ESO's Murkmire expansion designed to show Argonian culture

We sat down with creative director Rich Lambert to get the ins and outs.

At QuakeCon this past weekend the Murkmire expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online was teased with very few details, but we spoke to creative director Rich Lambert about the expansion itself, who gave us all the details on the story, the goals, and the scope, which all has to do with the Argonian race.

"So the story behind Murkmire is essentially a chase, a relic run, if you will, to basically save Argonian relics," he explained. "You work with a character [...] who is head of essentially a museum group, and she wants to save Murkmire, she wants to save their culture, because the Argonians, they don't really care about the past, they're in the now and doing their stuff in the now, and so you go on an adventure with her to discover a relic called The Relic of Argon. It is rumoured to be a powerful thing and nobody's been able to find it up until now."

When we compared the mission we saw to that of Temple Run, he said: "Yep, that's exactly what that main story is. It's racing other relic hunters to get Argonian relics."

We also asked about the setting we saw in the teaser, which seemed filled with ruins, to which Lambert said:

"Yeah absolutely, that is the Argonians. One of the things we wanted to show players in Murkmire is what Argonian architecture and culture really is. You get a little taste of that in some of the base game zones - in Shadowfen, for example - but they're heavily influenced by outside cultures, and Murkmire, it is their culture, which is a lot of fun for us to be able to show."

We couldn't help but ask about content too, and Lambert told us: "So if you have played through Clockwork City, it is about the same size and the same scope as that."

"Our focus for this update was, as you said, this visual storytelling, but also making the player a little bit more aware of their surroundings. So you're going to come across more types of traps, and more types of environmental things that you have to deal with, more puzzles and stuff like that."

What do you think of Murkmire, from what you've heard?