The next Chapter for The Elder Scrolls Online has been fully unveiled - and it sounds pretty high-stakes, as players will explore Western Skyrim as it suffers under the rule of a vampire lord.
Initially teased during the Game Awards in December, yesterday ZeniMax released a cinematic trailer for the game's 2020 Chapter, Greymoor, which is part of a year-long "interconnected adventure" of four updates. Greymoor is set to launch on PC and Mac on 18th May, then Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on 2nd June, and will open up vast swathes of Western Skyrim and a cavern called Blackreach. That sounds welcoming.
So, what the hell's going on here? Greymoor is set 900 years before The Elder Scrolls 5, and the western regions look a little different. Thanks to the aforementioned vampire lord, the land has been transformed into a dark and sinister place filled with vampires, witches and werewolves. In other words, the young adult section of a bookstore.
In the land of Skyrim, it turns out, you’re never more than a hundred feet from a vampire. The Elder Scrolls Online has planned a series of updates dubbed “The Dark Heart Of Skyrim”, where you’ll spend the rest of the year rooting out the bastards from the land of the Nords. That starts with the Harrowstorm dungeon DLC at some point in February, to be followed by the chunkier Greymoor expansion on May 18th. One daddy vampire is a particular problem, and Greymoor is all about romping through ice, snow, and underground caverns to stop him. Unlike how these numpties completely fail to in this trailer.
At the game awards in December, The Elder Scrolls Online debuted a teaser trailer putting a pin in last year's adventures in Elsweyr and teasing this year's new excursion to Skyrim. Today Bethesda is showing off more of what to expect when we return to the Nord homeland. The snow and ice will have an extra bite, it turns out, because Western Skyrim has a vampire problem.
Despite The Elder Scrolls V permanently linking Skyrim with dragons in our minds, ESO just got done with those particular baddies in Elsweyr. The new areas of Skyrim coming to the MMO version of Tamriel are designed to tell darker, "gothic" stories. A vampire lord has amassed an army of other vampires, witches, and weres to terrorize the north. Lyris Titanborn, the nord with giant blood from ESO's original campaign story, will join players for the full year of the Skyrim arc.
The next year of ESO is officially called Dark Heart Of Skyrim, spread out over four updates throughout the year, starting with the Harrowstorm dungeon DLC. In February, all players will have access to the free prologue quest for Dark Heart of Skyrim and players who have bought or upgraded to the new expansion will continue on to the dungeon. On May 18th, the Greymoor chapter, which seems to be the meat of the story for the first half of the year, will continue the events from Harrowstorm.
The second half of the year will add another dungeon and story zone to ESO's map, both of which are so far unannounced. The year's updates will also bring new public dungeons, Harrowstorm group world events similar to the current Dark Anchors, and a 12-person trial called Kyne's Aegis.
As with Elsweyr, The Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor is becoming the definitive edition of the game. New players who buy ESO for the first time will start their adventure in Western Skyrim at level one while getting ESO's past chapters packed in. Current players can upgrade to Greymoor which will also include ESO's other chapters: Morrowind, Summerset, and Elsweyr.
Correction: This story originally indicated that the Greymoor Chapter will be accessible with an ESO Plus subscription. That is not the case.