Return to Morrowind

- Matt Gilman

The MMO genre is a hard one to review. A game launches, then we have to score it even as it shifts in shape and quality before our eyes. The Elder Scrolls Online had an especially tough start, as servers melted, quests bugged out and those initial weeks dragged into a merciless grind. And yet in the time since its arrival on my PC, a new justice system, vast story DLC packs and the abolition of level restrictions on exploration have changed ESO more than any other MMO I can recall. The next step will take us even deeper into gold-plated nostalgia territory.

I know it’s going to work the first time I set eyes on ESO’s spanking new Seyda Neen. The opening section of the now 15-year-old Elder Scrolls III returns as a starting zone for the sizeable new landmass of Vvardenfell. The team at Zenimax took the height map of the 2001 original and placed it directly in the existing mass of ESO’s Tamriel. Gorgeously detailed, it’s also hearteningly familiar, complete with NPC ancestors of memorable characters to chat with.

Rather than a straight rehash, this Vvardenfell is set 700 years prior to the events of TESIII, so while there are homages by the dozen, there’s also a ton of new things to discover. Vivec City has only three cantons, the rest still under construction and explorable in their varying dredged out states. The volcano at the centre of the island isn’t nearly as catastrophically encompassing of its surroundings. Get close and there’s ash galore, but also lush mushroom bedecked forests and coastal regions as yet unmolested by the choking air. ZeniMax has worked closely with parent publisher Bethesda in its bid to tickle our nostalgia glands.

“This is Bethesda’s baby, right?” creative director Rich Lambert tells me. “