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The Elder Scrolls Online‘s final free content drop of Season One is upon us, and one piece of free content has attracted more hype (and confusion) than any other: ESO is getting sea battles and treasure diving, with the High Seas of Tamriel event running from September 28 until October 14. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway. Zenimax was clear from the get-go that these ship combats are a long way from Sea of Thieves’ dynamic, open world buccaneering – but even so, what we are getting looked pretty tasty to me as a lifelong TES fan – so I asked the developers what to expect.
It’s perhaps telling that ESO Loremaster Michael Zenke – not Associate Design Director Jason Barnes or Game Director Nick Giacomini – leapt in first to explain High Seas of Tamriel’s new, instanced shipboard adventures. Perhaps he’s got the best sea legs on the team? Or, just as likely, the event is aimed at telling new and different stories, as much as it is about divergent gameplay.
“High Seas is our weird experimental stab at what an event can be,” Zenke tells me. “What events are in ESO is pretty well established, and so the team’s whole goal was: ‘what are the outer bounds of what this could be?’
“So you have a short, quick, focused, narrative experience where you get to meet a centuries old ghost pirate and become his buddy,” he says, “and then you jump into an instance. The best way I can sort of describe it is that it’s kind of like one of our delves – one of our small, single player-ish dungeons – mashed up with the experience you get at the end of a long quest line, like a cinematic experience.”
We don’t steer the ship or fire cannons, it seems. The instance begins with our heroes already on the deck of a moving ship; we’re attacked; and we have to repel the enemies via good old-fashioned ESO combat. Meanwhile, characters will need to dip out of the fight to keep our own tub afloat.
“You’re on the deck of a ship,” Zenke explains, “and the sea elves – the Lice Whisperer sea elves, a terrible pirate cult – are attacking your vessel… but you’re simultaneously fighting off the sea elves, keeping your ship from sinking and trying to sink their ship all at the same time. It’s a fun juggling act.”
After that, he says, it’s treasure huntin’ time. “Once you either sink their ship or drive them off, you jump in a Dwemer diving chamber – an ancient piece of Dwemer tech that you take to the bottom of the ocean – and then, using the enchantments from the Dwemer diving chamber, you can explore the sea floor,” he adds.
“That’s sort of a fun exploration space, capped off with a couple of fun boss fights against weird undersea critters. And at the end of it all, you grab some treasure from a salt encrusted gold bedecked skeleton sitting in a chair, and you bring it back to the mainland for your reward. That’s the daily quest that you can do every day the High Seas of Tamriel event is live.”
I wasn’t wrong about Zenimax taking this event as a chance to submerge us in a bit of lesser known Nirn lore, either – Zenke is ever so keen to share some of the story points baked into this daily quest jaunt.
“Nautical tales are sort of in the marginalia of everything we do,” he agrees – “like, High Isle is a great example. There’s tonnes of nautical themes and ideas to that release, but it’s not the core. So the team’s idea was like: ‘what if we push that stuff to the front and talk about that?'”
“So you’re going to hear stuff about undersea Dwemer constructs and the sea elves, the Maormer – and the All Flags Navy, if you’re familiar with that lore concept: this ancient pan-Tamriel event where all of the different cultures banded together to go kick the Sload in the face because they were trying to kill everyone on the continent.
“All that stuff gets pretty big billing and discussion in the course of the event because nautical tales in Tamriel are fascinating and we wanted to craft an event and a story that was really tailored to exploring those ideas.”
There’s still clobbering, XP, and tasty loot, though, he reassures me. “At its core, it’s still just a fun ESO experience, right? You fight some pirates, you explore an undersea place, you kill a couple of really big turtles, right? That’s what you do.” But “this nautical background, this huge tapestry you have to work with, is sort of the backstory to all of this,” Zenke adds.
As instanced MMO location-based events go, this whole kaboodle may not be unprecedented, but it is new territory for ESO, and the devs are clearly pumped about it.
“This is our first event that’s truly like a destination for our players,” Game Director Nick Giacomini tells me. “So it’s not just: ‘oh, you know, participate in the world and get rewarded more for doing so,’ as many of our events are. This is one that is truly like its own loop. And we’re really excited for our players to experience it.”
Well, I’m game. I went SCUBA diving once in a pool when I was 11, so I’m probably prepped to go down in a Dwemer diving bell and fist fight a turtle. Alongside the new Rumors system slipping Morrowind-inspired, quest markerless detective quests into the game, I’m not ashamed to say I’m reinstalling the game and donning my flippers as I write this.
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