That's it for U45!

Global reveal will be in April for what else will be coming this year.

AzuraFan wrote: »

The Cyrodiil update will be available the second week of PTS.

There will be a new campaign called Vengeance - will be testing performance here. Goal is to get as many people into Cyrodiil as possible, way above the pop caps now. Want to tackle the issues head on. Will only have one campaign up and running when the testing is active. Want to test on PTS to make sure the testing is working before they do the same test on live.

Skills will be different - way toned back. Abilities are modified to be simpler and less taxing for the server. For example, a skill might do damage. It won't do damage, crowd control, etc.

There will only be 3 skills lines. No guild, no passives, etc.

AzuraFan wrote: »

Test will run for only one week at the end of March for live.

Gear will be templatized. You get it when you enter Cyrodiil, and you lose it when you leave. This is only a test, and all in favour of performance.

ZOS will want feedback on the test.

PvP Mains are going to be SO upset when their min maxed Meta builds become pointless. I welcome the level playing field though.

This all sounds very promising. I'll with hold final opinions, though, until I see them execute on it.

Goren wrote: »

I genuinely don't understand why they keep adding these huge player houses

They must like hearing people complain about the furnishing limits on those big houses....

Their dumbed down Cyrodiil idea is totally missing the point and a cop out. They should just fix their code and or servers or whatever broke since 2018. Cyrodiil used to work just fine with higher population caps. ZOS could just go back to doing it the way they did it in 2018. No need to create a new system or set of restrictions because ZOS doesn't want to make the necessary investments to keep ESO Cyrodiil running like it used to.

reazea wrote: »

Their dumbed down Cyrodiil idea is totally missing the point and a cop out. They should just fix their code and or servers or whatever broke since 2018. Cyrodiil used to work just fine with higher population caps. ZOS could just go back to doing it the way they did it in 2018. No need to create a new system or set of restrictions because ZOS doesn't want to make the necessary investments to keep ESO Cyrodiil running like it used to.

How do you propose they fix the code without testing possible solutions to reduce coding overhead?

Remathilis wrote: »

TechMaybeHic wrote: »

My best guess is if they get participation in vengueance, it will be similar to the no proc test they did for a week and fun for a moment at best. Then they will make it just another campaign and not support it or expand on it for 3 years, then repeat.

I would hope they get data, then expand on what is allowed and grow it and watch for what breaks it as they add things at a time; but that would be a long, slow, stepped approach

My guess is that by making everything standardized, they will know what the absolute max they can get away with is. Then they can work back to see what they can add back until they find a balance between performance and optimization

One would hope.

alternatelder wrote: »

Maybe a dumb question, did they say anything about whether houses with old textures will be affected with the new texture remodeling?

They didn't say anything about that.

Designers would also really benefit from having actual programmers in the room with them when they are coming up with things like new set or ability ideas.

Just someone to tell them like, "Do you know how computationally complex this new set is to implement? Let me give you some options on how to tone that down while still preserving the really cool concept that you have...".

Like, sets/abilities should be balanced from the start upon both their gameplay as well as performance impact. Simply reading the paragraph-length tooltips of recent sets, with their stacks and baroque proc conditions, indicates that this is likely not happening at the moment.

I understand the need to start somewhere if their PvP tests, but understand the lack of faith in it.

I do hope that with this, they can identify what causes major performance impacts and slowly start reintroducing more build diversity into this new mode. Starting with weapon skill lines, armor passives, skill and class passives, no proc sets, etc all the way up to what's currently available, but more performant and allowing for a large population. This is going to need a lot of attention, as in if something works or doesn't work, it shouldn't take another 6-12 months to iterate to the next version of testing. A high population is nice, but not at the permanent cost of removed diversity/identity.

OsUfi wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Base game improvements sound great.

But hugely worried about PvP. I don't think that turning everyone into templates is going to be popular. Build ingenuity and creativity are like THE defining PvP attraction for most players.

If players
wanted to be a template there's an entire other universe of "eSports" games that they could play instead.

They said it's a 1 week stress test.

Testing to stress the servers seems like a good idea.

Like I am old enough to remember when No-Proc was "just a test" and yet it's still in effect in Ravenwatch to this very day

No proc is no longer in effect in any campaign. They changed the Ravenwatch ruleset 6ish months ago.

Ah, that's right.

But the point remains that it was there for four or so years and that that it killed the campaign within the first year.

No-Proc was vehemently rejected by the Ravenwatch community but it was still enacted. Hopefully history will not repeat itself.

HappyTheCamper wrote: »

Also we may have finally received (unintentional) confirmation from Mike Finnigan that the events of ESO are over 10 years in-game, meaning the events all don’t take place in 582??

That was, kind of, always the case.
Every character can start everywhere, so the events seem to be placed in 2E582, as that is where each character starts. But as you quest on that character, time goes by, so other events will happen later. They just can't put an "official" date on them because there is no canonical sequence in which they take place, and are different for each character.
Though it's possible that they may stretch out official dates at some point, creating a canonical version of events that may be different from what your character experienced.

So is this just content for Q1?

I kind of thought this stream was to go over their plans for content in general since no more chapters?

No class changes? No new skill styles? No new scribed skills? Maybe we will see more changes during the PTR cycle?

Stx wrote: »

So is this just content for Q1?

I kind of thought this stream was to go over their plans for content in general since no more chapters?

No class changes? No new skill styles? No new scribed skills? Maybe we will see more changes during the PTR cycle?

They specifically said that this reveal was only the Q1 content, and the reveal stream in April will be the one talking about the new content delivery system.

We did hope they'd mention something about the future, but they did seem very tight-lipped about it. I am a little more positive though, since there are a lot of things that they're doing that are more in the "testing for the future" phase (e.g. Cyrodiil) that makes it seem a bit less like they're pulling the plug than it did before.

They did also say they'll be doing a PvP Q&A soon as well.

Now the odd patches do tend to be the ones with more combat changes, but nothing major was mentioned. However, those usually pop up in the PTS patch notes, unless they wanted to cool down the changes due to some being... controversial lately.

But the one thing I did notice - this PTS cycle is 2 weeks longer than usual. PTS is opening on Monday, but the patch is still dropping the 2nd week of March (10th). That means it's an 8-week PTS cycle, instead of the normal 6. Time will tell if that means there are more inteactions, but I'm hopeful.