Good Morning Friends! I have been playing an excessive amount of Elder Scrolls Online and it appears that others have as well. This is pretty much a familiar site that goes away quickly, but it is still very much there almost every time I log into the game. To me that is the sign of a healthy interest in what is going on, which makes sense given that we just had a dungeon content drop and have a major expansion story drop in June. On top of that a number of my friends have been poking their head back into the game and House Stalwart ESO edition is once again relatively hopping with a blend of old timers and brand new folks as well. I am very pleased to see it once again turning into a melting pot of friends and friends of friends.
Over the weekend I finished up The Clockwork City and it was extremely enjoyable. Like from the moment I saw this content I knew that it would be my jam given how much I love the steampunk elements of the Elder Scrolls setting. What I was not expecting however is for there to be a longer term story being told through these expansions. Orsinium, Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood were largely independent story vignettes dealing with certain regions or factions of the world. Starting with Morrowind/Vvardenfell something different has started happening. Through the course of Vvardenfell, The Clockwork city and so far in Summerset we seem to be moving a larger narrative forward and I am very interested to see where it is going. Each expansion or story drop seems to be laying the groundwork for the next and we as the player know more about this conflict each time as we move the tale towards an eventual conclusion.
This makes me all the more happy about my dogged insistence on following the content release order. That is not to say that I am certain the game will weave together a narrative that makes sense if you start in another place in the broader tale, but I like to see the ground work spread out in front of me in the manner originally intended. For example I wish I had played Witcher 2 and read the novels before finally getting into Witcher 3 because the final experience would have been all the richer were I to better understand the source material. Similarly the best experiences with Mass Effect have been when I started over with the first game and played all the way through the series to completion. Each game works fine as a standalone but the experience is just more beneficial if you know all of the content that set up the ground rules.
One of the things that continues to impress me about The Elder Scrolls Online is just how well written their characters are. A number of them are effectively throw aways that you are likely only ever going to encounter in a specific region. However each of them is written in a way as they have an entire character arc, often times with rich development… over what is actually only a couple of paragraphs worth of dialog. It is an exercise in expressing the most emotional impact with the absolute minimal amount of words. It is just enough to make you as the player care about these sometimes companions that you have along with you in your journey. It is because of this ability that I am really looking forward to the companion system coming with Blackwood in June.
Summerset is lovely but it is having to grow on me quite a bit because it combines two things that I do not really love: Mages and Altmer. High Elves are my least favorite race in Tamriel and this is an expansion completely chock full of haughty elven nonsense. Combine that with a cloister of super secret mages that are also similarly full of themselves and you have a recipe for a sad Bel. That said now that I have gotten into it… there are definitely some interesting stories being told and I am far enough in to start watching the events playing out that are echoing what happened in Vvardenfell and Clockwork City. Once again… expert storytelling because they are making me care about things that I generally “nope the hell out” of on a regular basis.
With all of the beautiful and pastoral scenes there are also more than a few that are twisted and brutal. Like for example I got stuck in what I can only describe as a “meat dungeon” the other night and I had to snap a picture of it. I could almost smell the place. For now however I am wandering around Summerset and being the liberator of the Bosmer which are an elven people I can get behind. There are also returning characters like one of the best written in Elder Scrolls Online, Razum-dar. So in spite of my hesitations, this expansion is shaping up to be a damned good time as well. I sincerely doubt I will be close to caught up by the time June rolls around but I am going to keep plugging forward because if nothing else the champion levels are a nice addition.