ESO's Next Dungeon, Coral Aerie Is Home To Elven Ruins And Seaborn Monsters

The first part of The Elder Scrolls Online's Legacy of the Bretons expansion, Ascending Tide, will be released later this month for players on PC (March 14) and consoles (March 29). This week, ZeniMax Online Studios gave us a preview of that upcoming DLC, in the form of a blog post detailing the Coral Aerie, a new four-player PvE dungeon.

Coral Aerie is home to "colorful caverns and archaic Elven ruins" -- as well as "a secret Ascendant Order hideout." Aquatic-themed monsters and the Ascendant Order themselves are your foes, with boss encounters including "giant yaghra monstrosities." ESO Encounter Lead Mike Finnigan said that players will be "engaging with monsters they have seen before in new and interesting ways." Funny, the only way I've ever wanted to engage with a monster is by stabbing it in the face.

The dungeon team reveled in the fact that they were able to create something a little atypical, with the combination of Summerset's elven ruins and gryphons in a dungeon, something Finnigan said had never been used in a four-player dungeon before. He also encouraged players to explore to find hidden secrets -- or, as he put it, "Stop and smell the coral."

Your companion in the dungeon will be Captain Kaleen, who got her own profile by way of a piece of fiction in the form of a letter earlier in the week. She's described as "a fierce opponent or a staunch ally," depending on your own political alignment, but in Coral Aerie, you'll work with her to uncover the fate of the roguish Jakarn, who was the subject of last month's profile. There he was described as a "scoundrel" and "not too hard on the eyes," giving new meaning to the phrase "pirate booty."