The Jaws of Oblivion: Saving the Elder Scrolls MMO...and Cross Platform

Shadowstep2003 · October 2016

Polygon posted an enjoyable read of the One Tamriel update coming to consoles that can be found here:
polygon.com/features/2016/10/14/13285014/elder-scrolls-online-one-tamriel-skyrim-mmo

I really love the direction ESO is heading with One Tamriel and I believe it will definitely alleviate the frustrating faction issue me and friends have been having. However, one part of this article really stuck out to me and it was this statement outlined below made by Pete Hines, vice president of public relations and marketing for Bethesda Softworks.

He and his friends had been playing and playing and playing, and one weekend he said, ‘Hey dad, we should play ESO together!’ I said, ‘Let’s go!’ And we went, and we both loaded up the game and we went to go play and I’m yelling, ‘Tyler! You’re in the wrong faction!’"

Hines said that he could have made another character to play with his son, but he had already grown attached to his character.

"It seems like such a small thing," Hines said. "But you make these choices in the game, and you start investing all this time in a character. One of us could have started over again, but that totally defeats the purpose.

"It’s just funny that little things like that are so frustrating. Why can’t I just do this?"

This quote is regarding the faction issue mentioned above, but I think the issue will still exist (although not as prevalent) from a cross platform perspective. I understand that maybe PS4 and Xbox One compatibility relies on the manufacturers themselves (although the discussion can still be had) but what about PS4 and PC or Xbox One and PC?

Is something like this even technically feasible with ESO's existing structure?

I'm not complaining, simply asking the question and wondering if there can be any official response on the matter. If it's not possible with the existing infrastructure or would require too much resources in comparison to what was done for One Tamriel than that is understandable.

What do you guys think? Is this even an issue for you as a player? Do you have console friends or PC friends that you wish you could play with?

From an analytical perspective the barrier to simply 'switching platforms' will always be character investment. When a great deal of time (and possibly money) is spent on an end user's character it deters them from desiring to start all over. If true cross platform play is not possible is there a way to remove character investment out of the equation assuming the end user were to purchase the game on a seperate platform? PC test servers provide 'template characters.' Is there a way to harness that technology and provide a one time optional 'template' of the characters you already have on an existing account with all of their 'achievements' (skill points, abilities, crown store purchases, etc) synced?

There is a moba out there called Paragon that handles cross platform very well between PS4 and PC. The game is very new and maybe it is able to accomplish this because the game was initially created with the design in mind but basically you can play with each other as well as take your game from one platform to another at will. This is just an example of the parity I was ultimately looking for in a perfect world.

Once again, I am really happy with all of the advancements ESO has made. I am only posing a few questions and wondering if there has been any thought put towards them by the developers.

Thank you for all you do

Woeler · October 2016

I'd rather have PC and console separated. I have a pc so that I do not have to deal with all the BS restrictions Microsoft and Sony put on their "low-end PC in a box with on purpose installed limitations".

PC has a huge advantage anyway in terms of input lag, frames and addons. I think most console pvp players would quit the game after a week.

[Deleted User] · October 2016

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Elsonso · October 2016

Shadowstep2003 wrote: »

I think the issue will still exist (although not as prevalent) from a cross platform perspective. I understand that maybe PS4 and Xbox One compatibility relies on the manufacturers themselves (although the discussion can still be had) but what about PS4 and PC or Xbox One and PC?

Is something like this even technically feasible with ESO's existing structure?

I'm not complaining, simply asking the question and wondering if there can be any official response on the matter. If it's not possible with the existing infrastructure or would require too much resources in comparison to what was done for One Tamriel than that is understandable.

I think that the answer is that ZOS could do it if necessary. It might even be a cost savings for them in terms of reducing the amount of hardware they have to maintain to keep 6 Live megaservers. From the perspective of ZOS, this would simply be a larger megaserver and they could save money by having one block of standby capacity rather than one for each megaserver.

I can see a few technical and political issues.

1. The console companies prefer not to mingle.
2. It is not clear whether the back-end infrastructure could handle 3-6x the load in a merged megaserver.
3. Console patch updates would throttle everyone else because we would all have to patch install in lock-step.
4. All of the megaservers would be down at the same time for maintenance. With equal staffing, this might increase the duration.
5. All of the megaservers would "crash" at the same time.
6. If EA and NA were merged, the people on the far side the planet from The One would have higher latency

log234 · October 2016

I believe it would be a huge undertaking combining the megaservers. Although I imagine a lot of the technical structure below would be similar (higher level APIs and such), there would also be huge parts that would need to be completely rewritten from scratch.

Not to talk about the bugs combining different platform implementations might bring. They might have code and "tricks" (although I know how despised it is) to get certain things to run on one platform that would not work at all on another.

I love the idea as much as you

, but I don't think we'll see it any time soon.

However there is light in the end of the tunnel, copying a character from one megaserver to another should be fine. They offered that when they launched the console platforms. So if the monetary pull is big enough, perhaps they can offer that service again in the future.

Neoauspex · October 2016

They've responded to questions like this on ESO Live by saying they are interested in the possibility but there are lots of technical problems that make it difficult such as dealing with duplicate usernames/account names/character names

Khaos_Bane · October 2016

Thank you for posting, fantastic read. I have been involved since 2013/2014 Beta and it brings back memories for sure. This game sure has evolved and hope Tamriel One is just the beginning. This game feels like a living breathing world more than it ever has.

Shadowstep2003 · October 2016

GrumpyMuffin wrote: »

Woeler wrote: »

I'd rather have PC and console separated. I have a pc so that I do not have to deal with all the BS restrictions Microsoft and Sony put on their "low-end PC in a box with on purpose installed limitations".

PC has a huge advantage anyway in terms of input lag, frames and addons. I think most console pvp players would quit the game after a week.

FFXIV seems to do well enough combining PC/MC, Ps3 & Ps4 users together. If done properly it would be very good. If set up poorly it would be very bad. The concept is great. It just comes down to the implementation

Wow, I had no idea FFXIV did this. Maybe an implementation might not be as difficult as originally thought?

idk · October 2016

@Shadowstep2003

There have been cross platform MMOs though I'm unsure of the current requirements of PS & XB.

However, the consoles have been at a disadvantage in those cases due to a little lag which plays a larger role in PvP. Additionally, ESO on PC has add-ons available while consoles only have the base UI which is substantially less than normal MMO standards and that also increase the PC advantage.

In short, it will not happen anytime soon, if ever.

Shadowstep2003 · October 2016

Neoauspex wrote: »

They've responded to questions like this on ESO Live by saying they are interested in the possibility but there are lots of technical problems that make it difficult such as dealing with duplicate usernames/account names/character names

Did not think about this at all. Yes, I can imagine that being a hassle. You could prompt people to change their name (as they already have a name change service) but people get finicky if they are forced to change something they've had for so long which is understandable. You'd have to somehow internally prefix each name (maybe something hidden) with some kind of ID for what platform they are on I guess

[Deleted User] · October 2016

The user and all related content has been deleted.

NewBlacksmurf · October 2016

There is literally no benefit for changing this over to cross platform because most things would still be platform specific.

Purchases, server files trying to figure out what to delete, merge and keep (I have PC and Xbox one)

That alone is a nightmare and then to consider playing on a server but loosing some social features based on the machine you're using and being forced to text chat with PC cause they can't is Xbox party chat in game.

No thanks

These cross platform ideas only sound good, but in practice there's a major reason players play on the machines of their choosing.

Shadowstep2003 · October 2016

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

@Shadowstep2003

There have been cross platform MMOs though I'm unsure of the current requirements of PS & XB.

However, the consoles have been at a disadvantage in those cases due to a little lag which plays a larger role in PvP. Additionally, ESO on PC has add-ons available while consoles only have the base UI which is substantially less than normal MMO standards and that also increase the PC advantage.

In short, it will not happen anytime soon, if ever.

In the MMO's that you reference do the PC users not have access to mods? I am not aware of all the mods available to PC users for ESO, but definitely buff timers would be a big one in terms of advantage and also if you guys had some kind of Boss timer/combat mod (that tells you incoming attacks and such). Other than that I'm not sure what else could be a competitive advantage gameplay wise.

I can't speak for everyone but I'd be willing to put up with that personally. I feel PC already has advantage with mouse/keyboard in any cross platform game for that matter. I guess the real question is the degree of impact that mod advantages would have on PVP (which albeitly is 'currently' a small part of the game as a whole) and if the pro's of cross platform integration would outweigh this for the ESO community as a whole.

Khaos_Bane · October 2016

Woeler wrote: »

I'd rather have PC and console separated. I have a pc so that I do not have to deal with all the BS restrictions Microsoft and Sony put on their "low-end PC in a box with on purpose installed limitations".

PC has a huge advantage anyway in terms of input lag, frames and addons. I think most console pvp players would quit the game after a week.

If this means the PC gets held back to the lowest common denominator console I agree with you 100%. I don't want SONY or Microsoft consoles setting the direction for this game. The PC/Mac offers freedom and change.

Khaos_Bane · October 2016

Shadowstep2003 wrote: »

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

@Shadowstep2003

There have been cross platform MMOs though I'm unsure of the current requirements of PS & XB.

However, the consoles have been at a disadvantage in those cases due to a little lag which plays a larger role in PvP. Additionally, ESO on PC has add-ons available while consoles only have the base UI which is substantially less than normal MMO standards and that also increase the PC advantage.

In short, it will not happen anytime soon, if ever.

In the MMO's that you reference do the PC users not have access to mods? I am not aware of all the mods available to PC users for ESO, but definitely buff timers would be a big one in terms of advantage and also if you guys had some kind of Boss timer/combat mod (that tells you incoming attacks and such). Other than that I'm not sure what else could be a competitive advantage gameplay wise.

I can't speak for everyone but I'd be willing to put up with that personally. I feel PC already has advantage with mouse/keyboard in any cross platform game for that matter. I guess the real question is the degree of impact that mod advantages would have on PVP (which albeitly is 'currently' a small part of the game as a whole) and if the pro's of cross platform integration would outweigh this for the ESO community as a whole.

This is precisely why I want to have nothing to do with them combining. In no way do I want the horrible limitations, more restrictive, and massively inferior consoles dictating rules in ANY WAY. Consoles are terrible, and God help us if PC gamers get tied down due to them.

shadowwraith666 · October 2016

Platform specific versions of the game makes debugging, content creation/deployment and patching a lot easier, i doubt that MS and Sony will ever allow cross-platform traffic through their XBL/PSN servers other than old/next/handheld gen of the same platform, a few devs like Blizzard at the beginning allowed cross-platform save transfer via a game server like battle.net through platform linking, that probably stopped after a while.

PC, Xbox and PS4 use different formats for audio and graphics, have different resource pools (GPU/CPU/RAM) and operating systems/file systems, this would make cross-platform gaming difficult.

nimander99 · October 2016

FF14 Online is Cross platform. PS4 and PC... Don't think its on Xbone though.

Danksta · October 2016

All the add-ons for PC would give PC players a clear advantage in PvP and for leaderboard scores. I'm not sure how that could be worked around.

KingYogi415 · October 2016

Crap idea is crap.

0/10

The PC trash macro CE exploiters would ruin whole game. And not just on one platform.

RomansXXI · October 2016

I play both pc and console and I strongly disagree with cross platform. Unless all pc add ons are disabled. Pc has an unfair advantage over console players do to the add ons and this would very likely bother the many people who play console pvp.

I do however like the idea of both xbox and PS4 players being able to play with one another as this is what separates console players the most.

raglau · October 2016

Thanks for posting that article, it's very interesting and shows the strategic vision that's been driving the game. I used to feel there was no such vision back in the early days, but I think in the early days the firefighting of bugs caused by a premature release blocked them from delivering strategically.

With 1T I feel they've delivered a large part of the vision that does actually exist.

Mojmir · October 2016

I'm more impressed that Mr Hines was able to just "fire up the game"