How would you have made ESO if you were the lead in charge of it's creation?

Milvan · February 2016

I don't mean to be rude or anything but I have been reading the comments and there is a lot of games that fullfill yours "dream mmorpg" or at least comes very close of it.

DMuehlhausen · February 2016

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

ThatNeonZebraAgain wrote: »

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

I would have recruited and hired a few seasoned successful MMO developers.

lol... Many of the higher up devs had experience with very successful MMOs (especially several from DAoC).

DAoC died a death too soon if I recall correctly. Having said that it was still a great game...

So what the $&%$ happened? Or were they the mailroom clerks.

DAoC is still going on, and from what I understand pretty strong for what they are wanting it to be.

Pallmor · February 2016

Merkabeh wrote: »

Fantasy based EvE Online set in Tamriels lore.

Obviously there would be changes to the system to support a fantasy setting, more traditional leveling (ES style leveling)...etc, but that is the concept I would have went with.

1. Full sandbox. Only side quests.
2. Full pvp. No prevention, only consequences in certain areas.
3. Full economy. Most items crafted. You die, you lose your items you are carrying. Limited resource nodes to breed scarcity into the economy.
4. No fast travel, or expensive fast travel. To force logistics to be a concern.
5. Player owned sections of the world; with asymetrical resource distribution to encourage changes of ownership.

That is the path I would have started on, if I had the resources to design the game. Huge fan of EvE Online, and if any fantasy setting screams "I would fit in EvE's style!", it is ES in my opinion.

That would be a great game, for the very few people who would play it.

Merkabeh · February 2016

corrosivechains wrote: »

Merkabeh wrote: »

Fantasy based EvE Online set in Tamriels lore.

Obviously there would be changes to the system to support a fantasy setting, more traditional leveling (ES style leveling)...etc, but that is the concept I would have went with.

1. Full sandbox. Only side quests.
2. Full pvp. No prevention, only consequences in certain areas.
3. Full economy. Most items crafted. You die, you lose your items you are carrying. Limited resource nodes to breed scarcity into the economy.
4. No fast travel, or expensive fast travel. To force logistics to be a concern.
5. Player owned sections of the world; with asymetrical resource distribution to encourage changes of ownership.

That is the path I would have started on, if I had the resources to design the game. Huge fan of EvE Online, and if any fantasy setting screams "I would fit in EvE's style!", it is ES in my opinion.

I remember in closed beta these were a lot of the suggestions people were making, instead of trying to force the game into DAOC 3. Guessing like me you have your eye on Albion Online then

Actually never heard of it...but I'll be checking it out now. Thank you!

WalkingLegacy · February 2016

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

ThatNeonZebraAgain wrote: »

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

I would have recruited and hired a few seasoned successful MMO developers.

lol... Many of the higher up devs had experience with very successful MMOs (especially several from DAoC).

DAoC died a death too soon if I recall correctly. Having said that it was still a great game...

So what the $&%$ happened? Or were they the mailroom clerks.

DAoC is still going on, and from what I understand pretty strong for what they are wanting it to be.

Private servers only and Camelot Unchained is the spiritual successor to it.

Merkabeh · February 2016

Sausage wrote: »

Merkabeh wrote: »

Fantasy based EvE Online set in Tamriels lore.

Obviously there would be changes to the system to support a fantasy setting, more traditional leveling (ES style leveling)...etc, but that is the concept I would have went with.

1. Full sandbox. Only side quests.
2. Full pvp. No prevention, only consequences in certain areas.
3. Full economy. Most items crafted. You die, you lose your items you are carrying. Limited resource nodes to breed scarcity into the economy.
4. No fast travel, or expensive fast travel. To force logistics to be a concern.
5. Player owned sections of the world; with asymetrical resource distribution to encourage changes of ownership.

That is the path I would have started on, if I had the resources to design the game. Huge fan of EvE Online, and if any fantasy setting screams "I would fit in EvE's style!", it is ES in my opinion.

Closest game what I can say to your saying is Darkfall, tons of us have followed it years now, also as far I know theres re-lauching happening soon for it. I'd love to play Darkfall on PS4. Tasos, please, make it work. Yeah, Darkfall Early Access to PS4 is good start!

And another game to check out. Thank you.

Edit - so yeah, darkfall hits PS4, I'm there. Sounds just like what I want. Thank you again!

Hymzir · February 2016

Well.. If I had designed this thing, it would be a lot different. But trying to explain all that would no doubt require me to type about hundred pages worth of text. So instead I'm just gonna list few key design choices that I would have adopted.

1. - Open world. All three alliances areas open from start. Go wherever you want do what ever you want. Alliance affiliation would only come in play in Cyrodiil, and you could defect if you wanted and swear allegiance to new faction if you felt like it.. If I had to keep Zones due to load issues, I would not set level ranges for them. Each zone would have stuff to do for all levels. And if you stumbled into an area in your current zone meant for higher level characters you would die.

2. - No main quest as such. Just stuff to do with people you meet. Also all achievements and such would be account based, so that you could happily switch from one character to another as the situation changed. You could be a Vampire with one character and a Vampire hunter with another. One could be thief another law abiding citizen. You would not have to complete all content on the same character to get all the rewards.

3. - No classes. All skills would be tied to a base framework that was open to all. Skills would provide you with different options to do stuff, your level and stat would decide how well you did that stuff. I would have worked spell crafting into the launch version of the game.

4. - I would not go with a percentage based buff system. I have always found that to be the lazy designers choice, and one that is open to all sort of abuse and crap. A system with fixed modifiers is harder to balance but would be much harder to abuse. So getting the base math right would be a high priority. Further content would not inflate numbers but introduce new ways to do stuff. Avoiding power creep would be a key design goal. As would avoiding stuff becoming obsolete.

5. - Finally, I would have made sure that I paid more attention to previous Elder Scroll Games and made sure that familiar elements were present in the game.

Merkabeh · February 2016

Pallmor wrote: »

Merkabeh wrote: »

Fantasy based EvE Online set in Tamriels lore.

Obviously there would be changes to the system to support a fantasy setting, more traditional leveling (ES style leveling)...etc, but that is the concept I would have went with.

1. Full sandbox. Only side quests.
2. Full pvp. No prevention, only consequences in certain areas.
3. Full economy. Most items crafted. You die, you lose your items you are carrying. Limited resource nodes to breed scarcity into the economy.
4. No fast travel, or expensive fast travel. To force logistics to be a concern.
5. Player owned sections of the world; with asymetrical resource distribution to encourage changes of ownership.

That is the path I would have started on, if I had the resources to design the game. Huge fan of EvE Online, and if any fantasy setting screams "I would fit in EvE's style!", it is ES in my opinion.

That would be a great game, for the very few people who would play it.

Likely true...

Personally, I believe a game should target a niche audience; when games try to target everyone, the end up becoming mediocre at everything; because you can't please everyone at once.

So, you set your target niche, design to make that group happy and set realistic expectations. Not every game needs to be a blockbuster to be successful (I offer EvE Online as evidence).

So really, the biggest problem with my desire is having the ES name attached to it; because of previous ES games blockbuster success. So of course the bean counters want the same.

TalonKnight · February 2016

Ra'Shtar wrote: »

Underwater exploration with sunken ships, traps and a continent (Tras).

RIGHT!.... Where in the crap is SWIMMING. I have been complaining about this since beta on the PC.

TalonKnight · February 2016

AFrostWolf wrote: »

Take out the Ability to play Any Race in Any Alliance.
No Cadwell's or Vet levels.
Better focus on Racial balances.
No classes/More Classes. I'm undecided. There aren't enough classes to cover all the fun play styles.

Agree with V ranks, pretty much with everything, but the only prob about not playing any race in any alliance is that u would have to take out all non alliance raced NPC's to compensate for that idea.

I mean why would i b getting a quest from and orc in AD????

TalonKnight · February 2016

1. not let the KONk quit.

2. SPELL CRAFTING, cause this idea would change the need for there to b more classes, of course thats not my idea, but man!, it was a GOOD 1.

LadyNalcarya · February 2016

1)More freedom and less grinds. (Almost) everything should be free to trade or bind on equip, that includes everything from justice system trophies to set items. Maybe some of top-tier items could be only wearable if you have certain achievement on your account (vMA for example), but gear grind has to go.
2)More social/group content, from competitive raids to RP options (maybe some lore-friendly events etc). Everything should scale and have both "casual" and "hard" modes.
3)Pvp arenas of course. And more rewarding pvp in general.
4)I would probably fire most of armor and costume design team. XD Also, dye system must be fixed so colors look like on swatches, without randomly changing hue on different armors.
5)I would really like to see something like poise system of Dark Souls (Link for those who havent played it) to give heavy armor some advantages and make it impossible to be super tanky in light/medium. Of course, it should be a tradeoff for offensive abilites.

MornaBaine · February 2016

Oh a couple other things...

1. Better character movement for walking and running. What's with the stiff arms held out away from the sides? And MALE characters REALLY have it bad. There is just no nice way to say this BUT...male characters walk and run as if there's some dreadfully uncomfortable rigid object shoved up you know where! Maybe it's those awful underwear! And speaking of...

2. Better unmentionables! Seriously, can we get that changed to something that actually looks like it belongs in the game world please? Linen, leather and fur loincloths for men, maybe some pretty silks for the ladies? Make them fit the race culturally.

Seriously, just something as simple as this (though with better rendering please!) would be fine.

And okay, this pic is cheesy as Uncle Sheo's lunchbox but I like the loincloth!

Zyle · February 2016

Balanced

PriorityBalle · February 2016

Better ?

Rex-Umbra · February 2016

Sandbox it up

xellink · February 2016

NPC spouses.

Minno · February 2016

Btw, OP, you are essentially describing Ultima Online except with better graphics and PVP. Eve online and even Minecraft has a better MMO experience than ESO. With the success of the latter, ID say more and more players want true sandbox experience where the stories are created by them.

ESO was doomed from the start when the corporate heads decided a theme park was better financially than the open-world design (which is better suited for the elder scrolls lore IMO)

rfennell_ESO · February 2016

I would have not allowed making cross faction toons on the same account.

I would have included a "warden" type system to scan system memory and ban cheats.

I would have included the Imperial city exterior in Cyrondil instead of a stupid daedra infested 3 bridges to nowhere thing.

I would have made IC gated by keeps and respawns in it also subject to the same rules (with dimished corpse timer) and made it every campaign.

I would have made damage shields subject to crits.

Lastly, I would have made stealth detection range at least twice further than it currently is and made mass stealthing impossible by increasing the detection range further for every player above 3 within 5 feet of each other.