So I've finished the civil war questline for the stormcloaks and after I thought I'd help out some more by clearing out the legions camps in the wilderness. However at every camp I've visited so far the residing legate was essential and thus unkillable.
Anyone know why this is?

Because Bethesda liked the Essential tag so much, they decided to put it on almost every NPC in the game.

What Alikah said. True story...

They had more civil war content planned out that was cut before release. These essential tags are the left overs.

A DLC may be released eventually to crown either Elisif or Ulfric high king/queen and will make use of these immortal commanders.

Thanks for the explanation, I thought I was missing a quest or something

Actually it's because of the complaining people did about "I broke this quest by failing Anger Management 101. Wahhhh!!!!!" in Morrowind and Oblivion. Honestly in Tribunal with that Bosmer guy in Mournhold I almost failed Anger Management.

I can understand all the npc's that give main quest to be tagged Essential, but civil war I don't. It's funny how you see multiples of other named npcs that give side quests get taken out daily by dragons and what not, yet these scums are made immortal.

Actually, that's a pretty good theory. Any NPC that is tagged as esential may not be essential in the vanilla game, but will become important in later planned DLC. Makes sense to me.

What if the cut DLC is the Thalmor mopping up the Empire/Stormcloaks and you lead man's last stand?

If that's the case it will be incredibly disappointing if they don't up the on screen npc count. The war was pretty bland due to so few participants in the battles, the defense of whiterun stands out as the best example.

I don't see how some random field commanders for the Imperials/stormcloaks could be more important than Galmer.Ulfric or Tulis/Legate Rikka, who can and are killed during the quest line.

I'd say it's just another oversight, among other things.

They forgot to pull the tags out. That's all there is to it. No amount of theoretical "upcoming DLC" will justify it. Because for God's sake when you have killed Tullius there is no point in keeping those Legates. Especially because you can kiss Titus Mede goodbye at that

And when you follow Stormcloak questline, Elisif is just a concubine for Ulfric. Either she's the High Queen or High King's Concubine

Why, they're here to protect you, citizen.

*trollface*

Yes, I'm almost certain this is the answer.

Sadly, this bug also extends to Stormcloack officers.

I don't see why they would do this, I really wanted to get rid of the Stormcloaks

it's not a bug. It's a feature. Bug is when you input the right code but got unexpected result. Brain fart is when you forgot to pull the essential tag from camp commanders

It's another example of Beth doing poor QA and hoping the excuse of the large game world being too big to QA entirely still protects them.

Either one of these scenarios:
1. Their programmers brain farted
2. Their QA team did not test the game thoroughly
3. Their QA team was not large enough to test the game thoroughly
4. Their programmers did not respond to QA team bug reports quickly enough
5. They were forced to release unfinished game due to magic eleven

It has to be noted that while the game is released on 11-11-11, version 1.0 of the game itself is shipped even earlier than that. They probably shipped version 1.0 to production factories (for all that DVDs) around mid-September to allow the factories to produce DVDs, pack 'em, and ship 'em to stores

That's how you get Update.esm on 11-11-11.

Seriously, if a company as big as Bethesda can't QA its game due to it being "too massive", it's time to give 'em a facepalm (or perhaps a middle finger if you're PS3 owner)

Skyrim is like Windows Vista: it was awesome, but it's a beta that you have to pay so you can QA it for the company who made it

According to some hints dropped on these forums, this might be the case. Just like 1.4 patch. Some easy to solve issues (that can be fixed via console commands or simple MODs) weren't taken into consideration.

It's possible that premature removal of the leaders from the game due to death by dragon/dragonborn could stop things dead during the civil war due to soldiers being scripted to follow the leaders.

That's a guess as I personally haven't played through the civil war stuff yet, so I don't actually know how the battles play out.

Lol soldiers and leaders? Without spoiling it for you, ill just say you're gonna be disappointed.

^^THIS

Either Beth made a mistake by not untaggiing them after they became superfluous or they have a legit reason and are just not telling us. Who cares? What's the big deal? Is it really gonna ruin your game experience if you're unable to kill off a few nameless NPC's?

I went into the Reach Stormcloak Camp post patch 1.4 and there was no one in there but 3 sick individuals in a tent. I went to another Stormcloak camp and saw some people milling around but I did not stop to see who was there. They looked like Stormcloaks. Perhaps this is something they fixed in the patch. I have not gone 30 game days yet, so the Reach camp may return to "normal"