Elder Scrolls Online creative director Paul Sage took part in a big Q and A video on July 11th at the Quest Gaming Network, answering many questions on the future of the game.

Below is a transcript of that video.

This isn't meant to take anything away from the superb work at Duffy,net, I had already nearly completed this for my guilds web site when they posted theirs and have since finished it.

Duffy.net version is at

http://dulfy.net/2014/07/12/eso-paul-sage-the-road-ahead-qa-transcript/

Duffy,net version is much more of a summary and easier to read.

The original video can be found at http://youtu.be/u0UUsPRdY5k

My version is much longer as I've tried to write it virtually as Paul says it (missed out some "erm" type responses), not saying it's 100% exact as I've tried to cut out all the crap general banter going on in between , but I tried and it's pretty close.

I've put the times on so that you can watch the Youtube vid and listen to any part if you want to hear him for yourself.

The "Interviewer" is any one that wasn't Paul, I've only quoted them when I felt it necessary to make sense of what Paul is explaining. And the questions at the end, the interviewers got from a variety of different people.


(5:20) What I've been playing this week (Coming in Update 4)

Coming in Update 4 we have content called Dragon Star Arena

Dragon Star arena is in the next part of Craglorn and is a little like trials but it is for a group of 4. So you have these different waves that come out, there's an announcer that announces how you guys are doing, he taunts you if your group doesn't do too well

That is what I've been doing, honestly it's great fun, I really love that content and I cant wait until people see that.

It is PvE and it's pretty difficult and that's putting it mildly, but even when you don't get through it, its still al lot of fun.

It will have leader boards


(10:46) Plans for a PvP arena

Let me give you the honest answer on that one, when we look at things that the teams are working on, we have different teams and even within a team, different sub teams working on different projects.

Right now our PvP experts are working on Imperial City, I don't think that's a big secret, we've talked about it a little bit and that's this big dungeon where you have to win ownership of that area.

It's a really big task to get that out.

But we have been showing a 3x3x3 map that was really meant to be just for the trade shows, we've got a lot of good responses on it

The trick really is, making sure anything we introduce with a battlefield/battle ground or whatever you want to call it, doesn't interfere with Cyrodiil, and we have to be really careful about that, and make sure anything we introduce along those lines is something that really attracts players to both.

So it's a pretty hard challenge, it's definitely something we have been talking about, we were surprised at how easy the 3x3x3 was to create and how much fun people had with it so hopefully we will see something like that in the future.

Interviewer: Any plans to introduce a single player 1 on 1 arena similar to Oblivion.

Paul: Definitely something we have mauled over, but right now we are working really hard on the social part of the game and getting people to play together more and more, but fear not we are also working on another zone or two that is really similar to the 1 - 50 experience (we will talk morel about this at Quakecon)

This is the last planned update to Craglorn I'm aware of.


(24:40) Vet content

The point comes when you have to talk frankly and openly and engage the community with what they are seeing

Our hope for the veteran rank system when it was first put out was that there was a system that you would gain veteran ranks and it would be a way for us to gate items so that there would always be a fun item chase, fun item rewards etc but also behind the scenes when we originally designed it, we had a thing called seasons so that a season ends and you would start either new levels or a new veteran rank season, starting at 1 again

But that whole system simply didn't have enough rewards in the cycle for what we really wanted to do, there wasn't enough of a moment to moment reward.There's nothing that's a predictable "This is what I'm working towards"

Thats not what we really wanted out of the system

One of the other things when we're talking to players and getting their feedback, there's this divide of what is challenging and what is difficult.

For some people there's a level of challenge that they really enjoy, to use another game, those people that love Dark Souls or Dark Souls 2, and there's a level of challenge that a lot of people really like.

Now there's a large number of people who don't really like that level of challenge and that level of difficulty, and so what we looked at was from a 1 - 50 experience, that ramp up in difficulty just kind of hits you really hard, so what we said is we have a lot in the game where we have difficulty , trials and other things,

For those people who went through the 1 - 50 experience we've really got to make sure that when they get to Veteran, the alternate Alliance zones, they are still in a mode where they are having fun.

So we're going in and looking very honestly at the veteran content and there;s a lot of things falling short of what we really wanted to do.And so we're going through these phases and we are systematically addressing those things. So the first phase we have already done and that was to lower the difficulty a bit.

It wasn't to dumb everything down, it was to make sure the experience was more consistent and players felt like they could do it, because if your trying to get people to group in those later zones and people are like "I just don't want to group" they still want that same experience.

We had to be very conscientious about that, we understand some people felt we just took away the challenge they liked, but we have something for them, and in the future we have something for them that is really going to make them happy.

And secondarily what we are looking at is, when your talking about veteran system, your looking at veteran points, and a lot of people are like "Whats a veteran point, why not just use experience" and we thought, yes, why not just use experience so we are getting to the point where we are going to start introducing the way you go through veteran ranks is to gain experience and all this is laying the framework and groundwork for this new system coming in as a replacement


(30:00) Vet content changes

The champion system which is whats going to replace the vet system is going to be a system whereby your constantly adding points to certain passives, your going to increase your characters viability

Lets say you want to increase your critical hit or spell defence or something , you'll add percentage that will increase those ratings.

That means your improving your character persistently in a way that you really like, it will be a system that will be sensible enough that it goes on for years, but is rewarding enough that you will want to keep investing in those points

Further more it will be account wide so once you opened up the champion rank, once you've hit 50 you'll be able to take those points and apply them to your other characters. If you put points into one character, those points are still available for another character (at level 50).

And there will be a built in respec and that respec will be straight forward and easy to get.

We want this to be an experimental system as in the players can experiment with it and its a lot of fun

So that's the goal, to have a vet system where people are constantly rewarded

Our goal is to have a cadence system where if your out not doing anything special, it will be about an hour you will have to put in and you'll get one of these points.

Thats kind of what this systems about, there's more to do with itemization as well, but I'll get into that later.


(36:35) Phase 2

It's really hard to predict these things, I don't want to make any guarantees, I would expect phase 2 to come in around update 4, it's hard to know, you have to get all these things tested

PvP will earn XP at a better rate, we want people to play how they want to play. I want to make sure that when your out there PvPing your still getting gains on this system. I know there's going to be some questions about can people farm this a little bit easier in PvP, and that was one of the big things, but we've got some measures that should make it a little harder to farm and we just want those people who are going to play PvP normally to get experience at a really good rate

Interviewer: So at level 10, I can go into PvP and level all the way without ever doing any of the story?

Paul: Absolutely, if that's what you want to do.


(42:00) Converting Vet XP to normal XP

One of the things we are looking at is, say you have half a vet level, how does that translate exactly, we will try to be as fair as possible, some people might feel like they loose a little, some people might think they gain a little

Interviewer: Whats going to happen to gear thats above level 50 the vet rank gear, how are people going to obtain that gear or is it all being set to 50?

Paul: When we take away Veteran points, that's not going to take away veteran ranks, its just that veteran points are being associated with normal experience now, so you will gain veteran ranks through experience, it wont affect the itemisation.

If I may, I saw some questions going by in the chat there and one was "How are we going to handle gear in the champion system".

One of the things and again this isn't set in stone but its one of the things we are looking at which is to have more of gear that is introduced by seasons where there's no level requirement at all

For example, say we're in season 8, season 8 gear will be a little more powerful than season 7 gear but season 7 gear will be much more readily available. The reason we are looking at this type of system is because we feel there will be less player separation. We will have something called a champion rating which will look at your gear as well as all the points you've spent in the champion system which will give you an idea of whether you can take on certain content or not.

We want to make sure we don't have a lot of player separation so thats why we are going to make the itemisation have less requirements for equipping the items but still finding those items will be more rare, yes there is a solution to crafting for all those people asking about crafting

Interviewer: Do you think having the champion rating could create a divide in the community where someone says I want to do that trial wile you but they would say "Well whats your champion rating?"

Paul: Lets hit that head on, I do think it will to some extent which is exactly why the champion rating will be based more on the gear than say the points you put into the champion system and the reason that's important is because the gear only a season behind is readily available to everyone causing less of a divide. We're actually trying to keep people together. It should be much easier to catch up than it is now.


(46:50) Interviewer: I just want to say thankyou for these changes to the vetran rank system, as a solo player, makes me very happy

Paul: You know, I think you can just thank the community, I mean this is one of those things, we watch the community really closely, we watch what people say, and sometimes when it seems like we are quiet, that probably means we're listening more than we are trying to talk, so I hope the community sees that this is another one of those things where we absolutely cant wait to get this out and have people try it.

And the reason we are being so open about it is because we think we can be open about it now, certainly any feed back is absolutely er, you know if you like the idea, if your concerned about things, just put it on the forums, even if we don't respond we'll probably readinig it.


(47:44) Itemisation

Interviewer: One thing that was said here was that the rewards you gain from doing things, don't really match up to the effort you put in to progress, and currently a lot of rewards that you gain from doing quests specificity, seem to fall short in comparison to items that you maybe able to make or items that you may be able to find. Especially if your a dedicated crafter. Is there any indication that you may add options such as being able to select what type of item reward you get, or maybe even upping the gold reward you get, to better fit the players style.

Paul: I don't know that we are going to add options for the end of quests at this point, we are, very very aggressively attacking some new itemisation along with the champion system, so even though it's not listed in one of the phases, what you'll see with itemisation is, we've got new sets coming out, we're going to more aggressively populate some of the bosses to where there's a lot of reason to go out and kill different bosses for different set pieces and loot, I think the itemisation plan that the team has been working on is pretty solid, especially coming out around update 4. So I think you are going to see a lot of changes to itemisation, for the better and hopefully you guys will tell us when we reveal more on it.


(50:28) PvP Itemisation

Interviewer: I was in Cyrodiil a while back and I had noticed that on a vendor there was gear that once you collected enough elements of the set, they did add bonuses toward PvP specifically, now in my opinion I think this was a departure from the original idea you guys held that gear is just gear and it doesn't matter if your PvPing in it or if your PvEing in it. So when I saw these set bonuses that added to your damage while PvPing, I was a little surprised. Very surprised actually. Is that something that's going to be consistently placed inside the game, this PvP gear for lack of a better term?

Paul: There's always been gear that you can use that benefits you in PvP actually, so we've had sets for a long time that will contribute to like the different lines of the PvP skills. That said, we just don't want the gear you get in one, to be more powerful than the other, so if you choose to wear that gear, that's OK but the gear itself also has to maintain approximately the same parallel and that's what's important.


(54:10) Update 3 Guild Management

Guild Management really just means the guild leaders now can create guild ranks, can delete guild ranks, just basically give people more customised guild ranks as they see fit. I think they can also assign unique icons to the ranks.

The guild rank management is just for guild leaders to be able to control their guild in the way they want to, as far as who has permission for what rank and how they have those ranks set up


(55:54) Guild Traders

This is actually a feature I've been looking forward to forever, it is one of the things where we are really happy to get this in because it allows people to just shop. OK, as dumb as this may sound to some people, having worked originally on Ultima Online, one of my favourite things to do in that game was just to go shopping around and see what people had for sale.

With now the guild traders, anyone can go up and interact with these guild traders and see what's on the guild store. And of course the guild gets the benefit of selling their goods.

I know this probably sounds incredibly wrong but we created a shopping game, I think there is a lot of fun in wondering around and seeing who has what available, what special things are available on the different traders, its fun for guilds to be able to hire these guys and bid for them.

I'm really looking forwards to seeing what guilds do, and how that goes.


(58:49) Guild Heraldry

Interviewer: As a solo player whose coming from the Elder Scrolls background, I take player identity and customisation pretty seriously. If I do not want to join a guild or anything, I want to create my own awesome cape, my awesome Tabard and my own heraldry, is there a way to do that with this update and if not are there any plans for those solo players that want to create their own individuality, their own heraldry?

Paul: What I can tell you is (in a jokey voice), buck up and join a guild, but that's probably not the nicest answer in the world. So honestly what I'll say is that we have the whole dye system that we're putting in place that allows a lot of customisation there. But really and honestly part of the reason we have heraldry is to encourage people to join in guilds, and I know some people wont want to, and maybe that's something we will look at in the future with costumes and what not, but for now I say yep, part of the reason you want to join a guild is to be a member of that club and if you haven't yet, the best thing I can tell you is to give it a try. It's really worthwhile.

I don't want to tell you how to play, you play how you want to play but that's the encouragement for you, is to get into guild heraldry and get those items.

Interviewer: If you do join a guild and get the herald, can me as an individual further customise that with my own dyes or is it set in stone?

Paul: For the particular Tabard, that will be set in stone because that's something I believe that the guild leader does and designs, maybe with the help of other people in the guild.

But with the dye system there's tons of dyes you can get, I think that's coming up in one of the next questions so I'll save all the dye stuff for then.


Interviewer: What about the default NPC guilds that we join such as the fighters guild, mages guild and the undaunted, will we see tabards from those guilds so that players who don't want to join a guild, will they be able to sport their colours for example?

Paul: You know, I don't think I've even heard of that suggestion, that's not a bad suggestion, I dig it, so if I steal it, now you know where it came from.


(1:01:58) Question about guilds larger than 500, having to have two guilds and communicating between them

Interviewer: We all know the guilds have a member cap. There are guilds that create overflow guilds, for example we have two guilds. Because there was so many people that joined we had to create overflow. Because of that, we have two groups even though they are part of the same community, they cant really talk to each other, not everyone logs into mumble, teamspeak, skype or vent. Do you think at some point down the road these guilds will be able to create custom chat channels to facilitate that?

Paul: That is definitely on our plans to deliver, I feel sad because I cant remember the name of what we are calling it but that's something we want to do. The limitation on guild size is more a technical limitation than something we really want. But absolutely we are looking into make sure larger guilds have a way to communicate freely with each other.



(1:04:48) Question about small/poorer trading guilds and new bidding system

Interviewer: Small and not so wealthy guilds do you think they will be able to compete within the bidding system at all. Here's worst case situation, you'll have a small circle of guilds who will be able to lock down the various market places with ease and create a strangle hold on the player economy. Meaning smaller guilds wont be able to compete as they don't have the resources available to contribute and outbid these other guilds

Paul: erm, Free market systems are sometimes tough so its really hard to know if somebody's going to try and corner the market so to speak. Its definitely something we've talked about, but one of the reasons why we made it a bidding thing in fact was because there are smaller guilds who don't want it to be based off member size or things like that, and so they absolutely want the possibility of putting gold in.

Now whether we have to have limits on how many vendors you can own at one time, I don't know, we are going to let if go free market at first and we're going to kind of see.

It's certainly a concern we've all talked about but I think there's more danger in trying to put too many controls on something than letting the players kind of control a bit more of it themselves, but we'll see.


(1:06:20) Question on guild quests

Interviewer: Do you think in the future we will be able to see guild quests in Elder Scrolls Online, for example in EQ2, guilds have the ability to do guild quests for example for the city of Qeynos and other NPC factions within the city and gain, I guess, faction reputation with them and earn the ability to gain cosmetic items, different types of gear and so forth. Do you think at some point in the future ESO has the capability to do that?

Paul: Anything is possible, I'm going to give you, this is my opinion, this has nothing to do with the record, there are no promises with this, but where my interest would lie as a developer, would tend to be more with land ownership or potentially even shop ownership within cities, expanding the trader system to where people could own a bar or something like that but that a personal preference, there's no guarantee of that ever coming about, but that's where I'd lean more towards.


(1:08:00) Interviewer: Will guild settings be fixed so that silenced members are actually silenced in guild chat?

Paul: Well yeah, I would certainly hope so, yes


(1:09:50) Respec costs

Interviewer: We believe that there should be free respecs, no offence, pretty much any time you touch a skill line that changes how people can play, meaning passive abilities that affect combat or even active abilities that affect combat. Those should be given for free because its no fault of the player. I actually wanted to suggest any time a change is made to any skill line, that that skill line in it's entirety gets respeced. Would there be any way of doing that? Like individual skill lines as well.

Paul: We do have some final (or finer, cant make it out) control over what you can respec. Here's what I'll say directly. There were some changes that went in recently that we think we should have offered a respec for. Let me then say that we're going to lower the cost of respec. The minute update 3 comes out respec costs will be lowered completely, so if your going to respec, that's a really good time to do it. We will probably offer a free respec right there. The respects will actually be very low cost with update 3, and we're going to see where it goes from there. Are we going to raise it back up or not, time will tell, but certainly that is the idea for now.


(1:12:41) Templar

Interviewer: Was there anything specific about the Templar that was kind of out of balance that you all wanted to address in this update?

Paul: I don't know that we'd say anything was out of balance, I think again we want to be very careful with any balance changes, certainly if I talk too much about this I can see Eric Wrobel one of our great designers who is working with all these class abilities might get mad. But I think what I can safely say is that we are really looking at the damage output Templars have available to them. There's going to be some lines, in particular I want to say we have given a lot of scrutiny to the Dawn's Wrath line, and we're probably going to look at that quite a bit, increasing some of the viability of those abilities. It's more about making sure that each ability is viable within itself than there is of saying hey this specific build, because the more abilities that we make viable, means that there are more builds available to people and thats what interests us more than anything else I think.

Interviewer: Is there any plans to help out the synergy between stamina based builds and the Templar

Paul: Well, OK, that's a really specific question, I'd say that we are looking at stamina pretty carefully right now. We made some fairly recent changes to stamina builds, I think there's still as you mentioned, when you get to the top levels, not putting out the same levels of DPS, that's definitely something we're looking at. That's all I can tell yo without getting into the specifics, because the specifics might change from you know, Friday to Monday, Honestly. And when I think we have the answer, we'll probably put it out there in more detail. But again I think that's something that we have to be very very very cautious about because there's always those really sneaky builds that people come up with, that all of a sudden, that become the real flavour.


(1:15:50) Nightblade

Interviewer: What changes do you think you might have in store for the Nightblade, I know you've just made adjustments but is there anything else that's floating up to the top

Paul: I hate to say too much at this time about the Nightblade. I don't want to try to er you know basically avoid the question, it's just that you operate on a lot of things from day to day for what gets fixed, I think with the Nightblade its one of those things where we've got a lot of changes coming in for them, I think at 1.3. Some of them we've fixed things that were broken like Dark Cloak which had a problem where it could be activated without magicka, and some other things. Then there's some other improvements. So I think we're going to see how 1.3 performs and we'll see what else needs to be done.


(1:17:40) Dye questions

Interviewer: Any chance of an appearance tab coming to the game, being able to change the appearance of your gear by overlaying the appearance of another

Paul: There are no plans for that at this point, no.

Interviewer: Can we have the capability of dyeing our shields and weapons as well.

Paul: I will say there's definitely people on the team that favour that and there are definitely people on the team who don't favour that. I look at it like this. Lets see how the dyes work out now, then we'll look at what we need to add to those. Right now you can not dye costumes I believe, I think the first things we might look at being able to dye is some of the costumes versus the weapons and shields. But that doesn't mean they wont be able to be dyed later

Interviewer: Is that because of the first person perspective and the animation on the shield and weapon mixed with the dye effect?

Paul: Do you want me to be frank, I just don't know how cool its going to be to run around with your pink sword.

Interviewer: In fairness to those players who do not want to see armour dyes, will there be an option to toggle this off for them?

Paul: You know, honestly, its something we've talked about, I don't know that we will have the ability to do that any time soon, its certainly a very interesting thought and its something I can absolutely see people wanting, but not any time soon, but lets see how things go. I think people that if they wanted to toggle it off, it would be perfectly understandable why they would want to.

Interviewer: Torches in the game, any chance of this?

Paul: There is absolutely a chance of it but again , you know guys we have so much coming up , all of these things are amazing and I would love to get them in, but that doesn't mean they will be in any time soon. And certainly torches is one of those things.


(1:22:04) Combat questions

Interviewer: What game systems were tweaked to make the combat more fun, (?), smoother and responsive

Paul: What game system? Everything is a game system. Let me tell you a little about this, This is actually led up, and this is interesting, by our art director Jared Carr, and he is absolutely a brilliant guy. We talked about this and he has a lot of ideas for the animations and the way that the animations react with the world. One of the things, I don't know if people notice, but what we do to imply impact is we actually have a small stutter in frame, when your character swings a sword for instance and impacts a target. And so there's just a small stutter that was used to kind of increase the grittiness of it. But Jared actually was like, "well I don't really feel like that reaches the motion and everything else" so they've kind of gone in and analysed that animation and really made it so that the light attacks are a little bit faster, they feel a little bit more responsive.

One of the things we did recently was weapon switching which I know was in the patch 1.3 notes. We cache now what we call the character atlas with both weapons in. Because before when you weapon swapped it would have to rebuild your entire character atlas for that new weapon, and now we predict what you are going to do by the weapons you have in those slots and it makes for a more immediate weapon swapping so that that feels better.

And there's just lots of these little things that go over and over and over again that we're analysing, how do we make sure that the combats more responsive, things like we're making the out of stamina and out of magicka events louder, that doesn't seem like it would be much but it actually tells you "so this is why that didn't work the way I expected it to work" because those events were kind of quiet before, so its a lot of little tweaks to just go in and make sure the combat really has the responsive feel that we've always wanted it to have.

Interviewer: (1:24:18) Any plans to make the bow more effective like putting a zoom option that we've seen in some TES games

Paul: One of the tricks about that is, I think a zoom option could be fun, I don't know how useful that would be in PvP when your really trying to be situationally aware, and so its not that I dislike the idea of a zoom option, it's just that when we are spending our time on features, it's something I want to make sure we get the most bang for our buck out of them. So I like the idea if a zoom, I just don't know how much it will be used by the players at large or if it would hurt their experiences in some cases but there are some other things we would like to do with bows to make them stand out and be a little bit different.


Interviewer: (1:26:03) Is there the possibility of adding a physical damage component to staffs.

Paul: Staffs are clearly the weapon we need to buff up the most right now, (then responds to that by saying in a voice that shows he wasn't being serious) I don't think that's quite true. SO no I don't think we are going to go into staffs and add a physical component any time soon. But that said and I know we've just talked about this, staffs are one of those other things where I've seen the animators so there will be new animations coming out for staffs that actually make them feel more responsive, its part of all that combat responsiveness thing, so we will be updating the animations for staffs but I don't know we will be adding a physical component to it.

Interviewer: (1:26:46) Will combat damage from weapons such as light and heavy attacks be seeing an increase in the future? Will we see a bump in the DPS?

Paul: Yes and no. It's going to depend on the weapon I think and its going to depend on the circumstance so it's really hard to answer this question, I'm not trying to be evasive, it's just it's a tough one to answer. They will keep their relative ???? but for the most part there may be some changes to add damage maybe not to the weapons themselves but maybe in the weapon abilities. How about we say wait and see, that's the best answer.


General questions the interviewers got from a variety of sources

Interviewer: (1:28:06) Jewel crafting, ever going to become a part of the game?

Paul: Don't know, would absolutely love it to be, Phil Draven who is our current crafting guru certainly wants that and its just a matter of whether we can fit it in in time. Certainly it is on the plans, I just don't know how soon we will be able to get to it.


Interviewer: (1:28:28) WIll there be am adventure zone for solo players that focuses on exploration not questing

Paul: Nothing I know of that is like that, no. I will say that our next zone that is built like our 1 to 50 zones, will be slightly different in the way you would venture out, so the story will feel different, and it will be more centred on exploration.


Interviewer: (1:28:57) After Update 3, what's the next big step

Paul: Update 4. Again I think the big thing around the horizon for us is really improving better gameplay and getting to that champion system like I said. But again there's so much that we're working on, that's just the big thing that I spend more time with, there will be lots of things going in and being improved.


Interviewer: (1:29:46) When do you think housing is going to become a priority to put in the game

Paul: I don't know why anybody would think it isn't a priority already. Which priority it is and again I cant talk too much about anything that's not in the near future, but everybody on the team I think is excited to take a crack at housing


Interviewer: (1:30:15) Could we please see pets bound to account and summoned like a spell and not with the use of an item?

Paul: Yes we'd absolutely love to put a user interface element for those vanity pets and various other things


Interviewer: (1:30:36) Distraction based content. What features come to mind, that you, personally, believe would fit in ESO

Paul: When I think about that, I think about what is on the horizon. I will tell you that I love finding interesting trinkets, finding interesting puzzles that you can do, so like little puzzle pieces that come in, I'm still a big fan of things like treasure maps, I really think that little discoverables that add up to puzzles, once you find them all you get something, is a cool thing for distraction based content. Personally, I know we've been talking about the champion system but if you ever want to engage me in conversation, nothing will get me to talk more, when you wish I would just shut up, than the justice system, so that's another big one.


Interviewer: (1:31:54) Any new additions to the justice system that the general populace doesn't know about yet?

Paul: Ladies and gentlemen, tune into Quakecon


Interviewer: (1:32:07) Are there any addons that you would like to see become actual toggled settings within the game?

Paul: There are things I really like. I will tell you that I'm a huge fan of, I know this is going to strike you as strange, DPS meters, I really like DPS meters as strange as that might be. There's certain things that I like, like different inventory management systems I've seen that are really good, and also there's a lot of thinks that I might not personally like, but I would like to see go in.


Interviewer: (1:33:55) Is there going to be a hair salon added to the game to change my characters looks and features.

Paul: You remember that really smart art director I mentioned, if we don't hurry up and get one in, he's probably going to kill me. There are lots of options and I will tell you that I hope however that goes in, its more of a social feature, its more something you get for being sociable with other people


Interviewer: (1:34:48) When can we expect to hear more about the imperial city?

Paul: Ladies and gentlemen, tune into Quakecon


Interviewer: (1:35:20) Any chance of an inspect player feature to come to the game?

Paul: Another one where again if we had infinite resources we would totally add it but its one of those things I don't know is going to be on the horizon any time soon but certainly the team would love it.


Interviewer: (1:35:44) Will it be possible to select players with the cursor rather than holding the hold key to interact option

Paul: Not that I'm aware of, no.


Interviewer: (1:35:54) Any news on consoles?

Paul: there is no news on consoles right now.


Interviewer: (1:35:58) Any possibility of increasing the draw distance of the game?

Paul: Yes there is a possibility that we will be doing that soon.


Interviewer: (1:36:35) What about straight up dueling, being able to duel in the cities and will players be given the option to automatically decline it if they don't want that feature enabled.

Paul: (laughs) Will we put in this system and will we have the option to not put it in the system. Dueling isn't something that we don't want, its just that rules for dueling can be kind of tricky in these environments especially with the way we've set these things up but once the justice system goes in, we will have a lot of the rules necessary for something like dueling, I would expect to see it sometime around then, with the justice system there will be a player versus player component to that system so I think dueling would naturally follow up from something like that.


Interviewer: (1:37:34) Will there be additional weapons or weapon skills, for example spears?

Paul: Not any time in the near future no.


Interviewer: (1:37:48) Are there plans to update the armour models to have multiple layers rather than appearing painted on a player

Paul: I'm going to have to be judicious about my answer here, given that if everybody understands that I know there have been FPS issues that have gone on in the game and the team is working very hard, we take the issue extremely seriously with FPS and there are a lot of people working their hearts out with it. That said, part of the reason why you see that is so that you can keep up the framerates in those battles. There are just certain concessions you have to make within an engine to keep the framerate high. While there are going to be some improvements, I think Jared could really talk about this on some of the ways we draw armour and the ways we model armour, they are going to be improved coming up very soon, some of the things you see now are to try to keep that framerate high. So there will be improvements yes, but it may not be exactly what you are talking about with the way you are talking about it.


Interviewer: (1:39:11) Seeing that this is the Elder Scrolls, obviously big role playing community is a part of it, do you think there's any quality of life stuff coming up for them?

Paul: I certainly hope so, again you've heard me hint at some things tonight, ????? , we'll have more to release on that later, its a group that's near and dear to my heart and we want to make sure that those people who are heavy into the RP are fully supported, more on that later.


Interviewer: (1:39:54) Any mounted combat possibility?

Paul: It's definitely one of those things that you know, I wouldn't say mounted combat but you know something with the charge ability, I wouldn't say no to that, certainly we might hear something about that soon as well.


Interviewer: (1:40:37) What is the prospect of additional quest lines like the thief guild dark brotherhood or maybe more?

Paul: We will certainly be adding additional quest lines like that as the game progresses, definitely more game play options even, associated with those, meaning not just quests, specificly things like stealing, murdering people, you know, all the things that are really fun in life.


Interviewer: (1:41:08) Is there any new solo or duo content in the pipeline apart from expanded delves in the existing zones.

Paul: Yes, I think I answered that but, ladies and gentlemen, Quakecon


Interviewer: (1:41:28) What fixes are being done for Mac OS/X regarding the game crashing with large group content, ie Craglorn and PvP

Paul: Just like I, you know mentioning with the FPS issue, we have our Mac programmers looking at that, well aware of it and hopefully we have news soon. the real trick with that one unfortunately is it doesn't happen on every mac, it's also a little tricky to nail down, so hopefully we'll have more news on it soon.


Interviewer: (1:42:32) Will we be able to see nametags/guildtags as optional UI elements like how we are going to see giant chat bubbles?

Paul: Interestingly enough, nametags have been on what we call our user interface teams backlog for a long time. It is not that we dislike nametags or don't want them in the game. It is just one of those features where when you turn it on, it doesn't always look great, it does other interesting things, so we just wanted to have the time to make them attractive, to make them look right, and certainly its one of those things where we will probably at some point in the future add them, I just don't know when that will be, and certainly there will always be the option to not display them.


Interviewer: (1:43:29) Any plans for a limited guild or account API for making web apps

Paul: The real answer to this is that I love things like companion apps I really do. But again its one of those things that it isn't anywhere on our radar now currently in development, but anything could happen.


(1:44:24) Paul reads out a question he sees: Is there any plans for multigroup instance combat that isn't timed. I think that what he's hoping for is that we don't have people looking for loopholes to bypass content, I believe that's probably his point

The answer to that is yes, we always want to look at something where players can demonstrate skills in other ways beyond just the timings. The timings was one of the first things we did, I would expect us to have a lot of different concepts coming in that doesn't just directly relate to that