Month: March 2024

Let me introduce you to Eveli, the Wood-elf who periodically shows up for various quest chains in ESO. And unlike most elves that I’ve encountered, she’s not arrogant. In fact, she’s a complete dork (albeit one with a crack shot and a good heart). I find that I don’t mind it if she tags along, because I’m usually snorting from some off-hand comment she makes.

My goal right now is to plow through at least one main zone quest per day to get to the end of Wrothgar in under a couple weeks. It’s not always easy, because some of these missions are pretty lengthy and involved.

And while I was able to chew through that zone storyline at record pace (for me), the speed and urgency ended up having a net negative effect. I felt disconnected from the zone as I wasn’t really soaking up the atmosphere and tales — I was speeding through it all. But from what I could tell, I really wasn’t missing too much. The orcs here have that same Klingon-barbarian-warrior culture that I’ve seen and experienced in too many fantasy settings.

Subtle signs that an NPC might be turning evil… when they get addicted to lugging tree branches around. We call that going “full Gandalf.”

And hey, look at that! Main Wrothgar storyline all done. Now I can breathe a little easier and focus on cleaning up the zone of other quests and points of interest. As for the story itself, it did resolve fairly strong and hit a couple good emotional beats. Maybe not worth the journey to get there, but at least I wasn’t left wanting.

Figure I’ll go back into fully Skelly mode for the rest of the zone. No flesh until I’m all done — this I swear! Upon my bear!

A fight with the Mad Ogre world boss turned out to be one of the more epic experiences I’ve had in ESO. It was just me and another Warden, and we both kept getting smashed flat by this guy. I think we each died three times before we started to get the feel of the fight and went toe-to-toe for a nail-biting 10 minutes. It was a contest of inches, and when he finally fell down dead, we both were jumping and cheering.

As I write this, we’re a month minus four days to reach certain goals in Elder Scrolls Online’s Wrothgar in order to get a mount and a few additional costumes. And while I don’t *need* any of those, free is free and they’d be nice to have. So the race is on to get through this entire zone with the minimum of doing the main storyline and all of the world bosses. Doable, but it’s going to be a push because as the game’s first DLC, it’s pretty sizable.

I am curious about the Orc culture in this game, as I barely know anything about it. Plus, this being a half-winter zone half-intrigues me.

I think this is the first delve in ESO that really caught me up short right at the start. There are two dead rabbits hanging upside-down and a trio of impaled werewolves. I don’t know what happened in here, but it couldn’t be good.

I’m working on being as efficient as possible getting through this zone — no dragging my feet. I’m definitely taking advantage of the increased population to knock out as many of these world bosses that I can find along the way. But an issue that’s been nagging me for a while is starting to become a real problem. Namely, I’m almost out of quest slots in my journal. I’ve had all these odds and ends quests — prologues, main quest steps, breadcrumbs — clogging up my journal, and I’m sitting at 18/25 filled up even without current zone activities. After I’m done with Wrothgar, my main goal is to clean house in the journal, I swear.

ESO can sneak up on you and go very, very dark when you’re not prepared for it.

There’s a pretty cool set piece where you have to defend a tree that’s on fire so that it’ll completely burn before the enemy puts it out.

The good news for my month-long trek is that I discovered if you only do four of the six world bosses in the zone, you’ve already unlocked those three outfits. And lo and behold, I had done four and had those outfits waiting in the shop. They’re not the best outfits in the world, but they’re colorful and it’s nice to have them since I only use outfits in this game as cosmetics.

This is turning out to be an exceedingly good time to play Elder Scrolls Online. The monthly login rewards are insane, including a mount, pet, lots of loot crates, and — oh yeah — a free DLC pack. I’m not complaining!

So Cadwell is starting to lose his grip on his normal daft-headed prophet body because his real one is being reassembled to bring back his Betrayer form. That won’t be good.

I got some strong Stargate vibes from this portal opening up and doing a whole light show. While the epic questline isn’t perfect in how much it’s telling of the grand picture than showing, I have to admit that it’s a merry chase that keeps the action flowing pretty steadily throughout as we good guys try to thwart the dragons’ grand plan.

It came down to the wire in the most dramatic setting, as it often does on these zone-wide questlines. While I lost interest in the dragons being extra dragony, I did appreciate (once again) ESO’s habit of keeping a roster of NPCs around for the whole chain so that you really do get to know them fairly well. Abnur Tharn is a bit of a tool, by the way. Do not care for him.

It was a good, satisfying feeling to get to the end of the Northern Elsweyr storyline and begin to wrap stuff up for the zone. For me to consider a zone “done,” I have to finish the main storyline, find all of the skyshrines, complete as many other quests as I can find, find all of the points of interest, and do all of the delves, public dungeons, and world bosses.

Just say “no” to skooma, kids. Just say no.

Happy 10th anniversary to Elder Scrolls Online! It’s certainly a great month to be playing, especially with getting all of the Orsinium DLC for free. However — and I’m not complaining here — that changed my plans as there is a time-limited set of achievements to earn a mount and some costumes before April 4th. So now I’ve got to get trucking through Wrothgar.

Of course, that means that everyone and their cousin is ALSO doing this zone, which has its ups and downs. I’m certainly going to be keeping my eyes out for anyone doing a world boss train.

To wrap up the week, I opened the nine free crown crates I got with this month’s login rewards. Among the goodies, I got the Scholar personality, an Eternal Hunger Coronal head adornment, a banquet costume, a facial marking, a levitation memento, a “flip the bird” emote, a “line in the sand” emote, serpent scale body markings, a standing collar hood, a turban, a mastiff pet, a housecat pet, and another facial marking. I think the mastiff and costume were my favorite gifts out of that lot.