The Elder Scrolls Online has turned ten years old this week, and it’s not showing any sign of slowing down yet. The next Chapter to release brings players back to a region many of us haven’t traveled since 2006’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, as we venture into the West Weald.
Gold Road is slated to release in June on PC, Mac and consoles, and with it comes the new zone, as well as the new feature, Scribing. We had the chance to go hands on with an early build of the upcoming ESO chapter to check out Scribing as well as explore ZeniMax Online Studios’ rendition of iconic locations such as the city of Skingrad.
The West Weald
One of the more interesting areas of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was the West Weald and its major city, Skingrad. This castle town was one of the more uniquely laid-out cities in the RPG, with its major chapel dominating the skyline when looking down on the city. Its narrow stone streets, flanked on either side by towering stone-crafted buildings, made it one of the more impressive sights outside the Imperial City itself.
The Elder Scrolls Online has reimagined the city before these more domineering features were in place a thousand years later in Oblivion. While it still has some of its defining characteristics, it definitely has a feel that it's still being built into the more pristine stone city that we'll see in Oblivion. From its cobblestone streets to stone and timber buildings, Gold Road's Skingrad very much evokes TESIV. Yet all roads still lead to the Chapel district, with the Temple impressively entering view once heading down the main thoroughfare.
However, while Skingrad in Oblivion has two separate housing districts, Skingrad in ESO is still being built, having not taken over the vineyards that would make up its third district. While the stone walls that protect the city are there, they will be expanded in the next thousand years to encompass the grounds that makeup Oblivion’s city. However, the castle and its iconic archway bridge are here in all their glory - which I was very, very happy to see.
Surrounding Skingrad are the iconic vineyards - and here, they actually feel like they are more prominent and in full bloom. The fields and hills of the West Weald open up around the city, but pretty quickly it’s easy to see that something is terribly wrong: a band of wasteland stretches across the region just out of catapult range from Skingrad’s walls.
This wasteland acts as a no man’s land buffer zone for one of the other defining characteristics of Gold Road’s depiction of The West Weald: the encroaching forest coming from nearby Valenwood.
How this forest sprung up seemingly overnight is a mystery that is uncovered slowly during the main campaign - but it’s the talk of the region. Running through Skingrad’s streets I could hear townspeople anxiously discussing the new threat, wondering aloud if the Aldmeri Dominion-allied Wood Elves were behind it.
The new woodlands, the Dawnwood, as some Bosmer call it, play a central role in the story that Gold Road aims to tell. This story is a continuation of last year’s Chapter, Necrom, and the monumental discovery at the end of that one (no spoilers here if we can help it). While, like every ESO chapter before it, you needn’t play Necrom to be able to jump in and tackle Gold Road, this might be the first time I’d really recommend doing the prior content. Thankfully, the prologue quest for Gold Road just launched yesterday, so you have time!
The Elder Scrolls Online team has always done a great job of recreating older locations in Tamriel’s gaming archive and going to great lengths to do them justice. Morrowind, for example, used The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind’s exact height maps for Vvardenfell in ESO to recreate the Dunmer homeland as accurately as possible.
Despite the changes with the Dawnwood dominating much of the Weald now, traveling through its countryside brought me back to my CRT TV in my bedroom seventeen years ago. I would spend so much time going between Kvatch and Skingrad in TESIV it’s beyond count - it was one of my favorite regions to just set off in and explore. While I’m sad that much of that countryside is now jungle, I’m excited to see how the developers spin this twist - especially since we know that jungle isn’t really there Oblivion a millennia later.
The West Weald itself is only one of the stars of this new Chapter. Each Chapter tries to bring a new class or major gameplay system to the MMO, and this time it’s Scribing, ESO’s precursor to Oblivion’s Spellcrafting.
Scribing Leaves Me Cautiously Optimistic
I won’t bury the lede here: at least in my playtest, Scribing felt less impactful than I thought it was going to when the feature was first announced back in January. A precursor (of sorts) to the broken Spellcrafting that dominates many playthroughs in Oblivion, Scribing is a way for players to effectively create their own skills.
While there are plenty to choose from, the selections also felt pretty limited. Grimoires, which are the skills themselves that players will need to collect, seem to only come from a select few skill lines out of the multitude that ESO has on offer. I knew this going in, but still seeing only Weapons, Mage and Fighters Guilds, Soul Magic, and the Assault and Support lines, erm, supported, was a bit of a downer in practice. Many of the skill lines that are supported only have a single skill Grimoire, which was a bit of a downer as well.
What’s not present are the Class trees themselves - so at least with Gold Road’s launch there won’t be any additions to the individual class skill trees to play with.
On the one hand, it felt a little limiting - ESO has come to be defined by its incredible player freedom, and I felt a bit bummed that this new feature was limited to only a select few skill options. On the other hand, I perfectly understand why that might be the case - from it being a potential waste of dev resources to create whole new skill animations whole-cloth for every tree in the game to the fact that the team needs to balance everything precariously in a multiplayer world; a system like this would be an even more daunting task if it were expanded further at the outset.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of options. From the Grimoires, Focus Scripts, Signature Scripts, and Affix Scripts you need to apply to craft a single skill, creative director Rich Lambert told the press during a pre-brief that there are over 4000 different combinations on offer right now.
The new Scribing skill isn’t simply bestowed upon adventurers the minute they log in, also. Players will need to travel to the Mage’s Guild in Skingrad to accept the questline that opens the skill line up to them. Making us work for our powerful new toy is a great move, in my opinion, though I hope the questing is a bit more interesting than the Psijic Order’s skill quests were back during the Summerset expansion.
Starting with the Focus Script, this is where you'll effectively determine one of the major characteristics of the skill you're developing, from whether it's a healing skill or an offensive one, for starters. One specific example of this is the Two-Handed skill Smash which, as the name suggests, sees the player swing their greatsword, axe or whatnot and smash it devastatingly on the ground around them. For the Signature Script, I applied a knockback effect, which sent every enemy caught in the smash flying away, while the other two scripts applied Damage Over Time and Minor Maim effects, dealing lasting damage and keeping the enemy weakened as the fight continued.
Another skill I augmented was the Dual Wield Grimoire Traveling Knife, which sees the player toss a knife at the enemy, almost boomerang-style. Applying a Bleed effect, Life Leech, and inflicting Off Balance helped make it feel a bit more impactful in combat, but being able to edit the skill to trade the bleed for multi-target was vital to making it feel instrumental in every scenario.
That trial and error helped here - but in the end, nothing felt nearly as impactful or valuable as the skills already in my rotation for the builds I use. This could simply be down to a lack of familiarity with the skills and the Scribing system as a whole - there just wasn’t enough time to truly dive deep over the Easter weekend - but I also was playing solo. How would these skills feel when paired in a group, whether in a group dungeon or part of a team taking on the latest Trial? I can’t really say till Gold Road comes out and we’ve had more time to dive into the feature.
It should also be noted that this is an early look at what is an unfinished product. Animations weren’t all there for some of the skills - and that could have a big role in scribed skills not feeling as impactful as something that is fully animated. Skills such as Vault, a Bow Skill that sees the player Vault backward while attacking the ground where they once were, oftentimes didn’t see my character move at all, for instance. I also felt that the melee skills had more heft to them than magickal skills right now - and as someone who typically uses a Destruction Staff for my Necromancer builds, it just didn’t feel quite there yet.
Crafting a skill requires Inks, which are doled out as quest rewards and more and can be traded in the guild marketplace - however, it should be noted you cannot craft the Inks themselves.
All this is to say that while it doesn’t feel as impactful as I would have liked right now, that doesn’t mean that this is the final product we’ll see in June. I still think it has some real potential, just like I did when it was revealed earlier this year. The team at ZeniMax has plenty of time to balance, tweak, and get the new system to a finished state by the time Gold Road is released - and I have every confidence they will. I love the idea of being able to craft my own abilities and the potential possibilities, especially when paired with friends and a group philosophy, can be dizzying - in a good way.
I can’t wait to experiment further when the full MMO Chapter launches. Given ZeniMax’s track record of supporting these systems well after release, we could see many more Grimoires added into the mix down the road. Hopefully, there are plans for some Vampire skills, Dark Brotherhood, or even skills that start to invade the extensive class skill trees themselves.
Change Is Good
One aspect of ESO for me that has seen me burn out a bit on Chapters (which is why our other ESO contributor, Kevin, reviewed Necrom) is they started to feel a bit formulaic in nature. As Matt Firor told us during our GDC interview, the Chapter system works for the team - though they are not averse to change if it ever stops working for them.
As I would play through a Chapter for review, they all seemed to follow the same pattern - even with the story beats on many occasions. That’s why I really love what the ESO team is doing here by adding continuity between Necrom and Gold Road.
By tying up the story of the last Chapter in a DLC later in the year, only to see players head to new regions unaffected by the last world-ending threat six to seven months later, everything felt disconnected from the narrative ESO is trying to tell. Indeed, the main Alliance War at the center of everything still feels like little more than a backdrop as One Tamriel torn down the walls that separated the alliances in-game and Chapters took the heavy lifting with its story. Yet you could still feel that central narrative woven through everything, albeit subtly. Characters would drop in and out, and references to the War and the struggle would be drip-fed through dialogue; it was always there, even if it wasn’t the main thing anymore.
It was refreshing to see High Isle make the Alliance War’s peace talks central to its plot, even if they were nothing more than a driver of the intrigue on the Systres.
This is the first time we’ve had the narrative of a Chapter not simply bleed into another but literally act as a continuation of the former. I hope this connection continues as The Elder Scrolls Online enters its second decade of operation. I’m personally more invested in what is going on in Gold Road because of how things were left in Necrom. It feels like my character has a real purpose going to the West Weald that is more than just “this new place opened.”
However, the team still needs to think about how this chapter story will be accessible to new players jumping into ESO for the first time - a daunting task when you’re telling a connected story. This is one of the MMO’s greatest strengths and it’ll be interesting to see how the ZOS team balances that - and whether this is a one-off or the new future.
Either way, we won’t be waiting much longer, as The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road launches on PC and Mac this June 3rd, while consoles will see its launch a few weeks later on June 18th.
