The livestream announcement was just under 40 minutes long with so much to touch on. Creative Director Rich Lambert explained that there are more than 30 hours of content added with Morrowind, which isn’t counting the repeatable content like Trials and the soon-to-be-added Battlegrounds. There is no way that they could hit every facet, and there were probably many things that just breezed by but will ultimately be important.
I found five items that should have got more attention than they did during the announcement that you probably missed even if you watched through the whole livestream.
The Warden class is specifically designed for all three roles
The big bear was amazing and nearly everyone focused on that aspect of the new Warden class, but did anyone happen to catch what the other aspects of the class were? Yeah, I kind of missed it the first time around, too.
Each of the existing classes has three skill branches, and the Warden follows suit. But only one of those branches includes the bear that was touted so highly. “What are the other two branches?” you might ask. Well, Lambert touched on those briefly in the stream before explaining all about the bear ultimate.
The defense or tank mode of the Warden is ice magic. Like the other two branches, it focuses on natural elements. This one clearly focuses on frost and other things that you can do with ice. And the nature branch focuses on healing. Unfortunately, Lambert didn’t get into how the nature powers work, but it does confirm that Warden includes all three combat roles, which might be one of the reasons that players are calling the class overpowered before it even launches. That’s probably premature, but it does have the makings of a very powerful class.
Red Mountain is inaccessible
Clearly with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind taking place about 700 years in the future, ZenMax can’t have you wandering into Red Mountain to kill off the main bad guy, resetting future history. So of course, they had to close this area off.
But before you get too upset about not being able to kill Dagoth Ur before he can cause trouble in Vvardenfell, Lambert did say that one of the new Battlegrounds, the 4v4v4 instanced PvP zones, will take place in a quarry in the Red Mountain area. It’s not quite the same, but it’s clearly understandable why this was done.
As an added bonus, Vvardenfell was height mapped directly from the TES3 maps, so although you might not be able to get to every place you’ve ever been before, the places you go will feel very much the same as they did about 15 years ago.
We know two of the three Battleground types
Lambert mentioned that Morrowind would launch with three different battlegrounds. But he was very cagey about what those battlegrounds would be. But because the number of Battlegrounds is so small, the types of maps were easy to ascertain based on Lambert’s description of gameplay modes. He specifically mentioned team deathmatch and capture the flag. So we know two of the three right there.
When he mentioned these two battleground styles they were mentioned as “also.” So my guess that this was a bit of a slip indicating that the Red Mountain battleground isn’t one of these. I’m going to take a guess that Red Mountain will be king of the hill or capture and defend, given that the other two battlegrounds are classic PvP styles as well.
Ald’ruhn exists but the Ghostfence does not
Elder Scrolls fans will know that Ald’ruhn’s manor district was inside a hollowed out giant mud crab shell. We also know that during the Oblivion crisis that this mud crab was brought back to life to help stave off the hordes of Daedra flooding in through the Oblivion gate. Unfortunately, that means that Ald’ruhn was destroyed in the process. That seems to be an extreme move to me, but when have mages been known to be highly considerate of other people?
Lambert mentioned that Ald’ruhn is there during ESO‘s era and the giant mud crab shell is there, too. Although there is no mention that I can find of how the mud crab mud crab died, it’s clear whatever it was, it happened well before the ESO Era.
He did mention one thing that does not exist: the ghostfence. The ghostfence was created by the Tribunal to hold back the blight sometime prior to TES3. This means two things: Dagoth Ur’s minions are not running around in ESO and the blight has not affected the different areas of Vvardenfell the way it has in TES3. So look for a different but familiar landscape to the biomes of Vvardenfell.
Clockwork City will likely be future DLC
Each time Sotha Sil was mentioned he was kind of glossed over. Will we see Sotha Sil? We will see one of his workshops in a Trail. And what about Clockwork City? We do see part of it. Then Lambert said specifically that they are saving that information for later. That tells me one thing: Clockwork City will be future DLC. I don’t blame them; there has to be a way to grow the game, right?
All right, I know I didn’t catch every little factoid mentioned in the announcement video. But I’m going to hand it over to you now: What did I miss? Did you catch the same things I did? Also, let me know what you think of what we did hear about the expansion. I look forward to reading all your comments below.
Traverse the troubled land of Tamriel in the Elder Scrolls Online. Larry Everett will be your guide here in Tamriel Infinium every other week as you explore together the land created by ZeniMax and Bethesda. If you have any burning questions, send them his way via email or via Twitter.
