Official Discussion Thread for "Creative Director’s Letter: 2019 Retrospective"

ZOS_SarahHecker

This is the official discussion thread for "Creative Director’s Letter: 2019 Retrospective" blog article.

Read a letter on ESO’s big 2019 from Creative Director Rich Lambert.

InaMoonlight

Amazing tat! I want to get the sleeve tattoos, the black swirly one myself one day

MornaBaine

I feel kinda bad for Lambert. Obviously he loves his job but it must kill him to be at the mercy of the suits that really run this show and forcefeed ever more cash grabs while utterly ignoring most player requests and concerns.

Tommy_The_Gun

Looking forward for the new story.

This year was great, but I think all the things that went wrong are overshadowing it. You know, event fails, server fails, wave of sledge-hammer nerfs and stuff...

btw.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/502670/how-would-you-rate-year-2019-in-eso/p1
An average of 2.5 /10... Yikes

I guess it will be hard for the next year to be worse, right ?

CassandraGemini

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Looking forward for the new story.

This year was great, but I think all the things that went wrong are overshadowing it. You know, event fails, server fails, wave of sledge-hammer nerfs and stuff...

btw.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/502670/how-would-you-rate-year-2019-in-eso/p1
An average of 2.5 /10... Yikes

I guess it will be hard for the next year to be worse, right ?

Always stay positive Even though "trying not to lose hope" seems more fitting by now.

I'm actually looking forward to the new year and the return to Skyrim, but some of the more pressing issues need to be fixed as quickly as possible. Like the overall state of ESO on the PS4 and the whole bluescreening situation. I can see many PS4 players leaving the game because of this if it doesn't get better fast - guild chat is full of comments that indicate this and the number of threads dealing with the problem in this forum is very telling as well. I know I would, if I was affected more, but fortunately I'm not nearly as bad off as many of my guild mates.

On a side note, though, that tat is amazing! Reminds me a lot of my own sleeve, although that's more nordic/viking themed, instead of Elder Scrolls related. Watching this really gave me the urge to get a gaming tat myself

luen79rwb17_ESO

Dragons were slayed indeed... By a flood of bugs, non working systems and terrible balance decisions.

TiaFrye

Elsweyr was... Not a good chapter. It felt mashed together almost forcefully (with dragons being that "zombie bear" which showrunners of GoT were including in their wishlist for 3 years until HBO finally gave money to do it), and backstory of it all sounded much more interesting than the chapter itself was. It felt cut in half, and Dragonhold was actually the better half of it. Characters of the North were meh and I often forgot about them even existing while Tharn and Cadwell were around. It didn't felt like something for anniversary, while Morrowind and Summerset felt grand.

I truly hope that Skyrim will be different but the choice of the location itself bears the fear of self-repeating for the sake of nostalgia. Hope it won't be the case.

valeriiya

This should be an amusing read
*Edit: your game had more than "challenges" this year. Dumpster fire server status is a more accurate wording. And the missteps were huge, "we fixed the activity finder! Yay us!" That turned into "oh crap we broke the game again, sorry lol"
Fantastic job on the final total for charity, that's amazing!

DarcyMardin

Wow, that is one super special tattoo! Gorgeous! Kudos to Rich for getting his first ink so beautifully rendered!

Zypheran

And thank you too Rich and happy holidays to all your team. Indeed as Rich pointed out, 4 DLC per year is an incredible achievement. This game continues to be the best MMO in its class and I have no doubt next year will bring even more.
Kudos to all the team.

Zypheran

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

I guess it will be hard for the next year to be worse, right ?

luen79rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Dragons were slayed indeed... By a flood of bugs, non working systems and terrible balance decisions.

valeriiya wrote: »

*Edit: your game had more than "challenges" this year. Dumpster fire server status is a more accurate wording.

I don't think thats completely fair. The game is not without its difficulties and challenges but we can see it moving in the right direction. I'm no white knight, but at the end of the year its important to balance against all the criticism and acknowledge what has been achieved and not to mention all of the effort from the team

InaMoonlight

Getting annoyed with people who use *every* thread, to voice their gripes already voiced 100+ times a day, could a few give it a break and focus instead of making eeeeverything into a bashin' contest? Understand it's frustrating, but why poison *EVERY* single thread...?

Think it'll get you listened to, no, they get annoyed esp. if they're already working on it, could we have some damned christmas spirit if nothing else?!

It's really "funny" from people who don't play anymore out of spite, but still visit and post in the forum daily *headdesk*

LET THE REST OF US HAVE FUN! Darnit...

EVERY single thread, hired by other games or something? Animosity grown out of heckling is a thing, so is "if youre gonna scream at me, YOU CAN WAIT!"

EVERY THREAD! Rein yourselves in...

Royaji

I personally believe it was a great article marketing piece.

InaMoonlight

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, I think there's a saying, err saying

(Sorry, we don't have TIME to deal with your issue, we're busy dealing with flooding greifers that says the same thing for the umpteenth time while we're trying to work it out)

Gnortranermara

Nice ink! Love the symbolism.

Where exactly is all of this positive feedback devs keep referring to for the Year of the Dragon? Just sayin'. Population has plummeted over the past year, only spiking temporarily here and there for special events. Racial changes were an incompetently bungled, imbalanced disaster. The skill standardization over the past year (a great idea, btw) has been oversimplified ("+60% AOE cost trollolol"), inconsistently implemented (leaving several grossly imbalanced outliers - Orbs and Ritual come to mind), and either created or failed to fix numerous bugs (such as skills, or at least their tooltips, that don't scale properly with Ancient Knowledge). In Dragonhold, players got absolutely hosed with no Dragonguard guild skill line and no new arena/trial weapons. Necromancer is cool and all, but you should never release a Chapter (much less an entire yearlong story!) that fails to expand capabilities for existing characters.

And still no CP rework, either? C'mon.

Half of these problems should be trivially easy for a single competent worker to fix in an afternoon, which begs the question of just where your combat dev team's priorities lie. You really need to hire a new combat dev, or promote someone with the creativity gene to steer combat development. Rich has done great on the other stuff (story, zones, etc) but you really need a dedicated Assistant Creative Director for Combat to focus exclusively on the creative power at the player's fingertips.

vestahls

The team was certainly pushed a lot this year, with so many releases and events, and it seems they overestimated the technical capabilities of the game. It's not surprising, with a game this big and complex. I'm kind of afraid now that it says there will be even more events, and I wonder if it's the devs who want it or management thinking it's a good idea. Yeeahhh...

It's still the best MMO on the market right now, and playing it I often get the impression that it was made with love. So many little touches and hidden jokes, attention to detail, and callbacks to the rest of the franchise. Really make it feel like ESO was made by TES fans for other fans, so credit where it's due.

It's a pity the technical side of things kind of overshadows the creative side, so I hope the two will fall into step in the new year. We don't enjoy having to gripe about stuff any more than the forum mods enjoy reading it

GlorphNoldorin

Q4 2019: Update 24

Memory management overhaul and behind-the-scenes combat ability improvements phase 1
This is now live on all servers (PC/Mac, Xbox One, and PlayStation®4.)
Incremental patches with additional stability fixes and improvements also went out on all platforms. Stability is greatly improved on all platforms.

I suppose stability is better in regard to less crashes.....dont know if that can be quantified. However the memory management cant be that great with the horrendous memory leak present in pvp. Is that a thing in pve also?

If this is the type of fix we can see in the future, I am not looking forward to future 'fixes'............ will the game ever move out of beta?

Rehdaun

Thank your for at least acknowledging some of what you call "challenges".

Missing were your "challenges" revolving around the roller coaster combat decisions that plagued this year's releases, one's that pushed many end-game players to other games. Also missing is the additional instability "challenges" of the non-pc platforms, ps4 in particular.

The constant crashes and blue screens don't make for an exciting time. There's at least one or two people in every trial that blue screens sometime during the fight. The largest I've seen was 8 out 12 blue screening on the first boss of vSO. Yes 66%. Then there's the "sitting idle at a wayshrine" crash. That one's extra special.

If you do anything this year, please, please please make your game stable and enjoyable to play. Less crashes and less drastic combat changes. Please!

kyle.wilson

Why is it that everytime server performance is "addressed" pvp performance in the main server goes to trash in prime time?
@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert

Starlock

This article highlights one of the major things I have appreciated about Elder Scrolls Online since I started playing a few months after the initial console launch:

The development team for Elder Scrolls Online consistently and continuously creates outstanding content on a release schedule that should be a model for the rest of the industry.

It is not a small feat to deliver four substantial content updates each year. There is a ton of work that goes into each and every one of these content updates. Where many games-as-service titles focus excessively on their cash shop rackets at the expense of creating actual content, Elder Scrolls Online does not. And while the predatory monetization has gotten significantly worse for ESO over time (and especially the past year), the quality of the content delivered has not similarly deteriorated. That truly does mean something!

InaMoonlight

Darn mispost