PAX West 2017 - Clockwork City Preview

By Garrett Fuller on September 05, 2017 | Previews | 0

This week at PAX we spoke with the Elder Scrolls team to find out about their next DLC, The Clockwork City. Coming off the success of Morrowind, the game is not slowing down. Now with this new DLC players will get the chance to explore the crazed underground world, but the Dwemer did not build this one. Here are some of the details.

The DLC comes in with about as much content as Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood, and will be released in Q4 of this year. Just in time for the winter months. It continues the storyline teased in Orsinium and continued in Morrowind, and comes with a new trial: The Asylum Sanctorium. This trial is slightly smaller but boasts a fantastic breakdown for hard and normal modes. There are three bosses, one main and two mini-bosses. If you want to commit right to hard mode, your crew can bypass the mini-bosses and go for the single big fight. It will be much harder, but, the loot will be better. Groups who want a more normal path can battle the two mini bosses first and which will weaken the main fight down. The system is organic to allow players a simple and seamless event.

The Asylum also boasts a new polymorph for the hardest of Hard Modes. You will have a set of Asylum weapons coming your way as well as rewards for fighting through the new Trial. The gateway into the DLC is going to be set up easily so players can get right in and not have to wait. It also has a new system for crafters which is a trait tracker to help out. ESO has a huge crafting community and the team is set on bringing more support to the game’s epic economy.

One of the biggest aspects of the DLC is item re-traiting. Yes, you can now change traits on weapons! Players will be given the flexibility now to tweak out their favorite weapons. As long as they have the research to do it. This is probably one of the biggest quality of life changes that ZeniMax is making and players can now fully tweak out their arsenal.

The area will have the mad god Sothas Sil’s version of what the Dwemer would have built. He steals as many ancient secrets and recreates them into his world. There will be a central hub city for players as well called the Brass Fortress. It will act as the full-fledged town for players to begin their adventures.

The DLC also has a new battleground mode: Crazy King. It is a capture and hold scenario which has moving flags so there are no static fights. This should make for a rolling PVP mix which will give warriors new options to battle it out.

Elder Scrolls has done a lot of work on the client too. The game will perform much better on consoles and PC alike with this patch, with a 15 to 20% increase in frames. It seems like the team at Zenimax are not slowing down at all after their last major expansion. More are due into 2018, but for now, Clockwork should finish out their year nicely.