The Elder Scrolls’ Apocrypha is a Daedric realm like no other. We first ventured there in the Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim, drawn in by dripping tentacles that lurched out of ancient black books. Immediately, we found ourselves stranded on islands in the midst of a seemingly never-ending ocean of grime and decay.
There were walls and spiralling tendrils made out of ancient tomes forming a library held in limbo, besieged by Lovecraftian monsters. It’s the world of Hermaeus Mora, Daedric Prince of Knowledge, and we’re finally returning there after 11 years in The Elder Scrolls Online.
“Our incredible art team generated much of the initial ideas of the landscape you see in Apocrypha,” Necrom zone lead Tom Murphy tells me. “There were certain traits that we wanted to reinforce visually - Hermaeus Mora is the great miser of Oblivion, and he’s been amassing and hoarding things in his domain since time immemorial. That translated visually into the idea of fossils, elements stuck half-buried in terrain and slipping into the ichor seas that Hermaeus Mora had collected centuries ago.
“The idea of a place riven by roots invokes the idea of Hermaeus Mora’s pervasive reach into the minds of men and mer (elves), pulling whatever knowledge he desires out of them. And we wanted players to always know they were someplace beyond the natural world, where ichor waterfalls flow uphill and monoliths list silently on the horizon. Players should always feel slightly unsettled in Apocrypha, even in its most beautiful corners.”
One thing that stuck out to me was that ESO is taking us beyond the neverending ocean into new lands. We’ve seen more of Apocrypha in ESO’s public test server, and across myriad teasers and trailers, both CGI and in-game. We can now find sharp cliffs that stretch into the sky, with floating debris scattered over the edge, giant fossils jutting out of the ground, and ancient temples littered along the hills. The more we unveil, the clearer it becomes that what we saw in Skyrim was only a snippet of this world.
“On the one hand, we needed to determine how we take the themes and visuals of Skyrim’s depiction of Apocrypha and create a landmass out of it - one that both makes sense in our playstyle and scale, and is fun to explore in a multiplayer setting,” Murphy says. “On the other hand, we had a million different ideas for how to fill in those blanks. So we had to take this huge list and narrow it down to our very best ideas.”
Not only is Necrom taking us back to Apocrypha, but also to Morrowind for the third time in ESO’s history. We explored more of the mainland in the base game, the Morrowind chapter returned to TES 3’s Vvardenfell, and now we’re going back to the Telvanni Peninsula, a part of the province that hasn’t been seen since the game that started it all, Arena.
“I think the team did a great job capturing the aspects of Morrowind we had already established - the alien landscapes, the baroque and severe culture of the Dark Elves - and folding new ideas and storytelling techniques into them,” Murphy says. “The Telvanni Peninsula is a fresh look at the Dunmer and what makes them such a memorable culture - one that players have loved exploring for years.
“We wanted to explore Dunmer culture outside the Tribunal and the Three Banners War. The Tribunal always looms large over Dunmer culture - living gods are great at looming over things - but House Telvanni has historically proven to be much more self-inserted and less zealous in their worship. Coupled with this is the fact that Necrom, the city, predates the Tribunal and is largely focused on their ancient rites of ancestor worship. Both House Telvanni and ancestor worship have been seen in previous ESO content, to say less of other Elder Scrolls games, but I think we had a singular opportunity to examine them in this release.”
Necrom launches on June 5 for PC, and June 20 for Xbox and PlayStation.