The Elder Scrolls Online: Stonethorn is Here at Last!

For a million and one reasons, work and family life has been incredibly busy for me this month. However, I still manage to take a little time every evening to log into Elder Scrolls Online (ESO), my day wouldn’t be complete without it actually. Furthermore, Bethesda and the games development team invited me to check out their latest DLC, Stonethorn.

I joined their team on the PTS server for a playthrough of one of the new dungeons, and we faced off against the new mad alchemist and his creations. It certainly felt like a big departure from previous DLC dungeons format. Think of Stone Garden as more like a trial for four people, it has a lot of secrets to offer up, such as turning into a giant werewolf behemoth, and that can be very important to the completion of the dungeon at times. I shall not reveal how here though, it’s one that’s worthy of exploration. As a side note, the voice acting in this one is just brilliant, it’s almost cartoon villain type stuff, but really fun. The Castle Thorn dungeon I haven’t run through myself, but it’s a more traditional and darker vibe in that one for ESO veterans.

What Bethesda Had to Say

“Continue (or begin!) your Dark Heart of Skyrim adventure with Stonethorn, a new DLC dungeon pack coming soon to The Elder Scrolls Online. Assault an ancient fortress and halt a new vampiric invasion before it begins its march, and investigate the terrible creations of the mad alchemist” – Bethesda

Hard Mode

What’s more, while the two new dungeons give you something else to explore in the game, they add a few new features overall too. The new Hard Mode toggles are in these dungeons, allowing you to turn them on/off on a per boss basis. So if there are five bosses, you can choose to do any combination of them in hard mode. Most importantly though, you can turn it back off and try normal again if you fail, rather than having to start the whole dungeon again. Like Veteran Hard Mode content? Good luck with the Mad Alchemist run, you’re in for a long night on that one. Lead Encounter Designer Mike Finnigan and his team have done a fantastic job, and it was a blast having them alongside me for the playthrough (they know all the good secrets).

Prologue for New Zone DLC?

Well, it’s easy to forget that this is a year of content in the “Dark Heart of Skyrim” and much like last years Year of the Dragon with Elswyr, we’ll have a new zone to explore in the coming months. What regions of Skyrim we’ll see remains to be seen, but you’ll get a few clues by playing through the new prologue quest that has now been added to the game.

Update 27

• Stone Garden group dungeon
• Castle Thorn group dungeon
• New item sets and collectables
• New Dark Heart of Skyrim storylines
• Improvements to performance (Update 27)
• Homestead Character Pathing for the Housing Editor (Update 27)
• Various fixes and balance changes (Update 27)

This is one of the more significant updates to the base game in quite some time, and again this also launches today with all these other updates. The developers have been busy! It’s a HUGE changelog and a lot of gear stats are being changed, bugs fixed, performance improvements and more. It’s best you check out the full details here.

If you’ve been looking for a good time to bet back to ESO or even just start it, now is a great time. With ESO Plus, you’ll get the new Stonethorn DLC thrown into your subscription, but it’s also available to purchase from the Crown Store. For more details, head over the official homepage here.