'Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom' Zone Lead States Zones Will Push Into New Directions (EXCLUSIVE)

Kicking off in June, developer ZeniMax Online Studios will launch its upcoming Necrom expansion planned for The Elder Scrolls Online.

The patch will return players to Morrowind to experience around 30 hours of story content, expanding on the lore of the Dark Elf region and diving into Apocrypha, the realm of Oblivion.

Leading up to its launch, the developers celebrated the expansion with the Return to Morrowind series. And now, the team is debuting a trailer that reveals more details on the new zones coming with Necrom.

Before its showing, publisher Bethesda Softworks provided Distractify with an early look at the trailer. In addition, we spoke with the MMO's zone lead Tom Murphy about the locations and the hallmarks his team concentrated on to thicken the scope of these fan-favorite biomes.

As seen in the trailer, Necrom will take place across the Telvanni Peninsula and Apocrypha — both new zones to The Elder Scrolls Online — where players will gear up, explore, and tackle the impending Daedric menace head-on.

Across the new zones, fans of the franchise will find familiar points of interest baked into the MMO's engine.

Players who enjoyed The Elder Scrolls: Arena will revisit the city of Necrom, rebuilt in a way that pays homage to the myths of its founding and the monster Gulga-Mor-Jiil.

But in that familiarity, Tom Murphy said his team wanted to "start imaging ways to push in new directions" with these zones, expanding the horizons of Dark Elf culture and delivering new flourishes to what players have already seen.

Since the Necrom city comes from a time before the Tribunal, the developers jumped at the chance to depict how that influenced the locales and customs of the city.

"Beyond the walls of Necrom, we see much more of House Telvanni — and its scheming ways take center stage in a variety of quests," Tom said. "We dive into how the House has contended with the Three Banners War and the activities of their rival Great Houses."

Several quests spanning these regions will unearth more about the land. The devs hope to strike the right balance of conforming to player expectations and surprising them, namely with the eldritch-infused Apocrypha region.

In many points of the trailer, the libraries of Apocrypha appear as a deary landscape brimming with eerie monstrosities and aberrations. Players will find many-eyed Watchlings floating through the skies and fish-like Titanic Lurkers beneath the surface of ichor pools, among others out for blood.

Apocrypha is also home to bizarre locations like the Fathoms Drift, a graveyard of boats heaved into the creepy setting by Hermaeus Mora. The Rectory Corporea is another but filled with bodies experiencing a shared dream for the All-Knowing Eye's mysterious purposes.

Tom explained, "Apocrypha is constantly shifting, and players will be seeing locations never before presented in an Elder Scrolls game. While players will find the inky seas and emerald skies familiar, they will get an entirely new landmass to explore."

"We knew we wanted to touch on everything players might have seen in the Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim, but were not content to just stop there," he continued. "That gave birth to a whole different half of [Apocrypha], which we call Chroma Incognito. Both are clearly part of Apocrypha, but [each] express it in very different styles."

Necrom is likely to pivot much of the lore surrounding this region of the Elder Scrolls universe, and based on Tom's words, the dev team seems deeply immersed in the zones they want to paint for players and are excited to ruffle its established borders.

Between the new aspects they're implementing and their dedication to the source material, ZeniMax could pull off this retread into Morrowind.

We'll have to wait until June to know how well and vast those ideas are executed in-game.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom DLC will kick off on June 5 for PC/Mac and become available for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on June 20.