User blog comment:Thedoucheinthenorth/The Civil War - Why it is great/@comment-3492791-20121031012959

As someone that can very games from a development standpoint, it is pretty obvious that one some point the civil war WAS the main quest.

It was likely meant to be that you join the Stormcloaks and fight the Empire and Thalmor. But somewhere down the line someone suggested seeing things from the Empire's point of view. They liked the idea so much they implemented it. Then they realized that spliting the main quest into two equal and both morally righteous paths was too hard and a simple war wasn't apocalyptic enough for the main quest and stop making it part way through. And there it stayed, cold and abandoned, until some poor dev had to string together what was left into the worst questline in the game.

Untimely there is this huge clould of potential and ambition hanging over the whole thing that wreaks of the it being planned on being so much bigger. Even Diplomatic Immunity shows signs of once being part of the civil war questline.