Elder Scrolls Online hauls sunken treasure to 14 October

ZeniMax Online Studios has launched the High Seas of Tamriel event in The Elder Scrolls Online, and it runs until 14 October. The event sends players out onto the Abecean Sea to fight from the deck of a haunted ship, then down to the seabed to loot what the ocean swallowed.

Starting is a two-step job. Pick up the free quest Raising the Riotous Redress from the in-game Crown Store, then help the ghostly Baron-Captain Olsien Guy-Mard put his beloved ship back together. That unlocks Bounty of the Abecean Sea, a daily quest that can be run alone or with up to three other players.

What the daily run pays out

Every completed daily quest drops a Deep Plunder Box, and the first completion on your account each day upgrades it to a Legendary Deep Plunder Box carrying 300 Trade Bars plus a random spread of other loot.

The drop table is wide rather than generous. Boxes can hold weapon style pages for the Abecean Sea Privateer style, one of three fragments for the Suncleft Grotto Ornaug mount, motif pages, crafting materials, quality improvement items, repair kits, Antiquity Leads, treasure maps and experience scrolls for the Antiquity skill lines. Only the legendary boxes can produce the style pages and mount fragments.

Crews who have already finished their own daily can still board a friend's ship to help, though the completion reward stays with the player who has not yet claimed it.

The event sits inside Season One, and the preview post that announced it describes the design as a deliberate tribute to the nautical corners of the series: ghost pirates, Sea Elf raiders, Dwemer mysteries and, in the words of lead narrative designer Michael Zenke, "really angry crabs".

Our opinion

This is a comfortably old-fashioned MMO event, and that is mostly to its credit. The loop asks a small amount of you each day, the ship-and-seabed structure gives the fights a shape that a plain overworld grind never manages, and the legendary box quietly rewards the first login of the day rather than whoever has the most spare hours. The mount chase is the only genuinely long-term carrot, so treat the Trade Bars and the style pages as the real currency. Fourteen days is also a tight window for three mount fragments; if the drop rate is unkind, that is a collection gap players will remember rather than a grind they will thank the studio for.