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The final free content drops of Elder Scrolls Online Season One are coming next week and, while there’s much to look forward to, the new Rumors system immediately caught my eye as an old-school Morrowind fan. 2002’s TESIII: Morrowind, as superfans /love/ to remind us, was the last time Bethesda properly made us find our own way around the RPG’s world; omnipresent objective markers came in with Oblivion in 2006, and they’ve been with us ever since. They’re the little glowing compass arrows that launched a thousand grumpy op-eds.
Now, 20 years later, ESO’s latest new feature takes inspiration from Morrowind’s ‘read the ****ing map’ attitude by ripping out the UI aids to give you /actual/ trails to follow – and I was so excited about it, I quizzed the Zeinmax Online developers directly to find out how these quests-that-aren’t-quests actually work.
“I keep referring to it as a narrative scavenger hunt, where you’re finding things out in the world and you, as the player, are piecing them together,” ESO Associate Design Director Jason Barnes tells PCGamesN. “It’s not the UI telling you where to go. You don’t have a giant icon pointing you N or something like that. It simply comes down to what I collect and the things I find.”
When the Rumors system launches on Monday, September 28, it will initially add 15 of these mysteries to solve, Barnes tells me, with three levels of difficulty: Whispers, Plots, and Conspiracies. “The base category [Whispers] is very simple,” says Barnes. “Like, if you really pay attention, you’re going to be able to figure it out. But as it goes up and escalates in difficulty, you have to start paying attention more. There are more of these red herrings that are thrown at you.” Conspiracies, they promise, are properly knotty, multi-stage head scratchers that’ll take time and careful attention to work through.
And red herrings, the Zenimax chaps are keen to underline, are a core part of how the Rumors are designed – music to my ears, as someone who still remembers trying to puzzle out the path of the Nerevarine. “The unreliable narrator,” says Barnes; “that’s like Elder Scrolls in a nutshell. And so when we built these, we built them in a way that not only can you collect them in any order, they’re not a linear path.
“You’re finding clues out in the world that then connect to other things,” he explains – “but there are red herrings. There are things that they try to throw you off. And as you uncover clues, you’re like, wait, this said that, but that doesn’t match up with this? So now I need to figure it out.”
After 12 years, ESO is hardly lacking in content. But, in the new zones, events, and systems coming in the MMO’s quarterly ‘Seasons’, it’s clear the folks at Zenimax are focusing on experimenting with weird new stuff to keep surprising and engaging players – or, in this case, reconnecting with familiar, special experiences fans associate with Bethesda RPGs, that are perhaps tougher to realize in an MMO.
“The main goal was: how do we add layers to the game to make it feel more alive, that you can get lost in?” Barnes tells me. “We have tonnes of quests, we have tonnes of interesting locations you can sort of find – but that sense of ‘I don’t know what’s behind that waterfall’, or ‘there’s an interesting tree up there, and there’s no marker or anything for it, but I want to go and explore it’.”
Finding adventure on the way to the adventure, the ESO devs agree, is a key goal for this new system. “We were able to look at a lot of those nooks and crannies and things you pass that you would normally not even take in, or maybe you glance at them, but you’re like, oh, nothing’s over there, so I’m going to keep going,” says Barnes. “Now you see something shiny over there, [think] ‘I’m going to go see what that is’, and then you find that it’s a clue. So a lot of that is very intentional with how we do it.”
And narrative-wise, ESO Loremaster Michael Zenke tells me, this new halfway house between a one-off readable and a full questline gives the game’s story spinners exciting new territory to play around in. “It really provides us a great parking space for stories that are maybe a little more involved than we could get to in a lore book, but don’t rise to the level of something like a voiced quest,” Zenke explains.
“There’s a tonne of space to cover in the Elder Scrolls IP, right? And having that middle ground where we can dig into something with a little more meat to it, but we don’t have to go all the way up to the level of a full-blown quest – that’s a great tool in our toolbox now.”
For now, Rumors is joining the game with 15 of these to find – but it’s clear the team has latched onto this system for future content. “What we essentially have built now is this system that we really love, and we’re going to continue to utilize for future releases,” says Barnes eagerly. “We’re already doing a bunch of stuff for things we haven’t talked about yet, using this system that just provides more depth to the game, more of a different type of play style, while still delivering a story experience for Elder Scrolls fans.”
Rumors comes to Elder Scrolls Online on Monday, September 28, as a free update for owners of the game, as part of its Seasons programme – but it’s not alone. The same day, we’re getting another experimental zone called the Nowhere Vault, full of weird puzzles, and, on Wednesday, September 30, the High Seas of Tamriel event kicks off with the MMO’s first-ever sea battles. Both are odd, interesting additions, and the Zenimax devs told me many strange, enticing things about them – if you wanna read about those, stick with PCGamesN, and in the meantime join our free Discord community to find fellow TES lovers!