What could Zenimax do to better accommodate the Role-Player community?

Iccotak

Personally I am not someone who plays out story arcs, waiting turns and such, but I do like to get into character when playing activities or just as I’m exploring and encountering other players.

Problem is that the chances I’ll run into another RP player in the world to be very slim. Really the only way to RP is with a guild. Otherwise there’s not much room to RP besides in my head.

I really enjoy the world, lore, and writing more in ESO compared to WoW. However, in my opinion, I think Blizzard really nailed the role-play aspect of the game. Dedicated servers for role-play made the world much more immersive because everyone in the world participated.

It’s like when attending D&D or a Fantasy Renaissance Fair, when everyone you encounter acts in character it makes the experience all the more engaging.

With that said; I don’t exactly know what Zenimax could do to better support the Role-Playing community but I think as an entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise, games about role playing a character, more could be done.

What do you think would improve the current state of role play?

LukosCreyden

Certain MMOs allow you to assign an RP tag to yourself, that other players can see. This would be a simple but useful addition for those who enjoy RP. Lets you easily see who else is up for it.

ESO already has plenty of emotes and mementos etc that can probably add to RP, so that is good. Skins are good too.

As for tools to assist in RP, I'm not sure.
The RP community is, by its very nature, creative; they always find a way to make it work.

PeterUnlustig

The game already is Roleplaying only. [Edited for bait]

Grandchamp1989

Allowing players the option to que for a "quest" based dungeon where you don't have to skip all the dialogue because people rush through it would be a nice start.

That or allow us to re-do the quest at a later date without the rewards attached to it.

Eifleber

Make an option to attack someone if he/she is backstabbing an innocent NPC in front of your eyes.

Iccotak

https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/29jxgj/roleplaying_mechanics_in_eso_compared_to_world_of/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

Starlock

LukosCreyden wrote: »

Certain MMOs allow you to assign an RP tag to yourself, that other players can see. This would be a simple but useful addition for those who enjoy RP. Lets you easily see who else is up for it.

This should be very simple to implement and is a great starting point. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. I don't know about you all, but I definitely do NOT turn on hovering name plates because all that floating text is serious immersion-breaking. Thus, if there was a tag, I wouldn't really see it unless I was looking directly at the person. Better than nothing, I suppose!

Technica

I just kinda wish there were things like more personalities to fit different situations..

I'm not a huge RPer but I like to adapt my outfits/pets/mounts/personalities to the area I'm adventuring in and the situation I find myself in (through quest or whatever)

EG: if I'm adventuring in Vvardenfell so I've got the following active: Telvanni Wizard-Lord Robe / Telvanni Magister / Nix-Ox War-Steed / Bal Foyen Nix-Hound

If someone dies or something in the quest I'm going through and it's a sad time, I will use the Melancholy personality, to try and- I don't know -feel the story a bit more..?

I'm wandering around Western Skyrim with the new update and I'm finding myself wanting a cold/freezing personality. I'm in a freezing region in the north by the Sea of Ghosts, I've got my full, warm, Skaal armour set on and my Arctic Rime skin to feel the cold, but I'm missing the physical animation of shivering and what not.

*Just want to add an example from a Skyrim mod I discovered recently. I came aross EVG Conditional Idles and I love it, and so does everyone else it seems. Just shows how the little things really make something feel better

Iccotak

Technica wrote: »

I just kinda wish there were things like more personalities to fit different situations..

I'm not a huge RPer but I like to adapt my outfits/pets/mounts/personalities to the area I'm adventuring in and the situation I find myself in (through quest or whatever)

EG: if I'm adventuring in Vvardenfell so I've got the following active: Telvanni Wizard-Lord Robe / Telvanni Magister / Nix-Ox War-Steed / Bal Foyen Nix-Hound

If someone dies or something in the quest I'm going through and it's a sad time, I will use the Melancholy personality, to try and- I don't know -feel the story a bit more..?

I'm wandering around Western Skyrim with the new update and I'm finding myself wanting a cold/freezing personality. I'm in a freezing region in the north by the Sea of Ghosts, I've got my full, warm, Skaal armour set on and my Arctic Rime skin to feel the cold, but I'm missing the physical animation of shivering and what not.

They could just add it as an emote

Technica

Iccotak wrote: »

They could just add it as an emote

There is an emote.

But you have to be standing stock still for it to play. I wanted more to walk around and have my character walk hunched over gripping her arms and Shivering

I prefer personalities over emotes.
One reason being: all I have to do is set it active, then my character will play out the emotes without me having to /command them all individually.
They look better than just emotes on their own in my opinion.
For instance with the Melancholy personality: they will go from looking sad, to the crying emote, back to sad.
Instead of neutral expression, crying emote, neutral expression

Darkhorse1975

Technica wrote: »

I'm wandering around Western Skyrim with the new update and I'm finding myself wanting a cold/freezing personality.

This might help with your Greymoor immersion: How about eating some High Hrothgar Festival Mints earned from the New Life event and giving your UI a tempoary frosty border?

Anumaril

Technica wrote: »

Iccotak wrote: »

They could just add it as an emote

There is an emote.

But you have to be standing stock still for it to play. I wanted more to walk around and have my character walk hunched over gripping her arms and Shivering

I prefer personalities over emotes.
One reason being: all I have to do is set it active, then my character will play out the emotes without me having to /command them all individually.
They look better than just emotes on their own in my opinion.
For instance with the Melancholy emote: they will go from looking sad, to the crying emote, back to sad.
Instead of neutral expression, crying emote, neutral expression

I agree with this. Situational personalities would be a great thing to have in the game. It's one of the reasons I like the New Life Festival's quest where you jump into freezing water in Eastmarch. Once you jump in your screen frosts up, and your character walks slower and begins shivering as they walk/stand still. An emote can't simulate all of that.
The least that could be done would be a personality that makes your character perpetually shiver (since I suppose the slow/frosty screen effect would be too much for a personality).

Sanguiness130

I think the most important things that can be done to help the RP community is first to have an RP server.

This would, in my mind, be an option you could choose when you logged in, and you would have an option in the character selection screen maybe as to whether you want to join a regular PvE server or an RP server (no I have no idea how this would work in practice, I admit I'm not all that knowledgeable in the tech side of things) and then in the RP server you would be able to literally find RPers anywhere and everywhere without questers or whatever else running around disrupting RP.

The big thing with that though would have to be given an option as to switch servers again if you wanted to do PvE, as to not interrupt RP on an RP server.

Food for thought, maybe?

evolkerb14_ESO

How about an RP chat channel, or maybe an RP filter for the existing in-game chat? Or a party system that would allow a party leader to handle the dialogue, or assign dialog to a party member with appropriate skills/perks?

Just throwing some ideas out there...

vestahls

WoW isn't that great for RP either. One good thing it does is making characters emote when you type, ESO should implement something like that for sure.

But as far as RP goes, ESO really dropped the ball compared to the single player games. Mind you, the SP had gotten progressively worse RP-wise over time themselves.

The best thing ESO could do for RP is to become more like TESII: Daggerfall. Give us the option to speak rudely or politely with NPCs. Give us the option side with whichever faction we want, "good" or "bad". Let us climb walls and take loans and go to jail when we default on them.


inb4 too hard to code. Yeah, I know it would be an immense effort and they won't do it, but if you want to make the game a real RPG, this is what ZOS would have to do.

adriant1978

More group instanced quest areas.

As a (soft) roleplayer I get annoyed by randoms intruding into the epic story I'm trying to follow and sometimes kill stealing quest bosses out from under me.

I remember a particularly awful example of this at the Illumination Academy, Summerset, where someone literally killed a boss a few rooms away and my own quest progress updated without me ever getting to see much less fight said boss.

Scion_of_Yggdrasil

I guess I would identify as a softcore roleplayer. I don't see myself wanting to act out long elaborate scenes, but I prefer to play "in character." That being said, I am curious about other RP events, whether it be watching them, are participating in a long elaborate scene myself :P just ever so often

1) I always played in the roleplaying server in Runescape, and think that would be an amazing option for ESO! Yah, the world might be a bit desolate, but that's good imo. There's no need for 20+ players to be in the market... constantly... the NPCs are enough of a crowd, so if you dooo run into another player in the market, that would make for a fun interaction (even if its just the vanilla: "oh, I don't see you here often")

The other thing I encounter a lot of is silent players (Im PS4 NA, so... less than social players are common since you need a keyboard to really make chatting feasible, or emote efficiently). So if I could play in a server where I know I will at least find other socially capable players... win.

2) more player2player emotes/interactions. Hug, shake hand, dance, etc. options that would send an "offer" and when the other player accepts the emote plays, otherwise, an alternate "denial" emote plays.

3) More personalities! Even without RPing, its awesome when you PUG a dungeon and see everyone in their unique outfits and personalities. It makes it feel... idk... not plain and boring? Makes it more immersive.

4) more mount interactions. emotes that play while mounted for example. Mount emotes? an option to have your mount follow you like a non-combat pet when dismounted?

Technica

An RP server I think sounds awesome!

I think some people may be too shy, or are reluctant to act out much, as some players find it weird and may perhaps comment with their distaste, putting RPers off.
If it's a server specifically for RPers to join if you're interested in interacting more with other players, that's wonderful, great confidence boost. To be around likeminded people.

At the moment the only interaction I'm using is emotes mostly, I'm walking around (not running, walking, which I have seen a number of player characters folllowing me, stopping and starting in short bursts of running to keep up with me, as I guess I look out of place as no one else is walking, just me) and I'll stop and /hail someone as they run towards me or as I pass. Hell, I'm even turning in my writs like this:
- /write
- /give
- "e" to interact with box
- repeat on each of the other boxes.

*I'm using Lovely Emotes (ESOUI.com) to set a quickslot menu and hotkeys to quickly reach the emotes I use most, it's helpful to have /hail bound to a key so I can greet effortlessly.

Scion_of_Yggdrasil

Technica wrote: »

An RP server I think sounds awesome! ...
- /write
- /give

PSA: Console players! There is hope for us! Did you know you can plug a keyboard into your PS4? Not sure about Xbox though....

Oh, and you can even CTRL+C and CTRL+V. Its magic.

Technica

Following from the suggestion about personalities:

I've put together a list of ideas I had for potential personalities. If anyone wants to add their suggestions to this list? or if you agree/disagree with some of my ideas

Here's the thread : Personalities: I feel like we need more

Arunei

evolkerb14_ESO wrote: »

How about an RP chat channel, or maybe an RP filter for the existing in-game chat? Or a party system that would allow a party leader to handle the dialogue, or assign dialog to a party member with appropriate skills/perks?

Just throwing some ideas out there...

Late reply but tossing this out there that /e and /s already exist and are meant to be RP channels. E stands for Emote and S stands for Say. Emote essentially is describing what your character is doing and Say meant for dialogue-only replies, but this is by no means reinforced and some RPers use one channel for all their stuff and some will switch between them. My main point is just that we do already have channels meant for RP. I could get behind a filter though, to sort the stuff that's actual RP posted in those channels from people just using the local channel for general/OOC chatting.

That said, there are a bunch of things that ZOS could do to help RPers imo:

*More Personalities to cover more things, like being scared, injured, and so on
*More emotes, especially ones that NPCs use (sitting and eating, for example, or any number of injured emotes)
*The ability to move while doing an emote and not have it immediately stop going. I miss the /drink3 bug, it allowed for all sorts of fun stuff with emotes
*Remove the gender lock on certain customization options. Male characters can wear dresses and makeup but can't use female hairstyles or certain jewelry? And a lot of the male ponytails look so much better than the female ones do
*Introduce more hairstyles. We get new Skins and stuff every new batch of Crown Crates, but we get one or two new Hairstyles a year, if we're lucky
*An RP server would be super nice, or even just the ability to denote that you're an RPer somehow (and see if other players have set themselves as such)

idk

Initially, Zos intended to heavily cater to the RP community by setting up a system where players could flag themselves as interested in RP. Then the game would attempt to place RP players in the same instance.

Shortly before the game launched Zos ended up balking at the idea because they could not get it to work without adding to much load to the servers. They did say they would look at other ways to accommodate the RP community but it seems more that they have completely given up on doing anything since they lost most of the RPers early on due to not giving them away to congregate easily. Very short-sighted and not a very bright business move.

Edit; So continuing this. RP player need to be able to congregate. Heck, in SWTOR they had a large gathering in a specific Zone that was designed to hold more players per instance than most zones (and it did not lag). When BW tried to make the instances in that zone smaller the RP community balked and the plans were canceled. In SWTOR a player could swap instance and choose which specific instance they switched to as long as it was not full or being closed because it was not needed anymore.

Without the ability for RPers to congregate the RP community will always be splintered and less effective. BTW. I am not an RPer. I just have had a lot of friends in games that are.

Gilvoth

one way the devs help is to make a tab for us ingame that we can fill out that allows us to write a back story of our character that anyone can see by clicking on our character tab and read our backstory.

Phanex

I wouldn't mind a good/evil personalities based on the choices you made in some of the story lines.

If you choose "this good person dies/Lie to win" you become more evil? and your personality starts to turn darker.

If you choose "this good person lives/Lie to make it easier on the person" you become more good and your personality starts to turn lighter.

Nothing too observant in the personality. maybe for darker personalities they would brood more, etc.

Additionally, I wish they could release a small expansion pack to allows us RP to create an archenemies. We would design them and pick their class. As we lvl up like every 5-10 lvls or so, (they would too would be our level) they would pop up and attack us out of the blue with minions too. At the end we defeat them and they would run away to attack another day. Maybe give them a random lair once we're max lvl and we can go there and take them out for good.

Edited for clarification and used a wrong term.

Technica

I've just bought a new pet, the vale fawn, cause it's quite cute.

I was watching it as I was waiting for a Harrowstorm.

I don't know about you guys... but I want to be able to interact with my pets
would be nice to have a key to press when looking at your pet and you can bend down and stroke it, or play with a ball or stick or something? or just wave your hand around and excite them

small thing, but I think that would be a nice little feature. I like stroking animals in the games that let you

BisDasBlutGefriert

I like the idea of being able to select an RP server in the NA/EU drop down menu.

Role playing is something I’ve always wanted to try out, and to me, eso would be the perfect landscape for something like that. But I’m a bit too shy in a mic to run around trying to find a good group who’d accept a first timer. Actually, if any of you have any suggestions in RP guilds for me to check out, I’d gladly spend the time checking into them! Thanks in advance!

Technica

I also want to drop this in here, as it would be a great addition for RPers I think
I was thinking about the events today, and what could be changed/added to improve them.
I put together a thread detailing what I think would be nice additions and such here: Events: improvements/additions needed. What do you think? (suggestion)

One of my main ideas was including lore holidays and decorating towns/cities/roads for these and other events. This would be great for RPers as if they were to add the lore holidays like Hearts Day or any of the other holidays to an in game calendar, we could travel to the appropriate areas where that holiday is celebrated. When we're there we could group up and celebrate together with /lute /flute /drum and /dance and all sorts. I think that would be really nice I know I'd go out of my way just to travel somewhere to celebrate an occasion. Such as Dawnstar's Festival of Lights. That was my favourite from TESV Skyrim's mod Holidays by isoku. (Nexus Mods)
Would have an even better atmosphere if there were decorations and such in the area too.

Ajaxandriel

Iccotak wrote: »

What do you think would improve the current state of role play?

1- First of all: congregate players of the same language together.

We can't randomly interact with players if we don't speak the same language - let's say, at least, English, French, German and Russian. This ruined any attempt of "wild" roleplay in the open world since the release of the game.

Also, seeing foreign Real-Life languages in Tamriel is terribly immersion-breaking.
(e.g. A Dunmer is not meant to speak german while I play a Dunmer born in the same city as a french-speaking roleplayer. This does make no sense at all...)

It is a huge issue for 6 years on the EU server.
I bet it is a problem for NA Server too with Japanese, Québécois and Mexican.

So, gathering (in the same game layers) players who tag themselves for specific language would be useful as a smart roleplay layering system. I guess people who don't care for immersion would not mind to stay in the randomized layers with mixed RL languages we already have now.


Anything beyond this is mere bonus.

2- Add a "speech" emote animation each time a Player-Character use the /say channel.
- Make it clearer this is a roleplay channel that shouldn't be used for gamer babbling near wayshrines, in the language-dedicated game-layers I spoke about above ^^

3- Find a solution for the annoying "spin" animation (client-side) and chart/bag animation (open world-side) when we use a game menu.
This breaks the current emote of the character and also it is out-of-context when we simply seek to activate collection personalities, emotes, and so on.


Dear @ZOS_GinaBruno or anyone else in the studio, please consider this thread!

Scion_of_Yggdrasil

Ajaxandriel wrote: »

3- Find a solution for the annoying "spin" animation (client-side) and chart/bag animation (open world-side) when we use a game menu.
This breaks the current emote of the character and also it is out-of-context when we simply seek to activate collection personalities, emotes, and so on.


Dear @ZOS_GinaBruno or anyone else in the studio, please consider this thread!

This, absolutely this please.

Ringing_Nirnroot

Make skins more achievable for the casuals. Titles should be for the sweaties [snip]

[edited for baiting]

Sanguinor2

HorkerSlay3r wrote: »

Make skins more achievable for the casuals. Titles should be for the sweaties [snip]

The newer ones are already pretty achievable with requiring just a vet clear instead of hm/speedrun/no death like the older ones. If they put skins in normal they shouldnt bother linking them to content and just give them away for free instead tbh.