Elder Scrolls Online: Murkmire will teach us how Argonians f**k

During QuakeCon 2018, we got a chance to sit down and see a mission from the upcoming ESO expansion, Murkmire.

Murkmire takes us to the homeland of the Argonians, the reptilian race from Bethesda’s RPG series. We were shown swampland, massive areas to explore, and one of the new, trap-filled, puzzle-focused quests.

But there was one question we really needed to ask: how do Argonians bone?

It turns out, they might lick a tree. The Hist are a race of sentient saplings and the Argonians live in a symbiotic relationship with them.

“Argonians worship them and they need them to reproduce,” ESO creative director Rich Lambert tells me. “They can survive outside of the Hist, but they go a little funny in the head when they do that. If you go through all the lore, there’s a bunch of different ways of describing how they act and how they talk to each other.”

In ESO, there’s an Argonian shaman who communicates with the trees through visions, and we’ll get to see a glimpse of these visions. We’ll also get to see how babies get made.

“Some books tell you that they lick the sap of a Hist tree, some books will tell you that there’s this mating ritual where they do a bunch of these crazy things, and other books will tell you it’s simple reptilian reproduction where there’s a clutch of eggs and they fertilise the eggs,” Lambert explains. “We have references all across the board. One of the objectives you go through lets you see the bonding ritual where various pairs get together.”

So, if you’ve ever wanted to find out for sure how Argonians bump uglies (and who hasn’t?) you should probably buy ESO Murkmire.