Alduin depictions differences

[legoless]

Alduin from the Seven Fights seems to imply something horrible and unintended would happen if a Kalpa were left to continue playing out forever. That would be an interesting OOG thing for the devs to play with in future installments, in my opinion. Imagine if weird "glitches" in reality started happening from the Nirn "program" running too long without "defragmenting".

Magical Anomalies, anyone?

[Pilaf The Defiler]

Maybe. It would be a good idea to expand on those, since the College questline in TES V seemed rushed and incomplete. Maybe they can work it into the next game and retcon the College questline into being a teaser for some wider thing, with the Great Collapse and the Eye of Magnus being mere harbingers for some new apocalyptic crisis.

[Minor Edits]

Maybe. It would be a good idea to expand on those, since the College questline in TES V seemed rushed and incomplete. Maybe they can work it into the next game and retcon the College questline into being a teaser for some wider thing, with the Great Collapse and the Eye of Magnus being mere harbingers for some new apocalyptic crisis.

That would interesting. And I absolutely agree on the Mages Guild questline; it seems like they must have run out of time. There must have been severe compromises to meet deadlines. I hope they started on the Mages Guild questline first for TES VI.

The magical anomalies are a great idea. I was thinking about the glitches in a more meta, matrix-y kind of way. Towns moving, climates changing. dates shifting around; historical continuity problems like that.

[Pilaf The Defiler]

That could work, too. For all we know, Winterhold was teleported to some alternate dimension rather than merely being physically destroyed. Sure, we see remains of part of the city, but in the lore it was massive. It was much bigger than Windhelm and Markarth. It could be that these anomalies do all sorts of wonky things, and you could make an entire main quest around investigating and cataloging all of them.

In fact, the whole idea of a Bioshock Infinite type game where you constantly phase between slightly similar dimensions of reality could be something fun to inject into this series, since some of the lore already suggests parallel kalpas. This could be a fun "powers" mechanic to replace Shouts in the next game. Maybe you reach a point in the main quest where you can't progress because a town was destroyed or an important NPC is dead. Simply phase back in time or to a universe where they're still alive. Of course, lots of things would be different then. You may enter a Tamriel where the Dominion is in charge, or where the Redguards never took over Hammerfell, or where the Akaviri had overran the continent in ages past and everyone is enslaved by a Potentate.

I'm guessing they won't go that in-depth, though. Really hard to pull off in sandbox games like the main TES series. That sort of reality-bending stuff only works in a railroad type game. I guess the pocket dimensions could be small, though. Like the Oblivion gates from TES IV, except instead of entering the Deadlands you're inside the Potentate's palace in Dimension 45 or something.

[Imbalance]

What you just described could be called the Artaeum Adventure.