Today, on June 3, 2024, the new chapter Gold Road is being released for The Elder Scrolls Online. You can expect a trip to the Westlands, some parts of which you might already know from Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. However, some visitors from the public test server show disappointment in the new area.
What are players criticizing about the Westlands? At first glance, everything seems fine with the area of The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road.
- The developers promise the usual 30 hours of story content for an ESO chapter.
- With the newly appeared Duskwood Forest, the corrupted Wildfire Thicket, the hilly Colovian Highlands, and the Gold Road bathed in autumnal warm colors, you can expect diverse biomes.
- If you played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you will return to some familiar places, such as the city of Skingrad or a few Ayleid ruins. Since there are 800 years between Oblivion and Gold Road, there is also much new to see in these well-known areas.
- With world bosses, public dungeons, delves, and a fresh world event, you can dive into the usual challenges.
- There’s again a lot to discover, such as 13 wayshrines, three crafting stations, and 18 sky shards.
In the forum of Elder Scrolls Online, several players criticize the size of the Westlands after their visit to the test server. Thread creator Cruggs, for example, is surprised that there are 13 wayshrines for this small area. Some are said to be unusually close to each other.
In the discussion, comparisons are partly drawn with the area of the High Isle chapter, which also seemed quite small to some players, and was perceived to not hold up in detail compared to other expansions like Elsweyr and Summerset, and also allegedly had a strange distribution of wayshrines.
The ESO fan MörKi was also on the PTS and draws a sobering conclusion:
I can confirm your impression. It feels very small! I was also surprised by the 13 wayshrines and thought it was distributed over two areas/levels. Unfortunately not. All 13 are located in the Westlands.
The whole first impression left me a bit “unhyped”. While it has the same amount of content as other chapters, it feels/is much smaller in area.
Secret area for scribes
What is behind the criticism? It is difficult to counter the subjective impression of the PTS visitors without a virtual measuring tape. Especially since impassable areas like mountains and bodies of water also need to be taken into account when comparing the size of zones.
Additionally, many chapters lead you into multiple zones. Gold Road also has an area that is not shown on the map of the Westlands: the Schola. This is the place where you must complete the questline for the new Scribing feature. To start the quest, speak with Irnard in front of the Mage’s Guild in Skingrad.
With the new Scribing feature, you can customize skills to your needs for the first time in ESO. For example, you can choose whether an area effect should heal or deal damage, control enemies, or trigger damage-over-time or healing-over-time effects. More than four thousand combinations will be introduced with Gold Road.
Regarding the quality of the content waiting in the Westlands, everyone should wait for the launch version, which is expected to go live at 2:00 PM, as soon as the ongoing maintenance work is completed. You can find out all about the Gold Road expansion and the new content that the MMORPG will receive in 2024 here.
