Some travel tips for a newbie...welcome to the game!

How to get to areas

- There’s a harbor master in Summerset, I forget if they’re in the city you start in or Alinor. Look for an anchor icon when you zoom in on the cities. They will take you to several new locations, including the starter cities in all three factions.

- You may go anywhere that is available on your account. The game is leveled so that enemies you face will be relatively similar in strength. But each faction is organized into five zones that are intended to get harder as you progress, so expect enemies to be a bit more prolific and vicious in zone five than zone one. But you’ll never be in a situation where you’re a level nine fighting a level 2,300 monster, lol.

- when you hit ten, you can go into Cyrodiil PvP. The process is a bit different. But you should enter when able, and complete the 3 minute quest at the entry. This will unlock a skill called Retreating Manuevers in the Alliance War skill lines, which is a speed boost, and is really helpful for low level explorers. To get to Cyrodiil, once level ten go to your Campaigns menu. Join a campaign (doesn’t really matter which). Then you travel to Cyrodiil by queuing up for that campaign and choosing to enter when a spot is open. Feel free to explore Cyrodiil...98% of it is open terrain away from battles. But if not, get your skill point and skill by completing the quest at the entry gate at your base.

- if you belong to a guild, you may free travel to any online member of that guild, even if you don’t have that wayshrine. There’s no interaction to this...you just find them in the menu and ask to be ported close to them and *poof*. You can find active guilds on your server in the recruitment forums here. Once you be,omg to one, in the game menu you’d go to Social...Guilds...select guild...roster. Players who are online are notated with a green icon. Select that player and “travel to”. The game sends you to the nearest wayshrine. That wayshrine will then be opened permanently for you. This is a good way to open hard to reach locations, like Alik’r.


Quest Play Order

ESO lets you go in most any order you like. If you play Summerset, the events technically occur after the stories in the vanilla game, but they’re written so it doesn’t really matter. If you’re well into the Summerset and Psijic main quest lines, you might want to finish those up, although you can put them on “hold” if you like. They won’t spoil much in the rest of the game.

When you get to the other zones, there will be a LOT of quest lines. A brief run down so you aren’t confused:

Vanilla Game

Main quest: starting with an unfortunate incident on a boat and involving a shadowy figure called The Prophet. This begins in the faction starter cities (Davon’s Watch, Vukel Guard, Daggerfall). A new leg of the quest is open every ten character levels.

Fighters and Mages Guild: These are independent storylines that can be played any time. Technically they merge with the main story at the point where you are called to a council meeting in Coldharbour. At least join the two guilds so you can work on leveling skills from the lines if you like.

Factions MEGA Quests: this is where you’re most likely to get lost. Each of the three factions has a loooooong storyline that proceeds through multiple quests in all five zones of that faction. (These lines reward 3 skill points per zone, fyi). Each faction line ends at the same council meeting mentioned above.

Here’s the trick - the faction quests for each zone pop up at the entrance to that zone even if you haven’t completed the quests that come before it. In other words, Aldmeri’s story is about Queen Ayrenn. You could go to the front gate in Reapers March (zone five) and pick up that quest line right now...you’ll be thrown into the middle of the story and it could be confusing.

If doing faction quests, those begin in the started cities and they always have a new quest giver pop up when you complete a leg of the journey. I recommend following this track...always drop a quest, then pick up the next.

Craglorn: you can get into Craglorn and play two major quest lines and lots of other stuff. These are utterly independent of the rest of the game, so play whenever you like.


DLC stories

Wrothgar, Hew’s Bane (thieves) and Gold Coast (dark brothers) have main quest lines that are totally independent. You have to have ESO+ or buy the zones to do the quest lines.

Morrowind: two major quest lines and lots of extras. Works the same as Summerset...technically it fits into a chronological order, but it’s designed to let you play when you like.

Clockwork City: main quest line that’s independent, but references put it after Morrowind but before summerset.

Imperial City: really loose story set in Cyrodiil Alliance War.


Technical chronological order of quests

Main line

Mage and Fighters proceeding simultaneously

Three factions proceeding simultaneously

Craglorn & Imperial City (ish)

Wrothgar

Hews Bane

Gold Coast

Morrowind

Clockwork City

Summerset