Sorry If This Has Been Covered Before But...

Nerouyn

Jaraal wrote: »

It started with the upheaval of decades of Bosmer and Argonian TES lore on a whim.

If you're referring to the awful racial passives they ended up with, possibly what they're doing is moving towards getting rid of them.

They were always a terrible idea. Totally at odds with the single player games where racial passives are totally insignificant.

Though I definitely sympathise. I have a lot of bosmer and argonians and also altmer, who for my tastes got some super *** passives.

bellanca6561n

Trancestor wrote: »

Just one of many reasons not to be a lore caring filthy roleplayer.

Yeah, it seemed rather silly at first to me too, tbh. Even though I'd played the beta, I had no clue about the lore of Elder Scrolls when I started. Minute one, day one of launch I made my first character, Aethelwulf, because - for god only knows what reason - I thought they'd be Saxons in this game.

I simply wasn't into single-player games.

But my buddy, even though his career was as a programmer and a game developer, got his start in theater. And when his jaw dropped at what was going on in THIS game - the story writing, the performances delivered in text and emotes, yet coordinated over voice, he became enthusiastic for the first time in decades. He'd played everything else.

A lot of us reasonably believed that the magic of online gaming was the narrative told by the audience aspect. What folks often call emergent gameplay. But I was a dev too, more on the design and production side though, and it is MUCH harder to design compared to devs writing the stories and scripting fixed or limited number of outcome encounters. Plus lots of people, used to push entertainment where writers and actors create the story and feed it to you, felt bewildered at first by the pull approach, where the developers offer the players multiple motives - things they may want - and have each player's story evolve from there.

And it exists in ESO. It's not the sort of verbal creativity and story telling of early ESO RP. But it is the core of gameplay in Cyrodiil. No two fights are the same and the story evolves as the campaign progresses. Players cohere with intensity, win or lose. Relationships are created based on how people react under stress where all pretense must vanish.

Morrowind in ESO was designed to appeal to single player gamers who felt nostalgia for the original single player Morrowind game where you're the outsider. No attempt was made to address existing players who were not outsiders at all but had used the lore to tell stories of their own or just create in-game identities.

And, in fairness, though I have no access to the numbers, it feels like the vast majority of players exist in, and seldom leave, what we used to call the roleplaying shell: towns, zones, the regular landscape apart from multiplayer. They cycle in and out when new content arrives.

In short, what they're doing may make business sense. Yet it's not aimed at retention. And that may make business sense too.

Me, I'm simply reluctant to play out another scenario where I'm an outsider who needs to prove myself. And nothing I've done before matters.