After last year’s excellent Necrom expansion, I was a bit worried that this year’s Elder Scrolls Online chapter, Gold Road, would be a step backwards. I have always maintained that The Elder Scrolls series is at its best when it’s leaning into the weird, and Necrom certainly does this. Gold Road benefits, then, from the fact that it is a continuation of the story that we experienced helping the Prince of Fates.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road takes players to the West Weald, dominated by the city of Skingrad. This isn’t the first time we’ve explored a slice of Cyrodiil outside of its PvP bounds, and the region is beautifully recreated here in the Second Era, evoking the landscape and some of the points of interest that we saw in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. While this traditionally high-fantasy setting can hardly be seen as leaning into the weird, so to speak, the narrative, and the capper quest that follows if you finished Necrom before starting Gold Road, is full of moments that evoke that feeling.
Yet, after spending the last few weeks exploring the West Weald and Gold Road as a whole, I find it hard to put my thoughts together on exactly how I feel after the end of the (Gold) road.
The Tides of Fate
The Elder Scrolls Online has built a reputation of being an MMO where you needn’t be “caught up” so to speak in order to enjoy each Chapter expansion. This is precisely why the ESO team doesn’t call these expansions, as the traditional meaning behind the term would usually gate people out of experiencing the new storyline by all the previous content.
Yet Gold Road is the first time where I feel you must play Necrom in order to truly come to grips with what’s happening this time around. Sure, landing at the wayshrine near the vineyards that crisscross the Colovian landscape around Skingrad will still see Leramil come and greet you as “Fate’s Proxy,” ready to work with you to save the world from this new threat.
I’m not sure I felt this way during the previous Daedric War Arc, especially as someone who never finished Clockwork City. I played (and reviewed) both Morrowind and Summerset for IGN back in the day and never felt like I was missing any additional context (nor did Summerset alert me that I should go back and play Clockwork City - again, Chapters are designed so you don’t have to). Yet after ruminating on the story, especially the capper quests after completing the main Gold Road story, I feel like I would be completely lost with the greater Daedric struggle on display.
We try to keep spoilers at a minimum in our reviews, so we won’t be spoiling the story ending of Gold Road here, yet it’s almost impossible to talk about its narrative strengths without spoiling Necrom. So if you’ve yet to complete that Chapter, nows your time to click away and go play it (trust me, it’s worth it).
Spoiler Alert for Necrom
Coming off the heels of the reveal that there is a lost, forgotten Daedric Prince at the end of Necrom, and in effect helping to free her in your last act as Fate’s Proxy in Necrom, Ithelia plays a major role almost right off the bat. Ithelia is one of ESO’s most interesting characters in years, and I’m happy she got so much screen time in this expansion. Learning about her, her motivations and more felt invigorating, especially as we’ve basically exhausted the existing roster of Daedric Prince storylines it feels.
Some of the characters we encounter in Gold Road’s narrative are entirely new, such as King Nantharion, who is leading the Bosmer who have inhabited the new forest which has crept up on the citizens of the West Weald as if Ents themselves shepherded it there.
The encroaching Bosmer forest and the cult called the Recollection play a central role in the storyline, uncovering how it got there and how it leans into the greater fabric woven since Necrom. It’s a great bit of storytelling, even if some of the “twists” were so predictable I called them the minute I was introduced to the characters, which served as catalysts for those twists. The politics of the Colovians and the Bosmer, as well as how they are treating each other, also play into this a bit, though it feels largely unexplored throughout the quests that dot the region.
Some quests were more interesting than others, such as one where I helped a Goblin researcher try to broker peace between two warring tribes or a Bosmeri-retelling of a Romeo and Juliet-style story. However, there were pockets of questing where I don’t think they worked out as well as the developers hoped, such as one section of a siege on a castle in the West Weald that had me holding off Daedra with a Scorpion-style catapult. The waves were so uninspired and unthreatening that it felt like I was wasting time just sitting there waiting for them to pop back up to shoot again.
This feeling - wasting time - ended up being a theme as I moved through the zone quests, unfortunately.
Wasting Time
The writing in Gold Road is excellent, as is usually the case with The Elder Scrolls Online. ZeniMax Online Studios can tell well-crafted stories, even if they tend to lean into familiar themes time and time again. However, I truly wish there weren’t so many filler quests, which was especially a problem in the capper epilogue questlines. Having to run back and forth to different locations to charge and then lay to rest artifacts - especially when Leramil has been popping portals to far-flung locations like they are Mike N Ikes - was especially tedious.
This isn’t helped by some of the questing grinds with the new Scribing system, which felt a bit like the world tour ZeniMax sent us on during Summerset’s Psijiic Order questline. There are few things I hate more in gaming, especially my MMOs, than quests that feel like they waste my time. There is nothing interesting about dispelling runes in far-off locations in the world, nor is there anything particularly compelling than to run halfway across Tamriel to enter a cave and set an artifact on an altar, especially when it was only two quests prior where I was basically doing the same thing. I have finite time on this planet, and uninteresting quests like those make me mad and pull me completely from the vibe the MMO has built up until that point.
And it’s a shame, especially when it happened in the main story since it’s otherwise excellent. These speed bumps can really derail how I’m feeling, and despite some incredibly interesting encounters, and incredible boss fights - including one of the best boss fights I’ve had in an MMO outside of a raid - all I felt in the aftermath was how much I wished that those time wasters weren’t a part of the experience.
Go West (Weald), Young Man
One of the highlights of any Chapter in ESO is the new region, and the West Weald does not disappoint. It truly transported me at times back to memories I had playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Standing in the middle of Skingrad - which was my favorite city in Oblivion - brought a ton of emotions, almost on par with how I felt when I stepped off the boat in Seyda Neen in Morrowind.
Running around the city of Skingrad, crossing the bridge that extends out from the city proper to the castle nearby, I felt a bit like I was coming home. However, the new forest on the eaves of Skingrad, called the Dawnwood by the Bosmer, was truly a highlight.
The West Weald is known for its vineyards and a hilly landscape that reminds me a bit of Sonoma Valley or even northern Italy, yet the Dawnwood provided just enough of a weird, tangled vibe that made the whole zone come together instead of feeling one note. The beauty of the West Wealds golden hills is broken by the dark, twisted forest that juts out just beyond a no man’s land of devastation separating the two worlds.
Colovian towns caught up in the Dawnwood are suitably mangled and destroyed, with stone houses, forts, roads, and more caught up in the destruction. Nothing feels like it was planted with purpose—the Dawnwood feels like it grew out of nowhere and suddenly swallowed everything in its wake.
I really enjoyed exploring under its eaves and learning more about what actually caused the wood to appear. When the developers explained the concept of the wood to us in a few preview events, I had visions of the forest of Fangorn that snuck up on the battleground at Helm’s Deep to swallow the Orcs who fled Aragorn, Theoden and company’s charge. This felt more primordial, and it’s one of the more interesting aspects of Gold Road’s storyline, in my opinion.
Since we’re in Cyrodiil, we also get treated to many an Ayleid Ruin, and each is a treat to explore. These were some of my favorite haunts in Oblivion, and I always get a surge of energy when I come upon those stone doors, marked with the Welkynd Stone Tree, and ESO brought that back to me. The main story makes use of them quite well, but I would find myself going back for non-zone story quests, just to explore them even more.
This is all helped by the fact that the main story takes us back to different planes of Oblivion, this time with a bit of Mirrormoor flair. Indeed, the Dark Anchor-style events that are in each zone this time are Mirrormoor Incursions, with pockets of Ithelia’s realm opening up in three places within the Weald. These are fought in waves around the central location, where players will need to fight off the Shardborn Daedra in an effort to summon the Champion, which acts as the boss. These are fun events, and are just different enough from previous versions of the world event that I never really got bored with them as I have in the past.
Scribing
When Scribing was announced back in January, I felt it could have the potential to “completely transform the MMO.” However, by the time I finished a preview of the Gold Road expansion a few months later, I had fallen off that opinion rather hard. While I was cautiously optimistic about the developer’s ability to make it into a killer feature by the time the MMO launched, it still failed to impress me fully during my time with it in this playthrough.
The Scholarium is an impressive new location within Tamriel, and I like how it’s not simply a feature that popped up out of nowhere in Tamriel’s lore - instead, you’re effectively rediscovering the practice of Scribing through the help of one of its originators Familiars.
My issue is Scribing, on the whole, just doesn’t feel as impactful as I thought it would. Sure, some skill combinations can create some interesting combinations, such as a Soul Magic skill that pulls enemies in and snares them, making them easy fodder for your group to clean up, or a Sheild throw skill that damages enemies and bounces off its first target to damage nearby foes.
Class skills are absent in the Grimoires, which act as the Scribable skill in the system. Instead, everything is basically a weapon skill or World Magic, letting you dabble in a bit of Soul Magic scribing (just keep plenty of filled Soul Gems in your pack before using).
Scribing is a system that feels like it has a ton of room to grow, despite it being underwhelming for me right now. Indeed, much of this is down to the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of utility as a DPS user to replace anything on my current Necromancer or Arcanist builds.
However, I think the biggest miss with Scribing has less to do with the skills themselves, but rather the grind to get to the point where you can fully utilize the system. Scribing is not set up as something that new players jumping into ESO are going to be able to use right away. The cost of getting Grimoires is simply too much for many new player purses (or even those of us who aren’t active in trading guilds and therefore don’t have a crap ton of gold to our name), and even getting Script drops in the wild is tied to a grindy questline unlock.
I do think having an intro quest to tutorialize the system is needed, but from there, the materials needed to utilize the system should just start dropping. Tying them to a full questline that feels like more busy work than anything really compelling is a major miss, in my opinion. This felt like one of those massive time wasters I complained about earlier, and it really put me off wanting to interact with the system further - and I likely would have dropped off if I weren’t reviewing Gold Road.
Scribing can potentially energize builds in ESO, especially as many of us have played the same character with the same five or six skills for years now. But it doesn’t feel like it’s fully there yet. With an MMO that exemplifies player freedom, this has the potential to be one of the best expressions of it, especially when you factor in the Skill Styling that was also added in Gold Road. But right now, in its earliest days, it feels more novelty than necessity.
That said, I'm fairly confident this will get better and better in future updates, purely because of ESO's track record of supporting major systems like this. When Antiquities was revealed back in Greymoor, the system is still supported years later, with new discoveries to uncover, and the same is true for the Tales of Tribute card game from High Isle. Scribing will get this treatment as well, and as more time passes, mature into something really compelling. For now, though, it feels lackluster as a tentpole expansion feature.
Conclusion
As it stands, The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road is one of the few expansions that has my views completely mixed. On the one hand, the story and many of the story encounters are excellent, and it’s a fitting conclusion to the storyline told over the last two chapters. I maintain the last boss in the capper quest - that entire fight - is one of the best boss battles I’ve ever experienced in over 20 years playing MMOs.
The region in Gold Road is also a delight to explore, and its faithful recreation of the West Weald highlights yet again one of ZeniMax’s strengths. It knows how to build zones and recapture the essence of the series’ past, and showcase it in their own way.
Unfortunately, many of the quests felt like total time wasters - filler simply to pad the run time. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in all of gaming, and it felt especially exacerbated as I moved through Gold Road’s capper quest and ending. The new Scribing questline also brought some of this feeling, reminding me of the veritable slog that was the Psiijic Order questline from Summerset before.
And while Scribing, as it stands today, feels less impactful than I would like, I can see the potential that’s there as ZeniMax adds to it over the years. For many of the most hardcore min-maxers, Scribing is going to be a feature that they pour over, squeezing out every last drop of utility. However, for most of us it feels like a novelty right now, and something to revisit down the road.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road is a good expansion, and much like the new Dawnwood borders on Skingrad, the Chapter borders on great. It leans into the weirdness that makes the Elder Scrolls universe so compelling, and ZeniMax’s storytellers deserve high marks for this one, despite some predictability throughout. Yet ESO still has yet to break out of its formulaic shackles, and Gold Road does drop the ball on that front. I get it - this formula works, and ESO is one of the most successful MMOs on the market because of it - but ten years on the formula is starting to feel stale.
Like Ithelia, The Elder Scrolls Online has many paths ahead of it, and it’ll be interesting to see which they take in the next decade of operation.
That said, it’s a beautiful zone with some incredible quests, and the world and story boss encounters are some of the best in the ten-year history of the MMO. However, the package as a whole falls short of being great overall, especially with its tentpole feature feeling lackluster out of the gate.
Full Disclosure: A copy of Gold Road was provided by PR for the purposes of this review. Reviewed on PC.
