I knew it was going to be bad, but now we find out we have to purchase the companions separately because they weren't included with our Gold Road purchase. In the past the companions have always been included with the chapter purchase. This is a new expense ZOS has added while at the same time delivering less content. *facepalm*

I voted the silly way.

I didn't expect to be disappointed, but I didn't expect to be wowed. Look, my wife was a programmer for years. My best friend is one. His wife is one. I don't want to belittle the work that ZOS is doing. It's hard. The new battlegrounds (4x4, 8x8) took a lot of work and time. QOL improvements don't grow on trees. Companions don't get coded by magic, voiced by pixie dust, and bla bla bla. I'm belaboring the point.

It wasn't a poor showing, but we spent how many years with every Q4 being a mini-zone with 6 to 8 hours of content? 6 years or so? 2 delves, 2 world bosses, 6 striking locations, 2 points of interest quest areas, a six part main quest, and a smattering of side content. Stories and areas that might not warrant a full 30 hour expansion, but were perfect for a novella of sorts.

Going from that to this is a real odd thing to get used to. People were afraid that "we're taking Q4 to do QOL improvements in 2023" would become "kiss the mini-zones goodbye, we're going to smaller Q4 content drops hereon out." Based on what I saw today, those people were right to be afraid.

So yeah, have to temper my expectations. This is the new normal. Lots of hard work being poured into the game. Lots of skill and talent at play. Lots of passion and sweat. So on, so forth. Just nothing as sexy as a mini-zone to snag your attention.

Incidentally, the only three things that really impressed themselves upon my medium-term memory from the presentation were:

- I think Gina has a new title, which is cool.
- I'm glad that it'll be easier to go for specific Imperial City sets now.
- It is hilarious to me that the one presenter thought the two companions were equally fascinating. "This one is a time-warped Khajiit necromancer blessed by Azura, who is temporally adrift and half-crazed from the experience... and this one is OUR FIRST NONBINARY CHARACTER!!! YAY!!! They are so exciting to me. I'd love to take them out for some wine and dinner."

(edit addition: as a playful aside, no... I don't mean that the presenter wanted to take BOTH characters out for a night on the town. Isn't Californian-English fun? Interpret via context. ;-P )

Okay? Haha. Not a fan of 21st century American identity politics in my medieval fantasy drug-trip, but whatever. I just won't use the character after I level her up. No harm no foul. Whatever. But... you don't really think the two are equally fascinating and compelling, do you? The one character was literally introduced via her sexuality (WOOOO!!! If that's the most interesting thing about you, you've got problems as a character) and the other is a time-warped, grave-violating, Azura blessed Cat-Man with a magic sickle who reaps souls and is half insane! Kirkbride himself would be proud of you for the latter. It's a tale of two cities.

Anyhoots, by comparison, the reveals of The Reach and Southern Elsweyr rocked my little gamer world. I left those reveals with WAY more substantial thoughts than "hm... guess I'll farm that one suit. Can I tell zer/zim that I don't care about its pronouns via a dialogue option? Probably not. Eh, I'll click through the dialogue fast. Problem solved. CAT MAN, I CHOOSE YOU!!!"

@Xanttious OK good answer! That's a much more coherent point than your first post which ignored the small number of us diehard BG heads. Most of us, maybe all of us, are long experienced in Cyro too but have found preference for BGs because of the rapidly available matches of evenly sized teams. Nothing else to it really.

Is it fair to say we could express your concern as: "Why has the less popular small-scale format been given priority over the more popular large-scale format?"

That's a more coherent question than "Why isn't there any PvP in this update", because BGs are in fact PvP.

Muizer wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Muizer wrote: »

It was not exactly what I expected. I mean yes Battlegrounds. But the fact that apparently they'd been working on this for one and a half to two years........ I mean sure the update looked substantial, but Battlegrounds seem like a rather niche thing to set aside so much dev time for when there's so much more demand for open world PvP. Have they finally thrown in the towel on that? And what makes this "short term PvP"? Does that refer to development time? If so, what's does 'long term PvP' look like? A decade?

Open world in what sense? PvP in existing zones outside of Cyrodiil? That would be a disaster in many ways the most important maybe being a waste of funds and time creating it.

IC and Cyrodiil are ESO's 'open world' PvP. If there's a better word for it I'll change it. Thanks.

Some people have been asking for PvP instances in other zones outside of the two we have and say they want open world. That is why I asked for clarification. What Cyrodiil needs more than anything else is a performance improvement. At this point I'm beginning to think that might be beyond what they can do. Performance hasn't really been good since calculations went server side to deal with players using cheat engine.
Imperial City can still be fun but we need some events to entice players to participate. I would like to see one or two weekend long events kind of like battle grounds was getting. My idea is chose one district and make it so in that district players who die can spawn back to their balcony even if their faction doesn't control the flag. Give the faction controlling the flag a small AP boost or something so there is still a reason to control the flag.
As it is now when a big fight happens the faction that controls the flag has an advantage as players can get back in the fight much quicker that the other factions after a death. Allowing the other factions the ability to spawn at their balconies would make the fights last longer and maybe be better battles all around.