The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road Review

After last year’s excellent Necrom expansion, I was a bit worried that this year’s Elder Scrolls Online chapter, Gold Road, would be a step backwards. I have always maintained that The Elder Scrolls series is at its best when it’s leaning into the weird, and Necrom certainly does this. Gold Road benefits, then, from the fact that it is a continuation of the story that we experienced helping the Prince of Fates. 

The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road takes players to the West Weald, dominated by the city of Skingrad. This isn’t the first time we’ve explored a slice of Cyrodiil outside of its PvP bounds, and the region is beautifully recreated here in the Second Era, evoking the landscape and some of the points of interest that we saw in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. While this traditionally high-fantasy setting can hardly be seen as leaning into the weird, so to speak, the narrative, and the capper quest that follows if you finished Necrom before starting Gold Road, is full of moments that evoke that feeling.

Yet, after spending the last few weeks exploring the West Weald and Gold Road as a whole, I find it hard to put my thoughts together on exactly how I feel after the end of the (Gold) road. 

The Tides of Fate

The Elder Scrolls Online has built a reputation of being an MMO where you needn’t be “caught up” so to speak in order to enjoy each Chapter expansion. This is precisely why the ESO team doesn’t call these expansions, as the traditional meaning behind the term would usually gate people out of experiencing the new storyline by all the previous content. 

Yet Gold Road is the first time where I feel you must play Necrom in order to truly come to grips with what’s happening this time around. Sure, landing at the wayshrine near the vineyards that crisscross the Colovian landscape around Skingrad will still see Leramil come and greet you as “Fate’s Proxy,” ready to work with you to save the world from this new threat.

I’m not sure I felt this way during the