Hold onto your hats, it seems Vvardenfell is coming to ESO! A recent datamining effort uncovered a map of the island deep inside the game’s files, along with some fancy new tilesets. There’s no official word on it yet, but it could be that we’re getting a new (old) area. Morrowind fans around the world, rejoice!
In a recent post on ESO’s sub, reddit user FloorBelow shared a picture of the map. You can head on here if you’d like to see the original, uncompressed version. If you take a closer look at it, you’ll see much of the stuff is like it was in TES3.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that the volcano is active and seems inaccessible. Apart from that, several locations are missing – ones that were tied to the Crimson Plague or the Imperial influence in the province. Imperial towns like Caldera or Ebonheart aren’t present, nor is the Foreign Quarter in the capital. There are a couple of new places as well, which is all kinds of exciting.
The diligent dataminer discovered new textures, too, which bear the names of Great Houses and cities. Among others, there were tilesets called Telvanni, Hlaalu, Redoran, Vivec and Velothi. Dunmer strongholds and Dwemer ruins will be having their own characteristic architecture as well. There’s no information about the kind of creatures we could face there, but I guess that would be expecting too much at this point. We’re just hopeful they’ll conveniently forget to put in cliffracers.
Of course, we should wait for official confirmation before getting giddy with anticipation. Game development is a tricky thing, and things can go wrong at any step. There’s no use getting our hopes up before the DLC is announced, which will hopefully happen soon, especially now that the cat is out of the bag.
