The island of Khenarthi’s Roost lies off the coast of Elsweyr, homeland of the cat-like khajiit. In previous Elder Scrolls games I’ve read about Elsweyr in dusty tomes and heard about it from the wanderers that frequent the inns of Skyrim, Morrowind and Cyrodiil. I’ve imagined many times what it might look like – but until now I’ve never seen it with my own eyes.
It’s with this sense of discovery that I begin my third extended session with The Elder Scrolls Online. This time I’m a member of the Aldmeri Dominion, one of the game’s three playable factions. The Dominion is made up of the high elves, wood elves and the khajiit. I’ve chosen to remake one of my first Morrowind characters, a hardy dark-haired wood elf archer.
I’m pretty invested in Elder Scrolls lore, but taking my first steps in Elsweyr feels like setting foot in a foreign country for the first time. Khenarthi’s Roost is a place of calm beaches and tropical forests. I progress inland along a neatly maintained dirt road, choosing to bypass the NPCs clamouring to offer me the usual array of kill-and-fetch quests. In Morrowind or Skyrim, you’re allowed to wander in any direction you please from the moment you’re released from the introductory sequence. In comparison, The Elder Scrolls Online feels much denser with things to do, at least in its beginning areas.
For the time being, I focus on taking in incidental details. Native khajiit fish in the open sea and tend marshy bamboo farms. Their shops are full of delicate-looking goods. Unlike the nomadic peddlers I’ve run into in other parts of Tamriel, the khajiit of Elsweyr seem like a serene and introspective people. In establishing their architectural style, ZeniMax Online Studios have blended aspects of East Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
But I can’t soak up the scenery forever. As you might expect in a world wracked by three-way civil war and the depredations of a soul-stealing demigod, the people of Khenarthi’s Roost are eager to enlist the aid of an experienced adventurer. Cultists with the power to command the fury of the sea lurk in hidden caves and tide-swept grottoes. Intrigues are brewing, and both the local population and my Aldmeri compatriots have suffered a series of mysterious disappearances.
The way each of these narrative threads weave in and out of the area’s central plot makes the prospect of sticking to the main quest-line more attractive than I’d have expected from an Elder Scrolls game. Khenarthi’s Roost is balanced on a knife-edge thanks to the machinations of the maormer, a race of sea elves thought to be extinct by the time of Morrowind. They’re outraged by the Aldmeri Dominion’s attempt to win over the locals, citing an ancient treaty that gives them ownership of the island. It’s an intricate, morally grey political intrigue similar to Skyrim’s Stormcloak rebellion or the interplay between the major houses in Morrowind. These are narrative flourishes that I’ve always admired in the series, and I was delighted to encounter similar depth in my first few hours here.
I am conscripted by the local Aldmeri Dominion commander to find a peaceful solution to this potential flashpoint. Investigating the whereabouts of some missing Dominion troops, I come across a blood-spattered sacrificial altar in a secluded grotto. After dispatching the cavern’s guardian – a ravenous serpent large enough to swallow me whole – I examine the remains. It becomes clear that the maormer are working with the sea-cultists to expel the Dominion.
I rush back to town with this new information only to find that the negotiations have gone badly in my absence, bringing both sides even closer to conflict. The quest changes gear, and now I’m tasked with working against maormer manipulators on their own turf. One clandestine mission requires me to find loopholes in a legal document in order to construct a case against the conspirators, a welcome break from the usual MMO quest archetypes. Slinking through back alleys and meeting with hidden informants carries the tension of playing in a high-stakes poker game, only here my opponents are a legendary race that I’ve read about in the lore of previous Elder Scrolls games.
Eventually it becomes clear that the Aldmeri Dominion are running out of options and I’m going to have to infiltrate the viper’s nest myself. This ends up being much more straightforward than I would have liked. The maormer embassy is watched over by a force of guards that seem unconcerned by my snooping and let me right in through the front door. After spiking a watchman’s drink with a pinch of conveniently placed skooma, I have all the damning evidence my superiors need to demonstrate to the locals the maormer’s ill intentions.
I’m not even harassed on the way back out, and it seems to me like the whole mission was much too easy. I didn’t have to find my own way in, fight anyone, or even really use The Elder Scrolls Online’s stealth system – making it hard to live out my fantasy of being an elven Jason Bourne. It was a stock MMO quest that didn’t live up to its exciting premise, and which made little use of the ideas that TESO has imported from previous games in the series.
The way The Elder Scrolls Online tries to dress itself up like Skyrim often ends up emphasising the ways in which it’s different. The trappings are there – the horizontally-aligned compass in place of a minimap, the crosshair, the first-person view and the magicka, stamina and health bars. Looking at a screenshot, it might be hard to distinguish it from a Skyrim mod – but it’s a bit like a clumsy hunter trying to blend-in among his prey in a well-crafted bear suit.
Khenarthi’s Roost started to feel staged to me, rather than an actual, lived-in place. It wasn’t just the maormer guards who weren’t paying attention. None of the local authorities seemed to have been trained in the ways of Elder Scrolls’ traditionally rigorous approach to crime and punishment. The wandering townsfolk were immune to my attacks, and my petty thefts went unpunished even in the presence of attentive-looking guards.
asked creative director Paul Sage about the absence of a proper crime system in his game, and he told me that the plan is to introduce both NPC and player-enforced justice with an update that will also add the popular Thieves’ Guild and Dark Brotherhood factions. “If you came in and you could just steal things from people, and I could come in and react to that,” Sage says, “maybe I could call the guards. Maybe I could kill you outright if I’m a protector of that town or something of that nature. You want to make sure that the game is in a stable enough way before you allow those kinds of systems, and that kind of player-toplayer interaction.”
Taking my misgivings into account, The Elder Scrolls Online isn’t just a standard MMO dressed up in Elder Scrolls garb. The option to use a first-person view and the way the combat system emphasises positioning over the rotation of hotkeyed abilities help to establish it as a legitimate Elder Scrolls sequel that happens to lean on certain MMO game mechanics.
There’s still a lot of TESO’s take on Tamriel that has yet to be seen by anyone. ZeniMax Online Studios have only permitted slight glimpses of the 12-player endgame dungeons and massive PvP. There’s a lot still to be discovered.
In the previous games, it was always my first few steps into those richly-detailed worlds that stuck with me. Whether I was setting out into the marshes around Seyda Neen or exploring pastoral woodland on the outskirts of the Imperial City, so much of the wonder of a new RPG is owed to the way those initial experiences suggest innumerable new experiences just out of sight. As I left Khenarthi’s Roost for the mainland, that feeling returned. I found myself looking forward to continuing my life as a wood elf archer in a strange land, just as I had in Morrowind a decade ago.
“The way we’ve built our content, it’s meant to be completely nonlinear,” Paul Sage tells me. “I can go over to this point of interest and say, ‘That place looks cool. What’s happening over there?’ Then I can get introduced to the story, if it’s a quest area, or maybe it’s something else. The entire idea is that you can ignore us entirely, and go off on your own, and do whatever you want.”
Right now, what I want to do is to play more TESO. I want to push beyond the next grove of trees, walk around the next bend in the road, and see what awaits on the other side. For all of its rough edges, The Elder Scrolls Online feels full of promise in a way that no other MMO has since my first experiences with the genre over ten years ago. That sense of discovery is a powerful thing.
