The Elder Scrolls Online Talks About The Development Of West Weald Zone & A New Daedra In The Gold Road Expansion

In The Elder Scrolls Online, we've seen summer, spring, and winter, but with the upcoming Gold Road expansion we'll be seeing an Autumn setting in the new zone of West Weald. Sporting a warm color palette, the team was looking to create a different atmosphere in the MMORPG than we've seen previously.

“The writers had a strong idea in mind for the visuals of West Weald,” explains ESO Art Director CJ Grebb. “Over the years of producing new adventures, we have explored wintery themes, springtime themes, and summer themes, but we had yet to really tackle an autumn-themed appearance, and that’s what they pitched. It was a great idea and we jumped in with both feet.”

The city of Skingrad is nestled in the autumn hills of West Weald as well, a site that will be familiar to Oblivion players from back in the day. The team says they enjoy making familiar settings, but also the challenge of making them look how they would 800 years in the past.

“Skingrad was built from the ground up by directly pulling the city’s map out of Oblivion and going from there,” explains Grebb. “We always get to have a bit of fun turning the clock back 800 years and imagining how an earlier version of the city might have looked, but we also like welcoming players home when they return to areas they know from previous Elder Scrolls games, so we made sure the city feels familiar.”

Along with a new zone, The Elder Scrolls Online is also introducing a new Daeric Prince, Ithelia. She has never been seen before in an Elder Scrolls game, and the team knew they were in for quite the task introducing her.

“[Designing Ithelia was] so tricky. We had to make immediate choices about how she would manifest herself on Nirn,” explained Grebb. “Would she take on a monstrous appearance like Mehrunes Dagon or Hermaeus Mora, or would she take on a more human appearance? We decided her conflict with Mora would be more stark the more human she appeared. However, she couldn’t be so normal that she’d be boring, either.”

Therefore the team settled on the idea of shattered shards, cracks in reality, and spun out of that to create the look of Ithelia.

“Our game engine has some technical limits when it comes to reflections, so the artists got very creative in depicting storytelling elements that centered in many cases around mirrors and crystal shards. As ever, they managed to create something unlike we’ve ever seen in an Elder Scrolls game, worthy of a new Daedric prince.”

The Elder Scrolls Online players sound like they're in for a lot of new exciting things when Gold Road launches on June 3rd for PC and June 18th for consoles.