Murkmire is a new chunk of story DLC coming to The Elder Scrolls Onlinethat will let players visit part of the Black Marsh, home of the Argonian lizard-people. Jump to about the 13.30 mark in the video above and you'll be able to see what that looks like in action. The new DLC includes the settlement of Lilmoth, which will be familiar to readers of the Elder Scrolls novels by Greg Keyes, and looks as swampy as you'd hope. 

Chris Livingston wrote up a demo of Murkmire he saw at Quakecon, where creative director Rich Lambert described it as "about fifteen to twenty hours of new story content, there's dailies, there's two bosses, there's a new dungeon that's coming along with it as well." 

As well as being available to ESO Plus members and via the in-game store, Murkmire "will be available as a Daily Reward for the month of November" according to this blog post.

At QuakeCon this weekend I got to see a demo of the upcoming Murkmire expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online coming later this year. The demo was led by creative director Rich Lambert, who gave us a brief tour of Lilmoth, the main trade hub of Murkmire, and led us to a dungeon in a quest to acquire lost Argonian artifacts.

This dungeon quest is undertaken on behalf of the Cyrodiilic Collections Agency—which sounds either like a tax office or a loansharking operation, but is in reality a museum intended to preserve Argonian culture and history. The local Argonians don't seem to care much about preserving their culture, but there are outsiders keen on pillaging Argonian artifacts for profit. The last party sent out by the museum's curator never came back—not a good sign.

After tracking the missing treasure hunters to a dungeon, a trap caves in the floor, dropping the investigators deep into the cavern below. The player will have to find their way back to the surface through a labyrinth filled with traps, puzzles, and deadly plant life.

Lambert says the puzzles, such as one we see where a drawbridge needs to be raised by moving carved symbols to their correct locations, won't be overly challenging. "We don't want them to be so hard [players] have to go look for the solution online," he says. "We want you to be able to figure them out either through brute force or by paying attention to your surroundings."

These dungeon traps aren't there just to give the players a hard time, either. If you learn how some of the traps work, they can come in handy later. After surviving a trap where areas of the floor we're standing on are bombarded by firebombs, a boss appears: a blobby yet extremely tough monster called a Voriplasm. The Voriplasm attacks the player in a chamber containing the same sort of firebomb trap, which allows the player to lure the boss into taking damage from the bombardment if he proves too tough to take on without help.

The Murkmire expansion isn't as hefty as Summerset, but "It is equivalent to Clockwork City in terms of DLC size," says Lambert. "It's a story DLC, it's about fifteen to twenty hours of new story content, there's dailies, there's two bosses, there's a new dungeon that's coming along with it as well."

After over a dozen updates to Elder Scrolls Online, I ask Lambert which gets fans more excited, to see the recreation of an area well-known in previous Elder Scrolls games, or to visit regions that haven't been fully realized in a game before.

"I think a bit of both," says Lambert. "Morrowind was: you're coming home. And everybody that was an Elder Scrolls fan knew what Morrowind was and knew what to expect, and so they were really hyped and excited to go and explore kind of a less-destroyed version of Vvardenfell. 

"And then with Summerset, which was the opposite, was the 'nobody really knows anything about Summerset, this is going to be our chance to go in and explore and see that'. I guess that's a long-winded way of saying 'it depends' but we've seen great responses for both. As a developer, it's always exciting to be able to go in and kind of forge your own path."

The Elder Scrolls Online's werewolf-themed DLC, called Wolfhunter, is coming out on Monday (August 13), ZeniMax Online Studios has announced. 

It's comprised of two new four-player dungeons: March of Sacrifices, in which you and your team must take down an Indrik in the hunting grounds of the Daedric Prince Hircine, and Moon Hunter Keep, where you battle against hordes of were-creatures to set up a final battle with an ancient werewolf called Vykosa. Beat the dungeons to nab new gear sets, monster masks, and other items.

Zenimax Online also teased the game's next expansion, called Murkmire, due out this autumn/fall. You'll travel to the "untamed wilds" of Black Marsh, home of the Argonians. We don't yet know much about it, but you can watch a teaser video below. 

At the same time as Wolfhunter releases, Zenimax Online will push out Update 19 to all players, and it will include a new Battlegrounds map called Istirus Outpost. Unlike other maps, it's only semi-symmetrical, which should make map knowledge more important than ever. It'll also be the first Battlegrounds map with mounts, so you'll be able to get to the action faster than ever.

For all the changes coming in update 19, as well as more details on the Wolfhunter DLC, the read this blog post. Wolfhunter will be free for ESO Plus subscribers, and non-members will be able to buy it through the in-game store.