ESO Stonethorn & Update 27 Preview Revealed

I’m a huge fan of Elder Scrolls Online, or ESO if you prefer. With this year giving us the year of Skyrim based content, the new zones, DLC and trials just keep on coming. We’ve already exploded Western Skyrim and actually I still am exploring it, it has a LOT to offer. Now it seems the next DLC dungeon pack will expand on this in a big way too. New stories, new challenges, and even more interestingly some amazing new updates to the base game too.

Features

• 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)

Stonethorn

The Dark Heart of Skyrim content has been a blast so far, brining in many new ways to explore the darker side of magic and Vampires in the ESO world. With Castle Thorn and Stone Garden, this is amped up in a big way. Check out the twitch steam below to see some of this new content in action. There’s a couple of spoilers, but they skip over the big details pretty well.

Update 27

The next big update looks set to add some incredibly new features for ESO housing fanatic. Plus there’s the new group mounts system so perhaps if you’re group member goes AFK, you can give them a lift, neat!

Performance Improvements

“In Update 27, the team continues to work on in-game performance, and this patch brings improvements to the impact of certain item set abilities, fixes server task messaging, introduces a new critical memory management system, and more. These additions and updates will help game stability and reduce load times in addition to decreasing the number of memory crashes and performance drops.”

Homestead Character Pathing

“With the addition of Character Pathing to the Housing system, you can build paths for your abode’s many residents (including pets, mounts, and assistants) to follow.  You can specify many locations (nodes) for each path, and pick their walk speed, add delays, and even decide whether they loop through to their original location, ping-pong back and forth along the path, or travel between nodes at random. With this new addition, your homes will feel more alive than ever before!”

When Can I Play?

It’ll all hit the PTS server on Monday, so you REALLY don’t have long to wait. As for the release date, it’s marked as “coming soon” so expect another update within a week or so.