Interesting quote from a former ESO dev.

scratchnsniff

A former Lord of the Rings Online Systems QA employee going by Aylwen who also worked for Zenimax wrote an article in march calling out some Devs. She had an interesting comment about an ESO producer.

"As for Elder Scrolls Online, a producer for the game thought that half the team believed they were making a single-player game and the other half thought they were making World of Warcraft."

Here is a link to the article if anyone wants to read it. Mostly to do with LOTRO.

http://www.mmobomb.com/news/ex-lotro-dev-dishes-turbines-missteps/

VincentBlanquin

old news, but pretty much explaining all that phasing issues game suffered

to sum it up, they still dont know if they are doing singleplayer or wow

Nutshotz

so let me get this right, a former dev that's calling out a current dev and zos allows that???? talk about hypocrites they are. kudos to the former dev.

stewart.leslie76b16_ESO

Yeah, I'm going to take this with more then a pinch of salt, probably with lime and a shot as well. To say that half the team didn't know if they were making one or the other is a bit silly. ZOS was set up to create MMOs, that is their business objective. If you are getting hired by ZOS on the production team, then it's fair to say you are working on an MMO.

It sounds like this is someone that is more then disgruntled about MMORPGs and the way they are heading, otherwise why would a Turbine employee, sorry, former employee take a shot at ZOS? Did this person try to join ZOS QA team and got turned down?

I'm not saying ZOS don't have anything to worry about, but Turbine and QA can not be mentioned in the same sentence without medical intervention.

Edit: States that the DEV recently worked for ZOS for a short period, this could indicate that they were on a probationary period.

WRX

stewart.leslie76b16_ESO wrote: »

Yeah, I'm going to take this with more then a pinch of salt, probably with lime and a shot as well. To say that half the team didn't know if they were making one or the other is a bit silly. ZOS was set up to create MMOs, that is their business objective. If you are getting hired by ZOS on the production team, then it's fair to say you are working on an MMO.

It sounds like this is someone that is more then disgruntled about MMORPGs and the way they are heading, otherwise why would a Turbine employee, sorry, former employee take a shot at ZOS? Did this person try to join ZOS QA team and got turned down?

I'm not saying ZOS don't have anything to worry about, but Turbine and QA can not be mentioned in the same sentence without medical intervention.

Edit: States that the DEV recently worked for ZOS for a short period, this could indicate that they were on a probationary period.

This quote has been know for at least the past 12 months.

We don't need a former developer or "probationary" employee to say so.

Draxys

stewart.leslie76b16_ESO wrote: »

Yeah, I'm going to take this with more then a pinch of salt, probably with lime and a shot as well. To say that half the team didn't know if they were making one or the other is a bit silly. ZOS was set up to create MMOs, that is their business objective. If you are getting hired by ZOS on the production team, then it's fair to say you are working on an MMO.

It sounds like this is someone that is more then disgruntled about MMORPGs and the way they are heading, otherwise why would a Turbine employee, sorry, former employee take a shot at ZOS? Did this person try to join ZOS QA team and got turned down?

I'm not saying ZOS don't have anything to worry about, but Turbine and QA can not be mentioned in the same sentence without medical intervention.

Edit: States that the DEV recently worked for ZOS for a short period, this could indicate that they were on a probationary period.

Might want to take it with a hyperbole potion as well. The employee clearly appears to mean that the company has a disjointed vision for the game, which has been obvious since before launch.

Turelus

As others have said I don't think this is really shocking news that none of us knew before.

Thankfully in the last months they do seem to have turned around and realised that as an MMO you have to make an MMO first and not a single player game. TBH if it continues on the current development style I will be quite happy as it's an MMO which has nice adaptation of TES systems to work within the MMO environment.

Sadly it may be too late to really change the minds of many who were put off by the bad release however. That Angry Joe video is still being splashed around today as "relevant and truth" even though most of his complaints have been patched out or were so nit-picky they're non-issues.

Rune_Relic

This game has always been pulled apart by solo ES fans and MMO fans.
The game has always had that identity crisis due to this.
ZOS trying to make a game that caters for both would always have that split personality.
It was inevitable.... a requirement even.

Nothing to see here for me. Moving on.

stewart.leslie76b16_ESO

Draxys wrote: »

stewart.leslie76b16_ESO wrote: »

Yeah, I'm going to take this with more then a pinch of salt, probably with lime and a shot as well. To say that half the team didn't know if they were making one or the other is a bit silly. ZOS was set up to create MMOs, that is their business objective. If you are getting hired by ZOS on the production team, then it's fair to say you are working on an MMO.

It sounds like this is someone that is more then disgruntled about MMORPGs and the way they are heading, otherwise why would a Turbine employee, sorry, former employee take a shot at ZOS? Did this person try to join ZOS QA team and got turned down?

I'm not saying ZOS don't have anything to worry about, but Turbine and QA can not be mentioned in the same sentence without medical intervention.

Edit: States that the DEV recently worked for ZOS for a short period, this could indicate that they were on a probationary period.

Might want to take it with a hyperbole potion as well. The employee clearly appears to mean that the company has a disjointed vision for the game, which has been obvious since before launch.

No, what I said wasn't excessive to make my point. ZOS tried to make something different that would please both MMO and TES crowds, the only problem is they identified both groups as separate entities. But this is ZOS first game, and as @Turelus stated things are heading in a good direction as it stands (although to be fair, it can also blow up in our faces).

As for Angry Joe's review, well MMOs are a growing, living entity. If Angry Joe would like to be taken as a serious reporter, he would come back and perform an update review. All consumer reporters do it, so gaming should be no exception.

Too late? Players come and go still. Just like any other game.

I would be more interested in finding out which producer had this thought, and if them comments hold true now.

JaJaLuka

Not convinced about this games longevity if I'm honest. It can only take so many hits to it's name before we see a further downturn in the players base. Yes you'll always see some new players coming in, but if that doesn't equal the same number leaving, ZoS has big problems coming their way.
There was obviously a minor influx of new players with both console and Orsinium (some of those would have been returning players to be fair). Considering the disjointed nature of the ESO development as a long standing MMO project, I can't see a real future for this game. It may be around for a few years still, but all things considered that's not a real long time for a successful MMO. The real success will be if they can keep up a steady and healthy population, which sadly because of all the frustrating features in this game, I doubt.
I also doubt that they will ever really deal with the problems plaguing this game because the overall design, while in some ways is pretty cool, is also flawed for a multiplayer environment. It's too exploitable, too imbalanced and very unstable. An unfortunate feature is that they even modelled their content around things like animation cancelling now coming to be a feature of both PvE and PvP. Some builds/classes have no choice but to AC to make the DPS checks in PvE, and other players choosing to use it in PvP. The issues with that can be anything from ping related to a physical nature (ie arthritis or carpal tunnel as examples) making this game both a minor hazard in some cases or near impossible in others.
None of this is news to most people and the only reason ESO is still alive is because it hasn't had too many competitors recently that are worth the time to download or buy.