Update 33 and Ascending Tide Road Map

ZOS_Kevin

Hi All,

We worked on a graphic to highlight Update 33 and Ascending Tide additions to ESO. Check the graphics out below!

NeeScrolls

Comrade_Ogilvy wrote: »

[snip]

Yeah , tbqh, in general, i don't think Game Developers ever truly appreciate the magnitude effect these types of core infrastructure revamps have upon their playerbase. For them it's just a matter of "meh, a few lines of code" . For us, it's almost like a "nerf" our character's individual cyber-souls.

Of course, had ESO originally started with Legacy-wide Achievements , it would've been GREAT. But alas, now, after the years of established fact (and gamer accustomed routines) , it can feel like de-valued disrespect toward prior time spent.

Guess we all signed up for this though. (re: MMO experience is subject-to-change )

Still very much looking forward to the UPDATE 33!
.

[edited to remove quote]

VaranisArano

If the team ever wants to do a "So you're coming back to ESO after a break..." style guide, a road map like this for past and future updates might be a good way for returning players to quickly catch up on major features that have been added to the game with each Update.

Dojohoda

Thank you for the list and the dates. These are very useful to know.

ZOS_Kevin

@VaranisArano We might be cooking something up for this very purpose...

tmbrinks

Seeing it in writing actually makes me sad to realize it's only 3 days away

Looks like they're promoting AwA as the "cornerstone" of this update (by its position in the graphic) despite the (unpaid) work of hundreds of players documenting broken quests, broken NPC interactions, longer timelines to level skill lines, difficulty in determining whether you've actually killed bosses in delves/at world bosses/in public dungeons/etc., collected that skyshard, etc...

VaranisArano

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

@VaranisArano We might be cooking something up for this very purpose...

Brilliant!

I always feel bad for players who are like "So I left years ago. What's changed?"

And I'm like, "Uh...lots."

So something like that sounds great!

Varana

Seeing the first "feature" leaves me just sad.

So ... good job, team?

S0Z0H

Let's get the option to play the whole game in Hard Core mode, so many people have been asking for that. Imagine, running through Auridon fighting a world boss that now might just need 10 people to kill ahahaha.
And the Dragons in elsywere will be like fighting vet hard mode trial boss lol.
People love the insane challenge. And u can give them unique titles for beating all this stuff again on Hard Core mode. It would give the vet community and new players a lot to handle.
Elden Ring is a super massive smash hit for a reason.

NeeScrolls

S0Z0H wrote: »

Elden Ring is a super massive smash hit for a reason.

Yeah, cuz most "hardcore" gamers are fickle and always flock to the new shiny thing.

ESO is approaching *10 years* soon. I think our game will be just fine.

Kesstryl

(Before I begin, let me clarify with the pro account wide achievements people that I was not against AwA in theory, I'm only against this current implementation which guts character individuality and breaks immersion in the game world)

I would have been excited for this if I knew this update brought an intact and coherent game world for my alts. No acknowledgement of broken quests except for the Museum ones, NPC reactions and dialogue trees being wrong and out of order for alts, and inability to track which delves and world bosses were killed on an alt without addons is a mess I will be avoiding. I'm not going to play this train wreck coming because ZOS refused to acknowledge and address bugs that will make the game a playground for Sheogorath with our alts because the game will now break the 4th wall and treat all alts as if they are simply extensions of the player and not individual people in Tamriel.

There will be no more immersion for new alts when NPCs recognize them as heroes because those reactions are tied to global achievements and were not decoupled and moved to the hidden quest journal end stage. Even a level 3 alt who has never done a single quest will be hailed a hero, or treated as if the NPCs already knew them in some instances. While these NPC bugs might not be everywhere, the instances where they happen will break immersion for people who are either role playing in their head as they quest, or simply enjoying the story on a new alt. All instances of NPC reactions and dialogue NEEDS to be decoupled from achievements and moved to quest stage completion! Achievement quests locked out of alts need to be added to the quest database so alts can access them (Taking Up The Mantle in Markarth is an example of a broken quest, alts will never again be able to talk to Count Ravenwatch for his epilogue if one character already got the achievement.) Fix your game and I might have something to look forward to. Until then, I'll be taking my sub money (sub expired two days ago so this is not a threat, it's already done), and trying other games.

All you had to do was communicate with us, acknowledge the bugs, tell us they would be addressed, and most of us would have trucked along with the changes as long as the game world was intact for our alts. As it is, the lack of communication (Q&A was a step, but did not address the bugs and concerns many of us had, and you stopped communication there and didn't dialogue with us after the fact) and the unwillingness to postpone this mess with account wide achievements until the broken things could be fixed, or even a simple acknowledgement of knowing about the bugs and statement they will be fixed in later patches would have helped us to weather this. The fact that you won't acknowledge these bugs makes us fear this is working as intended, and that you are OK with ESO going forward without immersion and coherence for our alts.

For many of us the game will now be irreparably broken. You've taken a beautiful game world and dumbed it down so that it breaks the 4th wall and makes the game no longer see our alts as individual people, but as avatars conglomerated into one character that wears different faces and is nothing more than a pixel representation of the player. The game is seeing our alts as the player, and not as individual people in Tamriel. That is breaking the 4th wall in terms of game play. This is unacceptable! Many of your long time TES fans do not play the game this way. We are used to immersing ourselves in an Elder Scrolls world, in both the single player games and for 8 years in ESO, and as such ESO WAS a role playing game. ESO will not be an immersive role playing game anymore with this update. This is not the Elder Scrolls experience I came here for. This mess does not belong in an Elder Scrolls game.


edited for clarity

majulook

So the Deconstruction Assistant is base game?

Does this mean it can some how be gotten for free, and not just purchased in the Crown Store?

tmbrinks

majulook wrote: »

So the Deconstruction Assistant is base game?

Does this mean it can some how be gotten for free, and not just purchased in the Crown Store?

No, that just means you don't need to own the DLC to purchase it.

Kelinmiriel

Speaking strictly from a graphics viewpoint, it's very well done.

Seeing "Account-wide Achievements" as the top highlighted feature on it, though, makes me very sad, after having played it on the PTS.

Like many people who have commented on the feedback and bugs threads, I'm not against AwA, just this implementation of it.

Anyone who plays on PC, please, before Monday, install the following addons and just cycle through all of your characters to save their achievements:

LibAchievementsArchive
Character Zone Tracker
LibSavedVars (if you don't have it; required by Character Zone Tracker)

There are a number of popular addons that use achievements to tell whether your character has completed certain things. After Monday, that information will be gone forever. So please save it while you can!

Other than my concerns about the AwA issues, I've been looking forward to the deconstruction assistant, and multi-rider mounts are far more fun and useful than anyone might think. I'll be getting one as soon as I can. (And the ragpicker.) Also anticipating Seaview Spire, though I see that's not ready for advertising yet.

NeeScrolls

Kesstryl wrote: »

No acknowledgement of broken quests except for the Museum ones, NPC reactions and dialogue trees being wrong and out of order for alts, and inability to track which delves and world bosses were killed on an alt without addons is a mess I will be avoiding. I'm not going to play this train wreck coming because ZOS refused to acknowledge and address bugs that will make the game a playground for Sheogorath with our alts because the game will now break the 4th wall and treat all alts as if they are simply extensions of the player and not individual people in Tamriel. y

hmm....

Kelinmiriel wrote: »

Anyone who plays on PC, please, before Monday, install the following addons and just cycle through all of your characters to save their achievements:

There are a number of popular addons that use achievements to tell whether your character has completed certain things. After Monday, that information will be gone forever. So please save it while you can!.

i'm one of those weirdo people who don't use add-ons nor game mods (never have) and tbqh i sorta despise them lol

But anyways, my question is: Are you saying that all the reported BUGS from PTS regarding improper calculations/conversions of individual character Achievements (as in, "this was originally cleared by X character on X date" , for example) hasn't been fixed yet?

I'm just a bit confused as to why the game Devs would force PC players to need those add-ons you mentioned? And i def. appreciate your warnings or whatever, regarding just-in-case-things-go-wrong on live servers Monday...
.

Hymzir

Had to comment on this, even though I tried not to since my post count was at 567 before this one... Would've been a kewl number to end on, but eh... I know I'll lurk on the forums for few more months, even though I will most likely stop playing once this update hits live, and no doubt will opinion on something or another in the future. So might as well declare my stance on this once more for good measure.

The thing is, that the way AWA has been implemented, breaks the most fundamental part of the experience for me, and I see no point in continuing until it is fixed. Assuming ZOS will ever bother to fix it. With their track record, I would not bet on it. And the fact that they haven't even acknowledged this as an issue does not really assure me.

I don't care about achievements, they meant nothing to me. I do care about narrative cohesion and character identity. Because achievements are irrelevant to me, I ignored this thing until I learned that it will screw up the way NPCs will treat and speak to my various characters.

With NPC interactions tied to achievements, every character is automatically hailed as the saviour of Nirn and every other things any of your characters have managed to accomplish in the game, regardless of whether that particular character has done any of it themself. And you'll need addons and extra hoops to jump through to even figure out where your character has been and what they've done there.

This is unacceptable. This destroys any pretence of ESO being a role-playing game, and for that reason I can not play it in any serious capacity until this is fixed. I might continue doing PVP for a while, at my once or so a week pace, though will see, as it will be super annoying when those resource guards keep complementing my PVP characters for things they've never done.

The most egregious thing in this whole debacle is the silence of ZOS. Not a peep on the issue, not a single comment about all these problems we have reported. No word on anything, except of course regarding anything that would bork up the Clown Store The spice must flow after all...

Jim_Pipp

Hymzir wrote: »

The most egregious thing in this whole debacle is the silence of ZOS. Not a peep on the issue, not a single comment about all these problems we have reported. No word on anything, except of course regarding anything that would bork up the Clown Store The spice must flow after all...

Silence is an answer. This info graphic says it loud and clear.

"Zos don't care, they heard players are shouting they don't want their character's histories taken away like this, but they'll do it anyway."

One of the worst decisions of their tenure. Lasting reputational damage.

Batgirl32

I am so disappointed with the implementation of AwA. As many have already said, it is breaking the individuality most of us associate with each of our characters, which we as players have created to be their own unique character for us to journey through Tamriel. As there is a limited amount of gameplay, I have made numerous characters to replay the content from different perspectives, now there is no point to doing that. I wish you had told us this was coming up a year ago so we players could have prepped and gotten all the achievements we wanted per character in advance. The AwA is one of those implementations where you should have polled players to find out if we actually wanted it or not. Overwhelming, the answer is we don't want it and it should not be implemented, although it seems like ZOS is not listening to its player base on this significant change which drastically alters the gameplay for its customers and will take a lot of fun out of the game. If you want to look at it from a money side ZOS, you will now loose out on people buy extra character slots, race change tokens, name change tokens, etc. as it is likely people will simply focus on one character for game content and simply keep alts to run dungeons/trials. So not only will you have alienated your players, it will also hit your purses.

Batgirl32

I should also add, I would always recommend the game because of individual achievements and character creation, and that excited my friends (= potential customers), now with this change, they won't be joining the game.

majulook

I am perplexed if Achievements Account Wide... Why is the "Earned By" tag on them?

What's the "Earned By" show if multiple character have earned an Achievement for the one(s) that haven't?
Will it only show "Earned By" for the characters that have not gotten it, if one or more characters have it?
A Character who see the sees the "Earned By", cannot get credit for completing the achievement so the "Earned By" goes away.... So why show the "Earned By"?

This make no sense to me.

Varana

If multiple characters have an achievement, it will show only the one who got it first as "Earned By". All other information will be irrevocably deleted.
Every character sees the same achievements (with very few exceptions). They are bound to your account now, not any particular character.
And yes - if you've gotten the achievement once on any character, you will never see it pop up again. Ever.

No, it doesn't make sense. It's ZOS.

Brightuatha

Could you please also add content for solo players along side of the other content. Like special antiquarian items or something special like group players get.