You'll be able to start your journey into the fiery zones of Deadlands for The Elder Scrolls Online when it launches in November. Now, ZeniMax is taking us behind the scenes on the initial planning that shaped the DLC.
The team wanted to, of course, bring fans back to the experience of Oblivion, along with new areas and content. Despite wanting to take everyone to Deadlands, and give it a sense of newness and scale that is part of the ESO experience, they didn't just want to rehash everything or make it all the same. One of the questions whose answer may have made this new DLC more memorable on its own when it's out was this: What if parts of Oblivion don’t look like the parts we’ve seen?
The result of this process of adding to Elder Scrolls lore and to Oblivion resulted in the Sever, a rocky, dangerous area with constant winds and storms. The Burn will be the more familiar of the two, with its fiery hellscape and dangers. Yet deciding to set an entire DLC in such dangerous territories far from everything else also led them to have to figure out how to create around those circumstances. Questions like where will players go? Where will they find friendly NPCs? To help with this, they created the city of Fargrave in an area of Oblivion. This will be the player hub and have all the necessary offerings.
The rest of the preview covers some of the ways they approached creature design and other areas and ways to challenge anyone that decides to chase adventure in all of these zones. After all, the environments themselves are a threat, but there's nothing without other obstacles or threats within the lands and on your path.
For the full first look into the process of making The Elder Scrolls Online's Deadlands DLC, read the full post on the official site here.
