What is the ultimate objective of ESO development?

Coo_PnT wrote: »

Does the development team have a concrete vision of what they want the final game to look like?/quote]

in my opinion, looks like they're going for "Fun"

Xarc wrote: »

What is the ultimate objective of ESO development?

money

“I think the biggest take away – for either the new or existing player – is that there is something in Morrowind for everyone, Lambert told Express Online.

“As a new player, you’ll find a new tutorial, a new class and, because the game is not level restricted, you have the freedom to explore the game as you wish

"We ended up settling on something that would be called “One Tamriel,” which involved removing all the barriers to exploration," Lambert said. "The arbitrary level gates that prevented players from exploring, the alliance-specific story paths, level barriers to grouping with your friends… all of these we removed to open the world up and give the players the freedom to explore the world at their own pace, and in their own way. It took us almost two years to do, but now that it's done it was probably the single best thing we did to the game."

We also made the game Buy-to-play, so you could play it without a required subscription, and finally – in 2016 – we added One Tamriel, that removed leveling as a barrier to player grouping and exploration. All of these were important, but with One Tamriel, the game really took off.

GI: You said that it didn't feel like the Elder Scrolls game fans were hoping for. From your perspective, what was it about ESO that wasn't coming across as an Elder Scrolls title?

RL: I think the biggest thing is we didn't have an identity; we didn't really know the game we wanted to be when we first launched because we were so focused on trying to please everybody and be in the middle. And so we didn't necessarily commit to the game, and that was one of the things we decided early on, after we launched, that we needed to decide what Elder Scrolls means. It means there are X [amount of things needed] to write great storytelling. It means the freedom to explore, to play the way you want to play. It's easy to kind of pick up and put down. Those are all the things that [factored] into a lot of the decisions we made at that time.

Under the new levelless system, players can jump into any part of Elder Scrolls Online and play which content strikes your fancy. If you want to start on Morrowind, you can. If you want to jump back to the beginning, that works too. This means new players have a lot of choices, and never have to worry about not being able to play with friends

What we're trying to avoid there is the gen one MMO problem. The cool new content launches, and new players have to play through 18 years of old content. We definitely wanted to avoid that. If they're seeing marketing images about dragons, we want them to play Elsweyr," says Firor.

That was the basis for One Tamriel—being able to go anywhere, do anything, but also the freedom to kind of build your character any way you want. And, you know, really live in the world and experience the world. Those were like the big core kinds of pillars of our game, and what Elder Scrolls kind of is for a lot of people.”

Other Elder Scrolls hallmarks are what Firor describes as a combination of story, characters, and exploration.

And Firor has shipped exactly two games since 2001. Both of those have had extraordinary longevity and player bases and enormous communities. He says that more than 24 million players have traveled through The Elder Scrolls Online. And he thinks that’s because it’s not your typical MMO. In fact, if you ask him, it’s not an MMO at all.

“We’ve wanted to evolve away from that, so that people coming into the game wouldn’t hear the term MMO and think they were playing a super-grindy, Dark Age of Camelot-type game. They were playing an Elder Scrolls game.

“I will say that that term—online role-playing game—was just as much for our internal developers as it was for external because we had a bunch of hardcore MMO designers. And we had to keep reminding ourselves, you know, don’t just do the tried-and-true system, because everyone else does it. This game is different.”

Tandor wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Syldras wrote: »

They had a longer part during the stream about how this began as a combat-focused game, but that they got the impression people spend a lot of time doing non-combat things, so they aim more for an "Elder Scrolls online world" the players can "live in". They repeated that a few times.

If this is their goal then I wonder why they are making Overland combat more difficult. I don't understand how any of these changes would accomplish that.

They're only giving an option for greater difficulty, the default Overland combat will remain the same. They made that very clear.

I guess it's part of their recognition that people play ESO for a ton of different reasons and therefore enjoy different aspects of the game, so it makes sense for them to cater for those who want greater challenges in the Overland content but purely as an opt-in for that particular subset of players.