Studio Director’s Message Key Points

Vrienda · December 17

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Just to follow up here. The changes here are to make us more agile and produce more engaging and varied content. So from our prospective, it is not us "going into maintenance" but rather being able to address several concerns the player base has noted over the years.

I mean I'm sure the game will still get the odd bit of new content here and there just probably at the same pace Fallout 76 does. It definitely feels like we've been getting less and less content since the second dungeon DLC and Story DLC were cut. Now we're down to what'll probably amount to a 30 minute quest (if you don't skip dialogue) or two every year under the guise of chasing the elusive white whale that is fixing Cyrodiil. I can't help but be a bit cynnical about the game's future prospects, particularly knowing you guys have another MMO with a new IP in the works which is likely to be much higher priority than ESO... while being funded by ESO.

Tra_Lalan · December 17

Sorry but to me it sounds like less and less content every year. 2nd Dungeons DLC - droped, Small Zone DLC - dropped.
Did we get any better quality, performance, service, bugfixing when they were dropped? No. Will droping chapters change anything in those areas? ...

Please dont tell us its all to adress what players wanted for years.
None of ESO players asked for less content. We asked for bug fixing, better comunication, better performance, quality of what is already in the game.

I realize that creating content is the expensive way to get yours players spend time in the game, you just want to have us still engaged with less cost at your side.

Personofsecrets · December 17

averyfarmanb14_ESO wrote: »

Fischblut wrote: »

While I am afraid that instead of paying once a year for chapter, we might be required to pay more times (per season)... The real concern for my playstyle is this part:

"Increasing the difficulty of standard overworld combat"

If this will be done, it will be the end of ESO for me personally I like easy fights in overland, casually exploring and not being afraid of mobs who guard treasure chests and resources. I already prefer to not participate in world boss/world events in chapters and DLC zones - but when I see an active Dark Anchor in base game zones, I always go for it.

And zones which force (or strongly encourage) grouping like old Craglorn are not how I wish to play nowadays

Bolded for emphasis. I'm an older player, and I'm here in part because I can engage in the story and social aspects of a fully-fleshed MMO without having to either run with an entire group, constantly, or go full-on Dark Souls on everything. If this is, indeed, the direction ESO's going, I can't follow.

Yea, I'm surprised that they seem to want to go back to the original Craglorn model of play which many players didn't really like.

I think that this year was giving development data for and the players a taste of seasonal content. For example, we were just recently encouraged to explore High Isle and Galen through an event. What separates a special zone event from a season may be tiny or non-existent.

And the resulting play patterns from us were something that Matt relates to in the letter, soft groups. Players organize on their own to take down incursions and world bosses. Players group up to share quests.

Regarding high end grouping that was mentioned, I'm going to repost a comment that I left on a youtube video about the ESO end game. To sum it up, from my perspective, end game grouping is impoverished. So I don't really know how design thinks that they can lean into that form of game play.

As a tank on PC NA, I've had the most minor of luck finding groups for trial trifectas. Obviously, I understand how there are limited groups and that may be because of lack of interest in the game. That said, I've completed 5 of the trial trifectas and have been looking for more groups for years. What I'm about to write is also related to the notion that the game is hurting for tanks.

Never have I felt like what I do is critically needed. I've never been irreplaceable. Trifecta progs feel extremely inaccessible. The reasons for these observations are many. I sometimes can only play at night for example. Other times, a group comes together, but a number of people don't want to push forward when they find out that it's not going to be a fast prog. And I believe those who find the raiding scene to be more impoverished today than it was in the past because of player interest. That said, there are players who want to engage in trials who go untapped, so the raid scene itself could do more to better it's own position.

ApoAlaia · December 17

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

ApoAlaia wrote: »

I too am curious about what 'seasons' means in this context.

If is just pure FOMO fuel not sure how I feel about this, at least with chapters you can complete stuff at your own leisure.

Just wanted to follow up on seasons a little bit. We will have more details in April, but Jess Folsom noted this in another thread. Thought it would help here too.

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

One thing we do want to clarify today are the questions about seasonal content. Our plans are not to remove content such as quests, stories, and new areas like some other games do when a season is over.

Thank you for the heads up. That does sound more promising.

Erissime · December 17

PVP-ers from all over wake up ! :

Direct quote from the letter:
We need to seriously address Cyrodiil performance. Our (ambitious) goal is to return it to the concurrency levels we supported in 2014. So, we will be experimenting with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign. - end quote.

New campaign! (that's like a whole expansion all and in itself!)

New skills!

Increased player cap!

New god knows what but finally some attention!

I have said it in the past and I will say it again now: pve content ( yearly chapters) are navigated by your daily player at leisure in top 1 month ( some do it in 3 days) then it's back to end game content. No matter how many changes are out there, trials and pvp ARE the end game! Aka - what your daily players will do for the rest of the year!

How is this bad? And how finally allowing some time to improve in what has been cried over the years and years in forums and on the nets is bad?

I have even read in the past pve players (self-declared non pvpers!) begging for some pvp content on account of so many cries! Now it appears to be the time for said pvp to be looked up to! Heyo pvers! I don't think you will miss that much with bits of seasons still delivered while pvp is being looked up at! And god knows that place needs A LOT of time to be updated! ( hence the "ambitious" in the letter) !

Thank you zos! still hopeful!

licenturion · December 17

The past year has been extremely boring because of very repetitive events and almost no new content.

No second zone, no second dungeon pack. Just some easy to make repetitive stuff.

So no more zone expansion to look forward to, no new story, no new world events, no new soundtrack release etc

I am going to wait and see but I will probably lose interest rather quickly. But good they announce this well in advance so that I don’t invest financially in ESO+ or crowns. It will be interesting to see how much the PvP crowd will invest financially, now that they become the priority for a year.

amapola76 · December 17

There are a few things in there that could turn out to be positive, but overall, I finished reading it with the distinct impression that it was full of middle fingers to the community. (Particularly the NA community; RIP to actually including us in anniversary events.)

Gaebriel0410 · December 17

I think this is a really good change that will likely benefit the game greatly. For me the biggest downside of ESO always has been its formulaic approach to releasing new things. Despite the rapid adding of new content, you kinda knew in advance it would have 2 public dungeons, 8 delves, 3 crafting places and a New Thing etc. which over time got a bit too predictable imo.

They already filled out the world map quite a lot, so I am all in favour of letting the world breathe a bit, and honestly I think the stuff that's mentioned, like finally updating base zones, doing new questlines in existing zones, expanding things like FG etc. is pretty exciting. So I kinda expect them to do it like before the yearly chapter release.

I don't think they will have time limited quests or anything like that, I understood that Season part as being more like focusing on an area or theme to give context to releases.

Also the thought of a story focused mmo doing limited time fomo story content is kinda ridiculous, there's not been any precedent for them doing anything like that and it would entirely invalidate one of the game's strongest aspects, so I doubt they would even consider it.

DenverRalphy · December 17

Erissime wrote: »

PVP-ers from all over wake up ! :

Direct quote from the letter:
We need to seriously address Cyrodiil performance. Our (ambitious) goal is to return it to the concurrency levels we supported in 2014. So, we will be experimenting with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign. - end quote.

New campaign! (that's like a whole expansion all and in itself!)

New skills!

Increased player cap!

New god knows what but finally some attention!

I have said it in the past and I will say it again now: pve content ( yearly chapters) are navigated by your daily player at leisure in top 1 month ( some do it in 3 days) then it's back to end game content. No matter how many changes are out there, trials and pvp ARE the end game! Aka - what your daily players will do for the rest of the year!

How is this bad? And how finally allowing some time to improve in what has been cried over years over years in forums and on the nets is bad?

I have even read in the past pve players (self-declared non pvpers!) begging for some pvp content on account of so many cries! Now it appears to be the time for said pvp to be looked up to! Heyo pvers! I don't think you will miss that much with bits of seasons still delivered while pvp is being looked up at! And god knows that place needs A LOT of time to be updated! ( hence the "ambitious" in the letter) !

Thank you zos! still hopeful!

To be fair, that same lip-service has been given many times in the past. The playerbase has heard this many times before over the last Decade. On the surface it's not bad. It's the lack of execution that's bad.

DeathStalker · December 17

licenturion wrote: »

The past year has been extremely boring because of very repetitive events and almost no new content.

No second zone, no second dungeon pack. Just some easy to make repetitive stuff.

So no more zone expansion to look forward to, no new story, no new world events, no new soundtrack release etc

I am going to wait and see but I will probably lose interest rather quickly. But good they announce this well in advance so that I don’t invest financially in ESO+ or crowns. It will be interesting to see how much the PvP crowd will invest financially, now that they become the priority for a year.

I agree with this post so much. This will drive so many casual players away. I have never felt more devastated or unwanted from an update than I do from this.

Erissime · December 17

As a newer player around pvp (slightly after 2021? 2022?) I confess I have never seen any such "lip-service" before. So I must say I am glad to see it even mentioned in a yearly plan. As for the rest of it - what I said still stands.

Defatank · December 17

IMO the information Matt F just gave us and the glimpse looking forward is all really amazing news for the game as a whole. Going to a "seasonal" update should allow the game to feel more "alive" and something "new" to do on a regular basis, just look at how the "events" turn players out in the zones when they hit. When we first started the game our special "events" was basically just Jester, Midyear, Halloween and New Life. Now we have been getting little events in between those 4 main events collecting more tickets and having more things to do and when those events happen you can clearly see an impressive increase of players in the zones where those events are taking place. As oppose to what we have been doing over the course of 10 years getting a new chapter each year where everyone comes back for the chapter, plays for 3 mo to do enough of the content to where it feels like they've "completed" it and then they move on to some other fly by night game until players get bored of that and come back to ESO when they feel like some other "new" content patch gets thrown out / event.

I believe this new system of things should keep players interested in the fact that it will feel like there is always something "new" to be doing and a "chase" of content if you will to keep players interested in gameplay and progression. Then again maybe I'm just a hopeless romatic gamer in thinking thats the case and what we end up with is smaller content that keeps players engaged for a couple of weeks instead of 3 mo at a time, but none the less lack of content will never be an excuse for the game because there is a metric ton of content for players to do, alot of people are just lazy (respectfully)

In regards to Cyrodiil, this news is something that has been needed for a VERY long time. ZOS please rework the whole scoring system as a whole and get us more in line with something that looks at how long factions has held a keep, resource, scroll for not just look at things in a snap shot of an hour and then base a score off the "tick". Then entire "tick" system IMO should be reworked. Make it to where players still get "the tick" for being at a keep sure, but it needs to be looked at as well of how many players did you res? How much damage did you do to players and keeps? How much healing did you do? How much repairing of siege did you do? There is no shortage of "efforts" that could be looked at and "scored" on each player to determine their "tick" for whatever they done with that keep wither it was defending or offense to a keep. Take away the mindset of just mindlessly running around to the "next in line" keep that we have had for 10 years and actually force some strategical game play as a whole by going back to what I just said, reworking the entire overall faction scoreboard for the month. Holding keeps / resources longer should give more points, and it should also be looked at as how populated / overpopulated a faction is. if its 1 bar / locked / 1 bar and the middle faction locked is holding the entire map then they should not be getting a ton of extra points for holding it b/c well duh they are heavily over populated. But if a faction was under populated and managed to hold the entire map as they are holding it yea points would start ramping up the longer they were able to hold the map under populated like that if that makes sense? But regardless do not look at the score once per hour it needs to be checked constantly and scored based on what is happening in live time.

There is even more stuff I could go on about here that I honestly have been saying for years but I've ranted enough time to give the floor back to you guys if you want more of my suggestions I'll be happy to go on more.

ZOS_Kevin · December 17

licenturion wrote: »

So no more zone expansion to look forward to, no new story, no new world events, no new soundtrack release etc

I am going to wait and see but I will probably lose interest rather quickly. But good they announce this well in advance so that I don’t invest financially in ESO+ or crowns. It will be interesting to see how much the PvP crowd will invest financially, now that they become the priority for a year.

Just to clarify, no one said we are not doing things like this anymore. They just won’t be packaged under a chapter. We still plan on story content, music, world activities, etc. We’ll have more info to share in April.

acastanza_ESO · December 17

Worth noting that ZOS has had a "Season" before; Season of the Dragon

I'm generally a pretty negative-nancy here on the forums about ZOS's decisions, but I'm actually pretty hopeful about this letter; a more agile ZOS, more willing to experiment with the game and revisit past decisions/designs, and a focus on actually making the game's awesome PVP performant is everything (on paper) that I could've hoped for.
We'll just see how it plays out.

Meredy · December 17

I'm cautiously optimistic for this new model. I hope the team knows how to balance the seasonal content drops so they feel engaging enough to come back to. It really hurt the game these past 2 years when there was a bit of a content draught in these latter halves of the year.

If it's anything like q4 from this year and last year this might not be as good. I hope it's much better than those quarters.

ZOS needs to find a good balance of revitalizing old content and adding new content, while still adding enough content.

DenverRalphy · December 17

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

licenturion wrote: »

So no more zone expansion to look forward to, no new story, no new world events, no new soundtrack release etc

I am going to wait and see but I will probably lose interest rather quickly. But good they announce this well in advance so that I don’t invest financially in ESO+ or crowns. It will be interesting to see how much the PvP crowd will invest financially, now that they become the priority for a year.

Just to clarify, no one said we are not doing things like this anymore. They just won’t be packaged under a chapter. We still plan on story content, music, world activities, etc. We’ll have more info to share in April.

Bolded for emphasis.

I think that's the rub that has the playerbase pretty upset at the moment. The last couple/few updates were preceded 4 months beforehand with tidbits of (paraphrasing) "Huge exciting housing update! We'll tell you more in a few months!" , then "Stay tuned for an awesome PvP update!", and got all stoked up waiting those 3-4 months each time only to be severely let down. So teasing yet another "Stay Tuned!" message is likelly perceived as a kick in the shorts for many players.

Syldras · December 17

Personofsecrets wrote: »

And the resulting play patterns from us were something that Matt relates to in the letter, soft groups. Players organize on their own to take down incursions and world bosses. Players group up to share quests.

Wasn't the need to group up for overland content rather badly received? I can remember that many players disliked Bastion Nymic (and some also Atoll of Immolation) for that reason.

RaptorRodeoGod · December 17

@ZOS_Kevin gear cap changes aren't being considered for seasonal content, right?

jsjem · December 17

Less and less content every year, complain here is useless, [snip]

[edited for bashing]

AzuraFan · December 17

ohaphazardo wrote: »

Once again ZERO love for solo players...

Well, there's still the quest content. But one important item missing in the letter is story mode for dungeons. That's an item that's been requested quite a lot, so it's surprising that it's not there. ZOS doesn't have to do them all at once, so it could have been one of the experiments. Just do one or two of the dungeons and see how it goes. But alas...

sarahthes · December 17

RaptorRodeoGod wrote: »

@ZOS_Kevin gear cap changes aren't being considered for seasonal content, right?

It would make overland harder...

But I can't see them pivoting on that at this point. ESO isn't a gear score grind game anymore.

Personofsecrets · December 17

Syldras wrote: »

Personofsecrets wrote: »

And the resulting play patterns from us were something that Matt relates to in the letter, soft groups. Players organize on their own to take down incursions and world bosses. Players group up to share quests.

Wasn't the need to group up for overland content rather badly received? I can remember that many players disliked Bastion Nymic (and some also Atoll of Immolation) for that reason.

I would say that there is mixed reception. The same can be said for Craglorn back in the day. Some players got together, organized, and crushed it. We would even do boss loops for experience grinding. That said, a number of players didn't like not being able to go in and solo content. Then Craglorn was changed to make it more solo friendly. The instances were changed.

Regarding Bastion Nymic, I honestly never understood how I was supposed to be doing them. Yea, if it had been solo content, then I would have just gone in and done it. Being a group content added an extra layer of complexity that I still don't really get. I was busy getting the Almalexia TOT fragments to figure out that the zones incursion system was completely different from others.

Reginald_leBlem · December 17

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Just to follow up here. The changes here are to make us more agile and produce more engaging and varied content. So from our prospective, it is not us "going into maintenance" but rather being able to address several concerns the player base has noted over the years.

Can you comment on if we will still get a trial in June?

Or about the concerns of content being limited time?

tomofhyrule · December 17

Reginald_leBlem wrote: »

Or about the concerns of content being limited time?

That one was mentioned:

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Just wanted to follow up on seasons a little bit. We will have more details in April, but Jess Folsom noted this in another thread. Thought it would help here too.

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

One thing we do want to clarify today are the questions about seasonal content. Our plans are not to remove content such as quests, stories, and new areas like some other games do when a season is over.

Renato90085 · December 17

If they real did,stop 1 year new chapter and try fix many year problem(base game art/PvP and PVE balance/cyro
sound good than this 2 year chapter...

LatentBuzzard · December 17

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Bolded for emphasis.

I think that's the rub that has the playerbase pretty upset at the moment. The last couple/few updates were preceded 4 months beforehand with tidbits of (paraphrasing) "Huge exciting housing update! We'll tell you more in a few months!" , then "Stay tuned for an awesome PvP update!", and got all stoked up waiting those 3-4 months each time only to be severely let down. So teasing yet another "Stay Tuned!" message is likelly perceived as a kick in the shorts for many players.

Not to mention that if they're only announcing details a quarter of the way through 2025 then 2025 is pretty much going to be a write off in terms of new content.

LadyGP · December 17

I'm stoked for this.

I love the fact that Matt straight up said they need to address Cyro performance. We have been screaming about Cyro for 5-6 years now and they have said minimal about it publicly. A statement like that is clear - they need to fix it and they know it.

No more, "hey ZoS do you know how bad Cyro is when it gets busy?". Yes, they know and it sounds like they are already well into development on something.

I also am a big fan of the seasons. Allowing them to shift focus and jump on an issue quicker than waiting a year for the next chapter is a big win. If they put something out and it becomes "the next hot thing" they can easily double down on that and expand on it. Or, if they put something out and it becomes a dumpster fire... they can react to that quick as well.

I also like that it sounds like they are starting to give the devs some room to experiment and try new things. Everyone has been saying this game, in particular Cyro, feels stale. I can't wait to see what kind of crazy ideas people come up with and get to try out.

I just hope the "powers that be" embrace this and don't shut them down (343i I'm looking at you and all the pilot Halo games that sound so sick but leadership said nah fam to).

Jaraal · December 17

I think people are overthinking the "seasons" think. Mr Firor stated that it was hard having his crew locked into a content release deadline every year. We all know that in some instances, this resulted in incomplete and buggy content being pushed to live by a promised date. By using vague "seasons," they are giving themselves the option to say, "Hey, you know what? This new zone won't be ready by July. Good thing we only told players about the "Season of New Zone X" without stating a deadline. So we can push it to September and still be in our "season" for the new content, without breaking any promises."

LadyGP · December 17

Jaraal wrote: »

I think people are overthinking the "seasons" think. Mr Firor stated that it was hard having his crew locked into a content release deadline every year. We all know that in some instances, this resulted in incomplete and buggy content being pushed to live by a promised date. By using vague "seasons," they are giving themselves the option to say, "Hey, you know what? This new zone won't be ready by July. Good thing we only told players about the "Season of New Zone X" without stating a deadline. So we can push it to September and still be in our "season" for the new content, without breaking any promises."

Agreed.

They are thinking of Seasons in the sense of games like COD, Apex, Halo, etc.

This is NOT that.

ZOS_Kevin · December 17

LatentBuzzard wrote: »

Not to mention that if they're only announcing details a quarter of the way through 2025 then 2025 is pretty much going to be a write off in terms of new content.

Just following up on this. We have new content coming in 2025. We have our normal Q1 content for 2025 (we’ll touch on that next month), and April will have details for the rest of 2025. So it will not be a write off regarding content.