Hello from the Lead Gameplay Designer

Amyxleexownsxu

Nice to meet you. The more passionate dev's the better. Rich Lambert is cool as f

Ydrisselle

Hi Rob, welcome to the forum.

It seems to me that you are trying to do what Ghostcrawler did in WoW 10 years ago - if you can keep up, that would be a very good change from the usual ZOS communication. But right now I can only offer you an X-Men quote... "hope you survive the experience!"

boggo

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Khajiits should take less fall damage. Make this a thing.

Khajiits also should have 9 lives!

neverwalk

i've one question: Where does your Alliance go to. WHY do we have to pick an Alliance at character creation and not later when you are ready to join the WAR.

Karivaa

ZOS_RobGarrett wrote: »

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to take an opportunity to introduce myself here on the forums. I'm the Lead Gameplay Designer on ESO, overseeing the Systems, Combat, PvP, and User Interface teams. Some of you may have seen me on ESO Live last month. I was a little nervous in the beginning of the show if you couldn't tell. =P

I've been working in games for 15 years, most recently having spent 7 at Riot Games working on League of Legends and several smaller games in the LoL universe. I joined ZOS in January and started playing ESO about a year ago. Obviously many of you have been playing the game much longer and have acquired a wealth of knowledge and expertise during that time. ESO is a huge game, and I won't claim to have the same depth of knowledge as someone who's been actively playing since beta.

I do, however, play pretty much every day (I recently switched from PC to console to get better visibility into that experience) and scan the forums and Reddit when time permits. I also lean on the knowledge and experience of the great teams and people here at ZOS who've been hammering on ESO for about a decade. To be clear, my role here is less about making specific changes or improvements to the product and more about helping our teams improve how we work and communicate, both with each other and with you - the players. That being said, I'd be lying if I said there aren't specific aspects of the game I'd like to improve.

My intent is to start posting here on the forums more regularly and, in time, provide more insight into how we think about Gameplay design. My days are already pretty busy (it turns out shipping an update every 3 months leads to a pretty aggressive development schedule!) but I will engage when I can. I'm also certain Gina will find opportunities to poke me for a response.

ESO is a great game. I wouldn't have joined the team if I didn't believe that, and it's exciting to have a hand in shaping the game for the coming years. I'm happy to be here and am looking forward to hearing from you!

Ohhhhg!! Welcome! Thanks for playing on console! We love you! Now we will feel like somebody is listening maybe!

Karivaa

Some of us mainly PVP. I would love to see you help fix it. Many of the best players have left. You can find out why on the forums. Please help make it great again!

Salvas_Aren

neverwalk wrote: »

i've one question: Where does your Alliance go to. WHY do we have to pick an Alliance at character creation and not later when you are ready to join the WAR.

Your alliance is relevant for you, because of all three alliance back stories one is yours and two aren't. If you don't have access to Vvardenfell or Summerset, your alliance is relevant for your starting zone too.

Furthermore, if you don't own the adventure package or play imperial, your char is stuck to one dedicated alliance upon creation. It's good that players get informed about that in the beginning.

Karivaa

ZOS_RobGarrett wrote: »

Danikat wrote: »

By the way, if you're willing to share: what's your favourite thing in ESO so far? What's made you go "Oh, that's cool!"

Honestly it's difficult to pinpoint a specific thing. I actually played a bit back in beta but got distracted with other games at the time. When I returned to the game last year I was shocked at how improved the entire experience was. The teams here have done fantastic work over the past few years, including taking on some big risks like One Tamriel, and that was a major draw for me coming on board.

As of late, most of my time in game has been spent in PvP and the Thieves Guild DLC.

Yay!! A Zos employee in PVP! You have no idea how happy this makes me!

Navras

@ZOS_RobGarrett

Welcome to the Forums Rob and thanks for stopping by.

Cheers!
Nav.

NBrookus

Welcome, and you have your work cut out for you.

About that 3 month schedule... please talk the suits into taking a content patch off for bug fixing and performance.

You can call it "Tamriel Revisited" and let the always fabulous art team loose on retexturizing old assets, and add some sort of new polymorphs or costumes or pets that drop in the older delves and dungeons as content for the people that love those.

wenchmore420b14_ESO

Welcome to the family!
Thank you for posting!! And good fortune to you.
1,000 Huzzahs!!
Glad your here. (But still miss Nick, hope that's ok....Lol)

Reverb

NBrookus wrote: »

Welcome, and you have your work cut out for you.

About that 3 month schedule... please talk the suits into taking a content patch off for bug fixing and performance.

You can call it "Tamriel Revisited" and let the always fabulous art team loose on retexturizing old assets, and add some sort of new polymorphs or costumes or pets that drop in the older delves and dungeons as content for the people that love those.

This sounds pretty fantastic.

Moloch1514

Welcome @ZOS_RobGarrett! I was impressed with the level of professionalism you brought to the table on the ESO Live a few weeks back. Professionalism from the dev team is something that seems to have been lacking over the last few years.

Here's to hoping your fresh perspective can bring in some badly needed freshness to a game that is getting very repetitive after 4+ years of playing (for those of us who've been here since 2013, seeing copy/pasted buildings as "new" houses and the same mount re-skinned every quarter is getting pretty stale). Dungeon designs are just getting silly with the forced mechanics. This game needs something new that isn't just a re-skin (Abyssal Geysers) or rehashed zone from 2014-2015 (Murkmire).

Cheers!

Moloch1514

NBrookus wrote: »

Welcome, and you have your work cut out for you.

About that 3 month schedule... please talk the suits into taking a content patch off for bug fixing and performance.

You can call it "Tamriel Revisited" and let the always fabulous art team loose on retexturizing old assets, and add some sort of new polymorphs or costumes or pets that drop in the older delves and dungeons as content for the people that love those.

This x1000! This one idea would go so far to fix the myriad problems "under the hood". Breathing new life into "vanilla" Tamriel would be a MAJOR boon going forward, especially to us old-timers who've been here since beta!

ResTandRespeC

Oh god please let us have skill timers on console .

tinythinker

ZOS_RobGarrett wrote: »

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to take an opportunity to introduce myself here on the forums. I'm the Lead Gameplay Designer on ESO, overseeing the Systems, Combat, PvP, and User Interface teams...

My intent is to start posting here on the forums more regularly and, in time, provide more insight into how we think about Gameplay design. My days are already pretty busy (it turns out shipping an update every 3 months leads to a pretty aggressive development schedule!) but I will engage when I can. I'm also certain Gina will find opportunities to poke me for a response.

ESO is a great game. I wouldn't have joined the team if I didn't believe that, and it's exciting to have a hand in shaping the game for the coming years. I'm happy to be here and am looking forward to hearing from you!

o /

Ydrisselle

neverwalk wrote: »

i've one question: Where does your Alliance go to. WHY do we have to pick an Alliance at character creation and not later when you are ready to join the WAR.

@neverwalk It's not that hard: your Alliance determines your available races, until you buy the Adventure Pack.

templesus

I can’t say I’m excited that the person in charge of combat overall in this game has ~1 year of experience playing it.

However regardless of the that, you have already won me over thanks to your actually being on the forums.

I hope we can continue to speak with you from here on out and get responses, especially on PTS forum where Class Balance threads with 50+ pages have gone without a single response in the past.

Welcome to the team.

Shadowmaster

@ZOS_RobGarrett What would you say is the biggest challenge to implementing some of your ideas?

starkerealm

Aliyavana wrote: »

If you are lead gameplay designer, what is Wrobel?

Wrobel is The Combat Design lead, and now Gil works for him.

starkerealm

Hey, Rob, great to see you on the boards.

James-Wayne

ZOS_RobGarrett wrote: »

Aliyavana wrote: »

Gameplay is often associated with combat, esp in a mmo where you kill people

I can understand how the terms can get conflated. In fact, I believe at one point in time the Combat Team was internally referred to as "Gameplay".

I should probably clarify the team structure a bit. As I mentioned before, I oversee the "Gameplay" side which includes Combat, PvP, Systems, and UI. There are also "Content" teams working on things like zones, quests, monsters, and dungeons. Ultimately we're all working together to deliver updates to ESO, but that's how the teams are organized.

And, of course, @ZOS_RichLambert oversees "all the things".

Even these posts I bet ☺

Karminathevamp

Greetings and welcome to the lions' den.

DanteYoda

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

Nightfall12 wrote: »

If i could ask anything of you,

It is when you look forward to new content that you do not cater to just a single group. We know that there are...
Hardcore PvPers including large scale and small scale, to duelists. (These guys deserve some love)
There elite PvEers running trials and speedflawlessperfectrun-dungeoneers. Perfect rotation DPS kings and mega tanks!

There are also casuals, new players and those with disabilities that get left out of a great deal of content. Please don't forget us.

Thank you

This dovetails with my serious comments.

First, welcome!!

Second, as you surely know and probably utilize, it is a standard practice in product management to think in terms of specific "personas". I suggest that you make it a high priority to ensure a set of personas or other group segmentation that accurately covers most of your player base, whether you see the segmentation as a true "partition" in the mathematical sense, or if you see them more as subsets that overlap.

For example:

• I'm a self-employed older player, with a lot of time to play. (It would probably be OK to lump me in with retirees.)
• I have poor reflexes/situational awareness, but good game knowledge and general brains. (I've been playing a long time. I was recently accosted by a guy in Vivec City who asked "Are you the guy who wrote the guides that were so valuable to me years ago?" That was indeed me.
• I commonly play solo or else duo with my wife @DarcyMardin , who would fit into the same segment I do. We can face roll the easiest 12-14 dungeons as duos in normal mode, but things get a lot harder for us after that, and if we want to do more challenging content we need to join fuller groups of players. To date, I've done more of that than she has.
• PvP, as you might imagine, is not important to us.
• A game change that would FORCE the constant use of accurate reflexes, like the proposed shield nerf, would probably drive Darcy and me out of endgame, much like the Fractals jumping puzzles kept us from ever trying Guild Wars 2 endgame in the first place. In that case we might well scale back on our participation in the game entirely, much as we did in GW 2 (and we were huge fans of Guild Wars Classic). I think that in that respect we're representative of a large-ish and reasonably affluent group of players.

Other obvious segments to try to capture include:

• Busy, results-oriented endgame PvEers.
• Busy, results-oriented PvPers.
• Generic RPGers who have a lot of time and money to spend on the rich ESO world, with no real concern for endgame; i.e., the ones who might care more about mounts and housing than functional gear.

Add me as well or i'll just stop playing classes dependant on shields ..

Ragnarock41

Welcome! I do hope unlike wrobel, you do enjoy diversity in PvP.

Zardayne

Welcome and thank God someone is finally going to come to the forums and communicate with us. It's an area that's been sorely lacking..

eso_lags

ZOS_RobGarrett wrote: »

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to take an opportunity to introduce myself here on the forums. I'm the Lead Gameplay Designer on ESO, overseeing the Systems, Combat, PvP, and User Interface teams. Some of you may have seen me on ESO Live last month. I was a little nervous in the beginning of the show if you couldn't tell. =P

I've been working in games for 15 years, most recently having spent 7 at Riot Games working on League of Legends and several smaller games in the LoL universe. I joined ZOS in January and started playing ESO about a year ago. Obviously many of you have been playing the game much longer and have acquired a wealth of knowledge and expertise during that time. ESO is a huge game, and I won't claim to have the same depth of knowledge as someone who's been actively playing since beta.

I do, however, play pretty much every day (I recently switched from PC to console to get better visibility into that experience) and scan the forums and Reddit when time permits. I also lean on the knowledge and experience of the great teams and people here at ZOS who've been hammering on ESO for about a decade. To be clear, my role here is less about making specific changes or improvements to the product and more about helping our teams improve how we work and communicate, both with each other and with you - the players. That being said, I'd be lying if I said there aren't specific aspects of the game I'd like to improve.

My intent is to start posting here on the forums more regularly and, in time, provide more insight into how we think about Gameplay design. My days are already pretty busy (it turns out shipping an update every 3 months leads to a pretty aggressive development schedule!) but I will engage when I can. I'm also certain Gina will find opportunities to poke me for a response.

ESO is a great game. I wouldn't have joined the team if I didn't believe that, and it's exciting to have a hand in shaping the game for the coming years. I'm happy to be here and am looking forward to hearing from you!

Well hello rob. Nice to meet you. Happy to see that you are hopping on the forums.. Things seem to be getting better over at zos when it comes to getting involved and caring.. Stuff like this is nice to see.. That being said, I have a couple questions for you.

Will you acknowledge the terrible state the game is in when it comes to the ongoing performance issue that has been on a downward spiral since one tamriel? Never getting better and only getting worse... An issue that plagues competitive pvp in this game and seems to hit cyrodil the hardest. An issue that is impacting such a massive portion of your player base, especially in cyrodil and especially on console...

Will you acknowledge that?? And will you tell us if there is any work being done to fix this? Or will you just give us silence like we've been getting for so long... And I know that " zenimax is always actively working on improving game performance"... However ive been hearing that for a couple years now and it only seems to get worse.

Again nice to see more of the zos team on the forums. I love the amazing game you guys have created but i just think we deserve some long awaited answers to some questions that have been ignored for far too long.

eso_lags

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

Nightfall12 wrote: »

If i could ask anything of you,

It is when you look forward to new content that you do not cater to just a single group. We know that there are...
Hardcore PvPers including large scale and small scale, to duelists. (These guys deserve some love)
There elite PvEers running trials and speedflawlessperfectrun-dungeoneers. Perfect rotation DPS kings and mega tanks!

There are also casuals, new players and those with disabilities that get left out of a great deal of content. Please don't forget us.

Thank you

This dovetails with my serious comments.

First, welcome!!

Second, as you surely know and probably utilize, it is a standard practice in product management to think in terms of specific "personas". I suggest that you make it a high priority to ensure a set of personas or other group segmentation that accurately covers most of your player base, whether you see the segmentation as a true "partition" in the mathematical sense, or if you see them more as subsets that overlap.

For example:

• I'm a self-employed older player, with a lot of time to play. (It would probably be OK to lump me in with retirees.)
• I have poor reflexes/situational awareness, but good game knowledge and general brains. (I've been playing a long time. I was recently accosted by a guy in Vivec City who asked "Are you the guy who wrote the guides that were so valuable to me years ago?" That was indeed me.
• I commonly play solo or else duo with my wife @DarcyMardin , who would fit into the same segment I do. We can face roll the easiest 12-14 dungeons as duos in normal mode, but things get a lot harder for us after that, and if we want to do more challenging content we need to join fuller groups of players. To date, I've done more of that than she has.
• PvP, as you might imagine, is not important to us.
• A game change that would FORCE the constant use of accurate reflexes, like the proposed shield nerf, would probably drive Darcy and me out of endgame, much like the Fractals jumping puzzles kept us from ever trying Guild Wars 2 endgame in the first place. In that case we might well scale back on our participation in the game entirely, much as we did in GW 2 (and we were huge fans of Guild Wars Classic). I think that in that respect we're representative of a large-ish and reasonably affluent group of players.

Other obvious segments to try to capture include:

• Busy, results-oriented endgame PvEers.
• Busy, results-oriented PvPers.
• Generic RPGers who have a lot of time and money to spend on the rich ESO world, with no real concern for endgame; i.e., the ones who might care more about mounts and housing than functional gear.

Guild wars 2 is such a cool game with such cool classes.. Also its decently different than most mmos. Sucks that it didnt workout for you and your wife .. Did you give it a fair chance ?

Jake1576

ZOS_RobGarrett wrote: »

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to take an opportunity to introduce myself here on the forums. I'm the Lead Gameplay Designer on ESO, overseeing the Systems, Combat, PvP, and User Interface teams. Some of you may have seen me on ESO Live last month. I was a little nervous in the beginning of the show if you couldn't tell. =P

I've been working in games for 15 years, most recently having spent 7 at Riot Games working on League of Legends and several smaller games in the LoL universe. I joined ZOS in January and started playing ESO about a year ago. Obviously many of you have been playing the game much longer and have acquired a wealth of knowledge and expertise during that time. ESO is a huge game, and I won't claim to have the same depth of knowledge as someone who's been actively playing since beta.

I do, however, play pretty much every day (I recently switched from PC to console to get better visibility into that experience) and scan the forums and Reddit when time permits. I also lean on the knowledge and experience of the great teams and people here at ZOS who've been hammering on ESO for about a decade. To be clear, my role here is less about making specific changes or improvements to the product and more about helping our teams improve how we work and communicate, both with each other and with you - the players. That being said, I'd be lying if I said there aren't specific aspects of the game I'd like to improve.

My intent is to start posting here on the forums more regularly and, in time, provide more insight into how we think about Gameplay design. My days are already pretty busy (it turns out shipping an update every 3 months leads to a pretty aggressive development schedule!) but I will engage when I can. I'm also certain Gina will find opportunities to poke me for a response.

ESO is a great game. I wouldn't have joined the team if I didn't believe that, and it's exciting to have a hand in shaping the game for the coming years. I'm happy to be here and am looking forward to hearing from you!

If you don't mind taking a look at this sometime seeing as you said u play on ps4 these bot are located in camlorn pre questing area ps4 na https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/431421/look-at-these-lovely-bots-500-cp-nothing-being-done-video#latest

DarcyMardin

itzTJ wrote: »

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

Nightfall12 wrote: »

If i could ask anything of you,

It is when you look forward to new content that you do not cater to just a single group. We know that there are...
Hardcore PvPers including large scale and small scale, to duelists. (These guys deserve some love)
There elite PvEers running trials and speedflawlessperfectrun-dungeoneers. Perfect rotation DPS kings and mega tanks!

There are also casuals, new players and those with disabilities that get left out of a great deal of content. Please don't forget us.

Thank you

This dovetails with my serious comments.

First, welcome!!

Second, as you surely know and probably utilize, it is a standard practice in product management to think in terms of specific "personas". I suggest that you make it a high priority to ensure a set of personas or other group segmentation that accurately covers most of your player base, whether you see the segmentation as a true "partition" in the mathematical sense, or if you see them more as subsets that overlap.

For example:

• I'm a self-employed older player, with a lot of time to play. (It would probably be OK to lump me in with retirees.)
• I have poor reflexes/situational awareness, but good game knowledge and general brains. (I've been playing a long time. I was recently accosted by a guy in Vivec City who asked "Are you the guy who wrote the guides that were so valuable to me years ago?" That was indeed me.
• I commonly play solo or else duo with my wife @DarcyMardin , who would fit into the same segment I do. We can face roll the easiest 12-14 dungeons as duos in normal mode, but things get a lot harder for us after that, and if we want to do more challenging content we need to join fuller groups of players. To date, I've done more of that than she has.
• PvP, as you might imagine, is not important to us.
• A game change that would FORCE the constant use of accurate reflexes, like the proposed shield nerf, would probably drive Darcy and me out of endgame, much like the Fractals jumping puzzles kept us from ever trying Guild Wars 2 endgame in the first place. In that case we might well scale back on our participation in the game entirely, much as we did in GW 2 (and we were huge fans of Guild Wars Classic). I think that in that respect we're representative of a large-ish and reasonably affluent group of players.

Other obvious segments to try to capture include:

• Busy, results-oriented endgame PvEers.
• Busy, results-oriented PvPers.
• Generic RPGers who have a lot of time and money to spend on the rich ESO world, with no real concern for endgame; i.e., the ones who might care more about mounts and housing than functional gear.

Guild wars 2 is such a cool game with such cool classes.. Also its decently different than most mmos. Sucks that it didnt workout for you and your wife .. Did you give it a fair chance ?

To be fair, we played it for quite a while. But neither of us liked the jumping puzzles, nor did we like GW2's skill system as much as we'd liked the original Guild Wars skills system (although in other ways, GW2 was better). Besides, ESO was starting closed beta, so we gave up GW2 to come here!