“Dragons? Oh, they’re everywhere! You must fly very high to see most of them, though. The ones nearer the ground are very hard to see, being invisible.”- Maiq, the liar no longer.
Why do Dragons always majestically roar towards the camera? Like if I walked out of my house into the streets and just started roaring, people would look weird at me. Are they all such alfas that they don’t care about social constrains? Actually, you go on and roar girl, don’t let that oppressive patriarchy tell you how to communicate (I know it’s basically how their language works, but it’s funnier if I pretend it isn’t).
So yeah, Elder Scrolls online goes Elsweyr (indeed read as ‘elsewhere’, the Khajiit have a strange sense of humor), the land of cat people, imperial oppression and Dragons. So basically the only way this is different from Skyrim is fewer Nords and it’s warmer. I jest, Elsweyr is an ostensibly fantastic location with a very different social structure from Cyrodiil, but it’s hard to not view the expansion as something of a re-tread of familiar grounds for Bethesda and ZeniMax.
Fun fact: did you know that the Khajiit are a hugely diverse people? In fact, not all Khajiit are humanoid cat-people, depending on the phase of the moon a given Khajiit is born under, there are degrees of phenotype differences. Some Khajiit are actually fully bipedal cats. As for why we never saw these ethnic differences between Khaiits in past games, well… Mostly resources constrains. But hey, we’re here now and we will actually encounter the full spectrum of this diverse culture. Wonderful.
Forgive me for indulging my nerdy side. In terms of specifics, the expansion introduces a new character class: the Necromancer. Which should be interesting, Necromancers have a fair bit of history and lore within the setting and are usually considered explicitly evil and immoral, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the subject of being one is finally tackled. Mechanically, the class incorporates elements of micro-management and tactical depth unseen in other player options.
Besides the new class, the expansion will feature a separate campaign, a 12-player Trail (so basically a raid) named ‘Sunspire’ and world events tied to the appearance of Dragons in Elsweyr. The expansion hits June 3rd and is a part of the “Season of the Dragon”, a larger cycle of interconnected stories maintaining the steady stream of content for the game.
So yeah, exciting stuff! If nothing else it made me interested in a setting hugely rich in lore which I knew very little about, so that’s good.