The Road Ahead - July 8, 2014

ZOS_GinaBruno

Below is the latest Road Ahead article, written by ESO Game Director Matt Firor:


It’s time for another update on what we’re up to at ZOS, how things are going for ESO, and what to expect in the near future.


ZOS and ESO at QuakeCon

As part of the pan-Bethesda fan event, we’ll be out in force at QuakeCon in Dallas from July 17th through the 20th. Most events related to The Elder Scrolls Online will be held on Friday, July 17th. We’ll have our own panel, there will be hands-on stations at our booth, and we’ll host a Q&A session. Everyone is welcome—we’d love to see you there. If you can’t make it to the show, you can still join us to watch the panel and Q&A on our twitch channel! Here’s a breakdown of what we’re planning:

• “The Future of ESO” panel, where senior developers will talk about their different responsibilities and what they’re working on. Creative Director Paul Sage will present an update on changes coming to the Veteran System (which we cover further down) and lots more.
• A Community Meet and Greet after the panel.
• PvP Tournament and livestreams—join in with your guild or friends and have your PvP session livestreamed on our Twitch channel.
• A Trials tournament and livestream.

To get all the details about our presence at the show, including how to enter the tournaments, check out our QuakeCon article.


EU Megaserver Update

We’re getting closer and closer to being able to announce a specific date for the migration of the EU Megaserver to our Frankfurt data center. As I type this, it looks like the move will happen during either the last week of July or the first week of August. This is obviously a delicate operation, and we have to make sure that everything is up and running and that all character data is transferred successfully. We are taking the time to do it right.


Veteran Rank System

We’ve been listening to your feedback about ESO’s Veteran Rank content. Some of the issues are that it’s too much of a departure from the 1-50 experience, it’s much more “grindy,” it can be too difficult, and the rewards don’t match the effort you have to put in to progress. I’m very happy to say that we’ll be making a series of announcements (starting at QuakeCon) that will address problems with the Veteran System in ESO, leading to a much more compelling high-level PvE experience for everyone.

In the interim, we’ve implemented some balance changes to content in post-50 zones that will make it much more like the content from levels 1-50. Our goal is to remove the feeling of “I have just hit a wall of difficulty” that many of you have commented on—you’ll be able to solo much more easily.

One of the guiding principles of our Veteran gameplay was to encourage people (not force them) to group. We wanted people to be able to solo to max level, but still wanted you to participate in group content. This principle was the reason we made our post-50 zones more difficult; we wanted you to get together with others and take on tougher challenges. But this hasn’t been well-received. Many of you love the game you played from 1-50, and the Veteran-level zones are too much of a departure from that experience. We know you want the ability to continue participating in solo content as you progress through Veteran Ranks. This will occur over time, but the first few phases look like this:

• Phase 1: Make sure the difficulty in Veteran zones ramps up slowly and rarely exceeds what a good player can do on their own. This change came to the live servers on July 7th. By the time you read this, you should be able to play Veteran content the same way you played from 1-50.
• Phase 2: Remove the Veteran Points system and have normal experience gains direct the growth of the Veteran System. Also, we’ll increase the amount of XP granted in PvP. This will happen at some point over the summer as we transition to the new system.
• Phase 3: Introduce a completely new Veteran System based on new character customization and growth mechanics. We’ll talk more about this in the near future—especially during Quakecon—but for now, be aware that we’re going to make some much-needed changes to post-50 PvE gameplay.

The primary reason for making these changes is to ensure that you have meaningful choices in the post-50 PvE game experience that reinforce the design idea that you can play the way you want to play.


Update 3 and Guild Enhancements

Update 3 (or “Guild Extravaganza!” as we call it) introduces lots of guild and player customization improvements, and it will be coming to the Public Test Server (PTS) soon. Few features are more important to ESO than guilds. They provide the easiest and most fun way to meet new people, chat with groups while you’re playing, and are almost always the first choice when putting together a dungeon or PvP group. As such, we’re devoting a large portion of Update 3 to making sure that guilds are easy to create, fun to join and manage, and provide players with a social group that helps them in their journey through Tamriel.

It is also important to note that almost all of these guild enhancements came about as a result of your feedback. Please keep up the comments on the forums, on social media, and in places like reddit—we are reading and listening.

Here’s a quick summary of Update 3’s guild enhancements:

• Management: guild leaders can create, delete, and promote guild ranks. Guilds can have up to ten ranks of membership, each of which can have its own icon.
• Bank: guild leaders can set permissions to allow members to withdraw gold from the guild bank based on their rank.
• Store updates: anyone in your alliance can browse your guild store in Cyrodiil if your guild owns a keep.
• Traders: The Gold Coast Trading Company will establish kiosks throughout the cities of Tamriel. The merchants running the kiosks can be hired by guilds on a weekly basis (via auction) to act as a portal to their guild’s store, which can be browsed by any player in the guild’s alliance. Auctions use a blind bidding process and are held once a week per merchant.
• Heraldry: guild leaders can design guild heraldry for their guilds if they have 10 or more members. Each guild member can purchase and wear a tabard emblazoned with the guild’s chosen colors and crest. There are 250 colors, 63 backgrounds, and 136 crests that can be mixed and matched to form guild heraldry.

Class Builds and Balance

I’ll take this opportunity to repeat an important point: we make class balance changes very slowly because they can have a big impact on your play experience. We’re making changes carefully, but we are always watching feedback about balance concerns. Recently, we adjusted stamina builds to help them become more competitive by making medium armor reduce the cost of stamina abilities and by improving the damage for several stamina-based abilities. In Update 3, ultimate abilities will scale from weapon damage or spell damage—whichever one benefits you the most. We’ll continue to make incremental changes to address balance issues.

It’s important to note that from now on, whenever we introduce a major change to a skill line, we will be offering a free respec to players who have invested points in that line.

Here are some other character and ability topics we’re looking at for potential balance changes and tweaks:

• The survivability of werewolves and the balance between their strengths and weaknesses may receive some adjustments.
• The effectiveness of Templars is being evaluated, particularly some specific builds that may be underperforming when compared to similar builds for other classes.
• Our previous changes to the Dragonknight class are undergoing review to ensure that the class is fun to play and still feels powerful.
• We’re continuing to make adjustments to the Nightblade. We believe that what we’ve done so far has helped, but there may be more on the way.

Itemization and Rewards

One of the most fun reasons to play games like ESO is to obtain cool weapons, armor, and other gear through the course of your adventures. We’ve been closely following commentary about how, at some points in the game, it feels like you aren’t being rewarded adequately for the amount of effort you put in. I’ve already talked above about how we’re looking to alleviate this at Veteran Ranks, but it also applies to some sections of the 1-50 experience.

We’ve seen feedback that there isn’t enough differentiation in armor appearances—especially as you adventure from moment to moment—and that the items you find are not substantially better than the ones you already have, leading to a feeling of incremental gain but never something exciting or momentous.

Armor dyes, which will be in the game as part of Update 3, will help by giving you the ability to customize gear colors to your tastes, but we’re also going to introduce some new itemization features over the next couple of updates:

• New armor sets that are visually distinct from others.
• A new system that makes it easier to find complete sets in-game.
• Item rewards will be handed out in a more logical fashion by quests and enemy drops.

Stay tuned to future patch notes to see how itemization and rewards evolve over the next few updates.


Combat

We’ve been working steadily behind the scenes to make combat more fun and visceral. This is a multi-pronged effort to tweak and fix dozens of different game systems to lead to a smoother, more responsive combat system. Similar to how we’re changing the Veteran System, we’ll make meaningful changes over time. We’re making changes to animations, audio, timing, server network optimization, and other factors to make combat more engaging.

We’ll show off some of these new combat enhancements at QuakeCon to demonstrate the evolution the combat system has made over the last few months.


Fun with Armor Dyes

Update 3 will be on the PTS soon, bringing with it a lot of fun new character and guild customization features. This update has been in internal testing at ZOS for many weeks now, and as part of that effort, we had a studio-wide contest to see who could use the new dye system to come up with the coolest (or most horrendous?) outfit. Check out some of the screenshots from the contest—it was a lot of fun, and it shows the lengths to which you can change what your character looks like just by applying different colors.





Thanks for reading. As you can see, there are lots of changes coming to ESO based on your feedback. As we roll them out, we’ll keep listening to what you have to say, and we hope you’ll enjoy everything we have planned for you. See you in Tamriel!

gibous

Custom dyed armor sounds great, but I don't like the idea of candy-colored armor dyes. Should be more earth-toned. The visual appeal of this series is that it's not terribly cartoony and works toward some kind of realism.

Kaytlin

I appreciate the information on the upcoming changes, but I am disappointed that there was no acknowledgment of the problems the game is experiencing and what steps are being taken to remedy the major game issues. This was supposed to be a address on the "state of the game". It missed the boat on this. There was no acknowledgement of the FPS and lag issues plaguing the AvA and some PvE zones. It seems this was more of a features in the works update rather than a state of the game address.
Frankly, the state of the game is not good at this point.
Caytlynne of Skye
V12 EP Sorceress

david.haypreub18_ESO

Ultimates charging off of Stamina as well as Magicka is a good start.

To really equal Magicka builds, though, you're going to have to add weapon ultimates, reduce the cost of dodge rolling and increase the damage of weapon powers across the board.

Unfortunately, it sounds like Stamina builds are a long way off from parity.

Tremulous

Can you name all the Characters in the pictures!

To bad there is not more player contests.

Sounds like they're going to nerf werewolfs... I hope they at least make them more interesting rather than the auto attack machines they turned them into.

Hinrasub17_ESO

Kaytlin wrote: »

I appreciate the information on the upcoming changes, but I am disappointed that there was no acknowledgment of the problems the game is experiencing and what steps are being taken to remedy the major game issues. This was supposed to be a address on the "state of the game". It missed the boat on this. There was no acknowledgement of the FPS and lag issues plaguing the AvA and some PvE zones. It seems this was more of a features in the works update rather than a state of the game address.
Frankly, the state of the game is not good at this point.
Caytlynne of Skye
V12 EP Sorceress

Uhm, they fixed the fps issues today, and most if not all of my problems were addressed in that letter with the vet rank and itemization points, so.

wahirschub17_ESO

gibous wrote: »

Custom dyed armor sounds great, but I don't like the idea of candy-colored armor dyes. Should be more earth-toned. The visual appeal of this series is that it's not terribly cartoony and works toward some kind of realism.

There is a big part of me that wants to agree with you, but I feel like the people really want the ability to dye their gear as they can in other MMOs.

It seems like the general mindset is "If I can do it in this game then it's a staple of the genre and I should be able to do it in every game like it!"

I'd like to just remind everyone that, while this is a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG)... that is just a series of labels which describe facets of the game itself. It is also:

1. An Elder Scrolls game
2. A simulator (ie: Fishing and crafting professions)
3. A life sim
4. A competitive multiplayer game

... as well as anything else that you'd like to read into it. ZOS has done a great job of keeping true to most of what we're used to with TES while also bringing in enough flavor from the MMORPG world to attract new players who wouldn't touch the game otherwise. It also gives us what we've been clamoring for (a multiplayer TES game) while still giving us the freedom of choice.

Why did I choose to write this rant? Because even though you and I may not want these saturated color options when we're trying to adventure in Tamriel as we see it... other people do. And while some people may want X, you and/or I want Y. The beauty is in the diversity of the player base and the love and respect that we receive from ZOS.

Personally, I'm thankful for all of the choice we've been given and I can't wait to agonize over new customization options in the future.

Signed,

CCC_wahirsch / Alexander Duronius

P.S. Those screenshots are awesome - I can't decide which I like the best... Catman/Hawkeye gave me a good chuckle, Poison Ivy actually looks really awesome and gave me an interesting idea for a play style, and Wonder Woman is actually pretty spot-on. Well played, team! Keep them coming!

EDIT: Forgot a word, corrected spelling.

Selique

I love the colors! There shouldn't be any colors left out. Colors are colors, and everyone has their favorite one! Even if it is candy colored, or neon, or black. Don't deny me (Or anyone) their favorite just because it doesn't "Fit" (Which is always an opinion).

Also, any word on Chat Bubbles coming soon?

MonkeyAssassin24

Kaytlin wrote: »

I appreciate the information on the upcoming changes, but I am disappointed that there was no acknowledgment of the problems the game is experiencing and what steps are being taken to remedy the major game issues. This was supposed to be a address on the "state of the game". It missed the boat on this. There was no acknowledgement of the FPS and lag issues plaguing the AvA and some PvE zones. It seems this was more of a features in the works update rather than a state of the game address.
Frankly, the state of the game is not good at this point.
Caytlynne of Skye
V12 EP Sorceress

General consensus from almost every player that has had a chance to play today is that the hotfix this morning has worked (I am one of those people as EVERY performance related problem I have suffered since 1.2.3 is now gone)

In regards to the letter, very impressive as long as no new serious setbacks occur with future large updates. Many of the things written here are very enjoyable to hear. I know the first few months have been a rough road, but I have still mostly been enjoying my time in-game, and from the looks of the direction you seem to be taking the game in, I am regaining much of the confidence I had before 1.2.3

kwisatz

Those candy colors are exactly the horrible thing I was afraid of! It looks like GW2 and not as an Elder Scrolls.
Bad, so bad.

Nazon_Katts

Fascinating! Some much needed improvements, although some of them still come short. But we're getting there. Slowly.

On a more serious note: 'SCHLAAAND!

Gothic

Looks like fun! Can't wait to see what changes are in store. I'm really digging this game.

ZOS_GinaBruno

Tremulous wrote: »

Can you name all the Characters in the pictures!

To bad there is not more player contests.

Sounds like they're going to nerf werewolfs... I hope they at least make them more interesting rather than the auto attack machines they turned them into.

We're actually working on a couple contests for players as we speak, and hope to start one later this month.

Fun fact, but each of the submissions from the internal contest had an appropriate name to match, such as Poison Dyevy or Captain Altmerica.

Lord_Draevan

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
Are the campaign changes discussed in http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/107716/upcoming-campaign-changes (i.e 5 campaings only, 30 day/7 day/5day and Vet/non-Vet only) also coming in update 3?

ZOS_GinaBruno

Lord_Draevan wrote: »

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
Are the campaign changes (i.e 5 campaings only, 30 day/7 day/5day and Vet/non-Vet only) also coming in update 3?

Yes, they will be.

Xsorus

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Tremulous wrote: »

Can you name all the Characters in the pictures!

To bad there is not more player contests.

Sounds like they're going to nerf werewolfs... I hope they at least make them more interesting rather than the auto attack machines they turned them into.

We're actually working on a couple contests for players as we speak, and hope to start one later this month.

Fun fact, but each of the submissions from the internal contest had an appropriate name to match, such as Poison Dyevy or Captain Altmerica.

lol,

Iron Man/Hawkeye/Wonder Woman (By the way, that's a good one)/Captain America/Poison Ivy

Kaynlor

I like the idea of dyeing. I think maybe certain races tend toward more colorful dyes, and others toward more earth-tone dyes. The Khajiit (in my understanding of the lore) enjoy bright, colorful clothing.

Also, will be able to have clothing, not just armor?

Denaia

@zos_ginabruno are the delve updates that where announced for update 3 in the previous road ahead also going to come? And what about the collectibles achievement that haven't been working since the start of the game?

Forztr

Shouldn't ironman be ironwoman or as he let himself go and developed moobs?

Sotales

Friday is the 18th, not the 17th.

Oberon

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Class Builds and Balance
Recently, we adjusted stamina builds to help them become more competitive by making medium armor reduce the cost of stamina abilities and by improving the damage for several stamina-based abilities.
This wasn't enough. Simple math shows conclusively that even after this recent change, light armor + staff still significantly outperforms any stamina build. Cost reduction and class skills remain as the only intelligent choice for dps, and this means light armor + staff.

• The survivability of werewolves and the balance between their strengths and weaknesses may receive some adjustments.

May receive? Do you honestly think that werewolves are at all useful (in any way whatsoever) right now?

Werewolves. Are. Useless. Even if the ultimate cost was reduced to zero and could be kept up forever it would still be a terrible choice by the player. Werewolves even in wolf form represent a very significant drop in dps and survivability. This is a simple mathematical fact of life in game.

There is currently no reason at all to be a werewolf. None.

• New armor sets that are visually distinct from others.
• A new system that makes it easier to find complete sets in-game.
• Item rewards will be handed out in a more logical fashion by quests and enemy drops.

Be sure to give crafting some love. Almost all of the 8-trait set bonuses are completely useless. Researching 8 traits takes a long time, and should be rewarding for dedicated crafters.

This could be a great way to help the currently very bad stamina-based builds. Add some really good 6 and 8 trait crafted sets to help them keep up with what is currently the only intelligent dps setup (light armor + staff).

mr2hardy7nub19_ESO

No Cyrodiil changes?

Lets spice up the PvP a little, the campaign changes are a start but what about the people who want consistant smaller scale battles?

People are creating their own 1v1 tournaments, the demand is there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiAZahhrVbM&feature=youtu.be

Lord_Draevan

Can't wait to dye my Pact's Armor the offical Pact colors, black on red. Blood for the Pact!

khele23eb17_ESO

Seems the game might be worth resubbing to by the time the console version launches.

The dye colors tho... bright enough to give Wildstar characters migraine :P

Lord_Draevan

mr2hardy7nub19_ESO wrote: »

No Cyrodiil changes?

Lets spice up the PvP a little, the campaign changes are a start but what about the people who want consistant smaller scale battles?

People are creating their own 1v1 tournaments, the demand is there.

Yes there are going to be Cyrodiil changes. Big ones (though 1v1 isn't mentioned)

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/107716/upcoming-campaign-changes

This is also coming in Update 3, not sure why it wasn't mentioned in the post, but Gina confirms it in the comments.

Shiroro

These changes are definitely a great start. Hopfeully they can follow through.

Selique

No word on Chat Bubbles yet? I know some people don't care, but I am curious.

Lonestryder

I cringed at the parts about which I am interested and skimmed the rest. One other poster mentioned that this falls short of a "State of the Game" address and I have to aggree (although one can infer the state based on the number of foundational re-designs in the works).

Back to playing in the margins and finding ways of dodging the new design ideas as best I can.

Agobi

No mention of sillyphasing fix...So I'm guessing I still wont be able to play with my friends any time soon™ then...but hey, atleast guildleaders can do stuff...yippi! o.O

mr2hardy7nub19_ESO

Well aware of those changes.

Was thinking more along the lines of smaller scale objectives (as an example),
rather then having to sit between two keeps hoping for some small scale PvP.

Lord_Draevan

mr2hardy7nub19_ESO wrote: »

Well aware of those changes.

Was thinking more along the lines of smaller scale objectives (as an example),
rather then having to sit between two keeps hoping for some small scale PvP.

ZOS did show 3v3 PvP arenas at E3, not sure what happened to that or if it's going anywhere.