I've been working through ESO's Craglorn the past week or so on an off-and-on basis, and if I thought that the "vanilla" part of ESO emphasized the solo play versus group play (it does), Craglorn is very much a group play oriented zone.
The original implementation of Craglorn, prior to the One Tamriel patch, was just about entirely group oriented. Even the puzzles had to be performed in a group context, otherwise you couldn't progress in the main questline. The post One Tamriel version of Craglorn still retains much group content (including a lot of group Delves, designed for a group of four people), but a significant part of the main questline is not solo play.
What do I think of the revamped zone so far? Interesting.
In its own way, the lore surrounding Craglorn and the Celestials has me a bit more confused than before. I'd kind of figured out the Daedra vs. Aedra and the Mer vs. Men aspects of Nirn, but the Celestials are pretty much outside of all of that. In the realm of neat and ordered*, Celestials are the monkey wrench thrown into the machine.
The non-spoiler version of the zone is that there's a Celestial for each month of the year. Think "Zodiac" instead of "Celestial", and you've got the idea. If you were given to understand that those Celestials you find throughout differing ruins (mostly Ayleid), and are utilized in a lot of puzzles, were just metaphors for the different months of the year, then I was right there with you. But apparently the Celestials are more than months of the year and constellations in the sky. And three of them are missing.
::cue dramatic music::
Your job is to find out what happened and to fix it.
But hey, if you played through the main vanilla questline, you know that this sounds like not a big deal after you dealt with [redacted], right? At least I thought so, too, but given all the group content in the zone I get the feeling that my toon is a wee bit more underpowered than I thought.
It's still taking me some time to adjust to Craglorn, as I'd become used to the ebb and flow of the zones in Vanilla ESO, but I'm fine with that so far. Reintroducing myself to constantly sneaking around isn't a bad thing at all, particularly if it means that you don't get one shot by a gigantic mob of trash screaming for your blood.
*And given the differing "pantheons" of the species in Tamriel, that's likely stretching things a bit.
The original implementation of Craglorn, prior to the One Tamriel patch, was just about entirely group oriented. Even the puzzles had to be performed in a group context, otherwise you couldn't progress in the main questline. The post One Tamriel version of Craglorn still retains much group content (including a lot of group Delves, designed for a group of four people), but a significant part of the main questline is not solo play.
What do I think of the revamped zone so far? Interesting.
In its own way, the lore surrounding Craglorn and the Celestials has me a bit more confused than before. I'd kind of figured out the Daedra vs. Aedra and the Mer vs. Men aspects of Nirn, but the Celestials are pretty much outside of all of that. In the realm of neat and ordered*, Celestials are the monkey wrench thrown into the machine.
The non-spoiler version of the zone is that there's a Celestial for each month of the year. Think "Zodiac" instead of "Celestial", and you've got the idea. If you were given to understand that those Celestials you find throughout differing ruins (mostly Ayleid), and are utilized in a lot of puzzles, were just metaphors for the different months of the year, then I was right there with you. But apparently the Celestials are more than months of the year and constellations in the sky. And three of them are missing.
::cue dramatic music::
Your job is to find out what happened and to fix it.
But hey, if you played through the main vanilla questline, you know that this sounds like not a big deal after you dealt with [redacted], right? At least I thought so, too, but given all the group content in the zone I get the feeling that my toon is a wee bit more underpowered than I thought.
It's still taking me some time to adjust to Craglorn, as I'd become used to the ebb and flow of the zones in Vanilla ESO, but I'm fine with that so far. Reintroducing myself to constantly sneaking around isn't a bad thing at all, particularly if it means that you don't get one shot by a gigantic mob of trash screaming for your blood.
*And given the differing "pantheons" of the species in Tamriel, that's likely stretching things a bit.
Ah Craglorn, that's exactly the zone my ESO journey came to an end due to the "forced" grouping design that I really, really dislike. Good luck and hope you can persevere through it! :)
ReplyDeleteAt least it's not as bad as it originally was. The zone is actually fairly busy, but when I "group" it's pretty much an organic thing where somebody needs help bashing people's heads in while I'm in a delve, not doing the LFG call-out.
DeleteAt least I know that Morrowind doesn't suffer from this problem.
I was wondering what Craglorn was all about. I stumbled into it the other day and wasn't exactly sure where it fitted in the story.
ReplyDeleteAs I mostly play solo, it probably won't be a zone I see too much of.
Apparently it used to be entirely group related, but Craglorn was reworked shortly after One Tamriel and I'd say that probably about 30-40% of the quests were reworked into solo play. The story quests are all solo, but the regional zone quests --the ones where you walk into a town and help out people-- remain group quests.
DeleteI personally will be coming back because there's plenty of High Iron Ore, which I need for leveling blacksmithing right now, but the zone was --from my perspective-- a big misread on the part of Zenimax.