From Skyrim To ESO, How Zenimax Reinvented Apocrypha

thegamer.com:

The Elder Scrolls’ Apocrypha is a Daedric realm like no other. We first ventured there in the Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim, drawn in by dripping tentacles that lurched out of ancient black books. Immediately, we found ourselves stranded on islands in the midst of a seemingly never-ending ocean of grime and decay.

There were walls and spiralling tendrils made out of ancient tomes forming a library held in limbo, besieged by Lovecraftian monsters. It’s the world of Hermaeus Mora, Daedric Prince of Knowledge, and we’re finally returning there after 11 years in The Elder Scrolls Online.

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“Our incredible art team generated much of the initial ideas of the landscape you see in Apocrypha,” Necrom zone lead Tom Murphy tells me. “There were certain traits that we wanted to reinforce visually - Hermaeus Mora is the great miser of Oblivion, and he’s been amassing and hoarding things in his domain since time immemorial. That translated visually into the idea of fossils, elements stuck half-buried in terrain and slipping into the ichor seas that Hermaeus Mora had collected centuries ago.

“The idea of a place riven by roots invokes the idea of Hermaeus Mora’s pervasive reach into the minds of men and mer (elves), pulling whatever knowledge he desires out of them. And we wanted players to always know they were someplace beyond the natural world, where ichor waterfalls flow uphill and monoliths list silently on the horizon. Players should always feel slightly unsettled in Apocrypha, even in its most beautiful corners.”

One thing that stuck out to me was that ESO is taking us beyond the neverending ocean into new lands. We’ve seen more