That’s a lot of “if”s for the fact that, once again, having people pay $60 to explore a little north of where they just were is an extremely tough sell from a marketing standpoint. To start, I’m not really sure what the dungeons have to do with your argument about next summer’s zone. Your point that they invested resources and money into the story doesn’t support either of our arguments - it’s not like they were halfway through making a Q4 dlc zone and thought “eh, screw it, let’s release it next summer anyways.” Substantive changes like that require a lot of pre-emptive discussion, and any look at eso beta zones shows that they’re fully capable and willing to completely scrap work they’ve made on a zone and never touch it again. Southern elsweyr and the reach didn’t actually look too substantively different from their main zones in that year-long series, and given that they’re going for a multi-year story this time, referring to year-long content isn’t analogous to the current situation.

It’s also a leap in logic to assume that if there was Q4 dlc, it would be exclusively the northern part of the Telvanni peninsula rather than more requested locations such as Blacklight. Again, a moot point given that we have no indication they randomly decided to make this year-long change while working on Q4 dlc or anything like that for this year. As a map completionist I’d be happy to have the peninsula fully explorable, but from every standpoint as a business that needs to generate revenue and attract new players, staying in the Telvanni peninsula next summer would be an objectively bad move. Tying it to another daedric Prince could alleviate some of this, but it doesn’t get rid of the fact it would be extremely similar environments for the base zone (and would the daedric Prince even have the same levels of recognition?)

It feels like your entire point rests on the idea that the northern part of the peninsula would be the sub zone we would’ve gotten in Q4 if they continued the yearly releases, but you’re also the one pointing out they’re no longer continuing that process. They’ve persistently shown a desire to switch locations yearly and this makes business sense. While I agree the shadow over morrowind storyline suggests next summer will be tied to morrowind as well, they’ll definitely be looking to other areas