New Elder Scrolls Online Expansion Trailer Shows How You'll Be Able To Play Dirty

A new trailer for the upcoming expansion of Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited that centers around the Thieves Guild has gone live. It's only a 32 second teaser, but it features lots of gameplay snippets for Zenimax Online Studios' MMORPG for home consoles and PC.

Gamespot points to a quote from Bethesda about the new expansion that will feature a new 12-player mode, a brand new zone for players to explore, as well as additional story-oriented content that helps expand on the lore of Tamriel.

The expansion for Elder Scrolls Online will allow players to take their character into the shady underworld of thieves. The highlight of this new content is that players will be able to pull off some brand new moves, such as scaling the rooftops of cities and sneaking into buildings to steal goods. There will also be treasure that can be recovered from the newly implemented zone, but they don't detail if this is part of a preset storyline or if gamers can literally just gather up a party and go raid some random places within the new zone to get their hands on some epic loot.

From the description for the Elder Scrolls expansion, and based on the video above, the content appears to add elements from Thief. There's definitely some close similitude in the appearance of the thieves and the whole first-person, sneaking around element that Eidos and Square Enix attempted to reintegrate into gaming with the 2014 reboot of the Thief series.

I do wonder if this means that there will be a stronger focus on the meta game of players being able to build thieves that can rob anyone at any point while other players can develop skills to thwart them? I know that's venturing closer into Mortal Online territory or the single-player Elder Scrolls games, but it seems like that would be the perfect opportunity to try a risk like that with the staling MMO.

As noted in the Gamespot article, Zenimax had originally announced that they would be expanding the content in Elder Scrolls Online as far back as QuakeCon 2015. And while no release date has been set for the Thieves Guild expansion, it will be arriving ahead of another expansion that Zenimax has in store for the game called The Dark Brotherhood. Once again, the latter has no release date set for it either, but we can expect it to arrive sometime later in the year after the developers finish up on the larceny-themed content.

After getting off to a rocky start back in 2014 the MMORPG has slowly managed to build up its own niche audience and carve out a space in the saturated and very competitive MMO market. With the two new expansions on the horizon I imagine Zenimax is hoping to inject some interest into the game and expand the playerbase. We'll see how that all works out once the Thieves Guild goes live.