Choosing between the Stormcloaks and the Imperial Legion in the civil war is one of the biggest choices you have to make in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. While saving the world from dragons is one thing, the Dragonborn can also choose to aid one of the factions win the long-standing power struggle.
While the overall victory was simply decided based on selecting the relevant options, it seems the original plan for the Skyrim civil war was to make it more dynamic. That means your actions against Stormcloak and Imperial soldiers and towns, even outside of the quest, would affect the final outcome.
In a conversation with PC Gamer, The Elder Scrolls writer and loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann revealed that the original plan with the Skyrim civil war was to make it more dynamic. He described something akin to a reputation system, where killing soldiers of one faction would slowly help the other gain more power.
"The civil war was originally intended to be much more dynamic, in the sense that we were tracking if you went around and killed Imperial soldiers … and we would say, OK, you're harming the Empire in this hold … so we could see...
