war but it didn't really come to a complete conclusion or some sort of détente, but that's just my guess," he concluded.
Even with there often being hundreds of years between entries of The Elder Scrolls games (in lore, that is, as we only wait decades for new entries currently), it appears that the Skyrim civil war is too big of an event to give a proper answer to. Of course, Nesmith hasn't worked at Bethesda in ages, and so he's not aware of the latest at the studio, but it seems likely this could be our "canon" ending for Skyrim.