dk_dunkirk wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

DenverRalphy wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

MISTFORMBZZZ wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

DreadKnight wrote: »

As I understand it crossplay for all games is something that is being driven primarily by Microsoft. As the next consoles are basically going to be PC spec (and price).

There are already many games that successfully incorporate crossplay and it's part of Microsoft's long term strategy to merge their entire gaming world into one. If eso doesn't work towards crossway it'll simply get left behind and loose investment. As Microsoft has basically said 'if it's not Elder Scrolls or Fallout - forget about' it to Bethesda, if eso doesn't become crossplay it will have a very limited future.

That's all very well, but it is Microsoft who have just laid off a third of the ESO staff, so who's to blame if ESO gets left behind, ZOS or Microsoft?

I dont think thats correct. I read multiple times, the ESO staff has not been effected by this and there were actions beeing taken to keep them. But the ZOS studio overall was and the other MMO they were working on, was canceled (wich should be good for ESO).

If im wrong, feel free to correct me as i dont find the posts anymore (reddit, forum & online)

Anyway since Microsoft’s official line suggested ESO will remain supported as a "key live service title'' , cross service should be worked on, imo.

EDIT: Found something after letting chat gtp search : https://www.gamesradar.com/games/mmo/a-future-has-been-stolen-zenimax-union-says-lives-were-upended-by-xbox-layoffs-and-mmo-cancelation-but-we-have-not-yet-been-laid-off/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Also chatgtp answere, so im open to be corrected :

Based on all the reporting and union statements so far, here’s the clearest picture:

✅ What’s confirmed

ESO itself is safe: Microsoft explicitly said The Elder Scrolls Online remains a key live-service game.

No formal layoffs of the ESO team have been confirmed. The union (ZOSU-CWA) stated that ESO devs are still employed, with pay and benefits intact.

The layoffs targeted Project Blackbird (the canceled new MMO). Almost the entire team working on that project is expected to lose their jobs once severance negotiations finish.

Meanwhile, this article from 9 days later says, "According to current employee Page Branson, some of those who were laid off were “absolutely crucial” to the success of ESO and “integral” to the everyday function of the studio in general. Some of that brain drain can likely be attributed to the dev knowledge lost thanks to the ending of development on MMORPG Project Blackbird as well as the departure of former studio president Matt Firor, but according to QA worker Autumn Mitchell, a third of the studio’s institutional knowledge keeping ZOS’s projects running smoothly has been eliminated."

https://massivelyop.com/2025/07/23/zenimax-online-devs-say-microsoft-layoffs-eliminated-critical-mmorpg-staff-and-institutional-knowledge/

The reported numbers of people laid off from the studio were more than the number of people that were working on Blackbird. So regardless of official statements, some ESO people have definitely been cut. This article suggests a third. Tandor says a third. I've seen other articles also referencing a third. Pretending that ESO wasn't impacted by the Microsoft cuts is, frankly, and I'm sorry to say, cope.

As always, YMMV, TACMA, OVWP, etc., et. al.

I think that article may have mis represented a quote. Because I recall an earlier article that it was likely sourced from (can't remember exactly where though) where the statement about some let go being crucial to the success of ESO was speaking about some of those let go were part of the original team responsible for building, launching, and getting ESO on its feet. And thus crucial in that aspect. Not that they were currently working on ESO. Because from most original accounts, despite the clickbait "ESO Devs Laid Off!" headline articles, it was former ESO but now Blackbird employees laid off.

It was a very short article, but I didn't want to paste the whole thing out of old school norms of internet respect. The last graph is:

“A lot of practical knowledge just disappeared overnight,” said Branson. “I feel like they were numbers on a sheet that got cut, but the real application of what they were doing was integral to making everything run correctly.”

That sounds very current and ongoing; not "getting ESO on its feet." And that's a direct quote. I know journalism as a profession is slipping, but I still have to believe that words in quote marks are direct, not-paraphrased remarks. Again, YMMV.

And that portion of the quoted source material is not referring to ESO specifically, but the studio (ZOS as a studio, not the ESO project itself).

Look, I keep saying "YMMV", trying to be open to interpretation, but, dang, I don't know how much harder you could work at denying the reality of what's the person was clearly trying to convey. After the cancellation of Blackbird, the only project ZOS has is ESO. So what else do you think he was talking about at "the studio" that doesn't directly involve ESO? Creating budget spreadsheets? Moderating the forums? To me, it's clearly referring to keeping the infrastructure running. What other thing(s) could provoke such a comment about making "everything run correctly?" What am I missing here?

The whole reason I brought this up was because, as a 30-year full-stack dev, I see nothing BUT infrastructure work required to make cross-play a thing. In addition to changes in the game code and the databases, there will be changes to the servers, the proxies, the CDN's, the networking, etc. It would be a massive infrastructure change to put all 3 platforms in one server. This is why I thought the article and the quote was relevant to the discussion. Crossplay was a pipe dream before the cuts. The only way they're ever touching this now is if TES VI causes an absolute explosion of interest in ESO, and they staff back up.

Renalds wrote: »

Maitsukas wrote: »

Just because ZOS said they were looking if it is possible (with no additional updates since then), doesn't mean it is confirmed to be coming any time soon. It is a huge mess to deal with as I have mentioned in previous threads:

1. What to merge, the regions or platforms? If both EU & NA are merged, then depending on where the servers physically are located (Texas for NA, Germany for EU), most players are forced to deal with an increased latency (as if the OCE/SEA players don't have enough already). And are Sony and Microsoft willing to cooperate to make a platform merger possible (since MS basically refused to do that during the PS3/XB360 era)?

2. Shared character names on different accounts and servers. Who gets to keep the name, someone who had it longer or someone who manages to log in first, forcing the other player(s) to use a name change on their character(s)?

3. Shared guild names on different servers. There is no way to change the guild names without disbanding them.

4. Character cap for multi-platform players. Is doubling or tripling the limit a solution considering the many cuts (guild trader sale times, mail expiry times causing to take nearly Exabytes (from what I read somewhere once) of space (1 EB = 1000 TB = 1 000 000 GB) they had to make to improve performance over the years?

5. Housing projects potentially getting erased if someone creates something in Grand Psijic Villa on one server, but completely different in the same house on another server.

If I had to guess purely on technical terms there'd more likely be something like an instance mechanic.
Users get instanced into the same zone from different platforms and are able to interact with eachother.
Chats will be cross platform, traders and guild will be cross platform. (Guild names would also have some unique identifier allowing you to avoid having issues with duplicate names)

Usernames will have extra identifiers on them, example Renalds#001 as username, meanwhile characternames can have some hidden extra identifier to make them unique but where players are still able to have the same character name.

NA and EU wont be merged; that'd be an absolute nightmare, if crossplay were to ever happen it'll combine PC+XBOX+Playstation of a region The first two being the more realistic given that Microsoft owns xbox.

You'd also have to consider that consoles are still behind on updates due to their platforms approval process of updates.
This can't exist if crossplay is a thing; all 3 platforms have to receive the update at the same time.


Just throwing out some potential theorycraft they'd have to do and I am a billion percent sure it's even more complex then this.
The game is 10 years old and was never built with the cross platform idea in mind; so it's one spaghetti mess of code to solve too.

These are the kind of constructive replies im coming here for into the forum, you guys are great 🙏

MISTFORMBZZZ wrote: »

tbf if swimming mounts did take 9 months we will probably never see crossplay

Maybe the reason they're extending the projected life of the game to 30+ years is so as to accommodate the work they need to do in order to implement crossplay !

ESO devs, but also devs from other live games, already stated a few times in posts or interviews that stuff that gets released today, is usually in development and production for usually at least a year or more.

So if crossplay is in conceptual phase today, you should expect this probably at the earliest within 2 years.

But pretty sure at some point it is coming.

https://gamerant.com/elder-scrolls-online-crossplay-dev-update/

I found this article from may regarding the topic. As far i know the devs mentioned it aswell on the gamescon in germany

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

As Rich noted during Gamescom, crossplay is being worked on. There is a lot of work to go through because ESO was built way before crossplay was part of the industry. And there is 11yrs worth of content, systems and data to go through. The last thing we want is for systems to be heavily impacted by crossplay and have it an impact on your overall gameplay experience. So it's something we have to be extra careful about. Nothing else to report right now, but there is a team focused on crossplay.

Tell them to make sure keyboard can que for all the BG quest at the same time like controller UI can. It really hurts new player experience being stuck in que longer because they cant que up for everything like other players.

If they ever do bring cross play and I end up losing any of my characters' names, or any of our PC settings that consoles do not have, or any of my 53 decorated houses, that will be one HUGE final straw for me.

SilverBride wrote: »

If they ever do bring cross play and I end up losing any of my characters' names, or any of our PC settings that consoles do not have, or any of my 53 decorated houses, that will be one HUGE final straw for me.

I have to 100% agree with this!!

I would add to that my actual account names too! I presume it will not be possible to have multiple accounts with the same names, who get to keep theirs and who loses out would for me be a very big issue!

I suspect this is a very big part of the issues they need to resolve before implementing cross play.

freespirit wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

If they ever do bring cross play and I end up losing any of my characters' names, or any of our PC settings that consoles do not have, or any of my 53 decorated houses, that will be one HUGE final straw for me.

I have to 100% agree with this!!

I would add to that my actual account names too! I presume it will not be possible to have multiple accounts with the same names, who get to keep theirs and who loses out would for me be a very big issue!

I suspect this is a very big part of the issues they need to resolve before implementing cross play.

I don't know how they could resolve this but our user id and character names are probably the most important parts of our accounts for a lot of players.

Besides the name issue, PC and Console have very different ways of doing many things. I can foresee a lot of conflict arising from this.

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

By the time they'd get around to releasing crossplay, they'd have time to align whatever it is you're referring to. I mean, adding mods to consoles is really a first, GIANT step towards crossplay, if we're being honest, and that's already up and running well, from what I can tell.

Add-ons for consoles has no effect on what they will do about duplicate names, which is a very big consideration.

I definitely think the name overlaps will be a major thing that needs to be figured out. Simply handing out name change tokens to hardcore RP players because someone on a different server who stopped playing a decade ago has their 8-year-old main’s name will not go over well. And I don’t think appending a server onto character names so we all see our characters introduce themselves in universe as “My name is Darien Gautier_PCNA” is going to work well either.

Whatever suffixes they add would need to be internal and not affect existing characters, or you’d end up with a mass exodus.

But my major concern is fixing the internal IDs. We all have an internal ID to our accounts, and if someone went to a banker and suddenly saw someone else’s stuff since they share internal IDs, that’s also a major problem.

I’m not concerned about addons or the economy; those issues will sort themselves out within a few weeks. It’s more issues with the backend, as the original architecture of the game was not designed for server transfers or intermixing, and (as we saw from the PTS planemeld last year) mixing them haphazardly does not just work.
And no, I’m not going to point to a major bug that took weeks to sort out and resulted in people losing characters or gear as a proof that it “works.”

I do hope some form of crossplay does come for the benefit of all. But ZOS will have to essentially rebuild a lot of the character data at the bottom of the spaghetti code to get it to work, and I hope that doesn’t take away from releasing new content.

DenverRalphy wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

freespirit wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

If they ever do bring cross play and I end up losing any of my characters' names, or any of our PC settings that consoles do not have, or any of my 53 decorated houses, that will be one HUGE final straw for me.

I have to 100% agree with this!!

I would add to that my actual account names too! I presume it will not be possible to have multiple accounts with the same names, who get to keep theirs and who loses out would for me be a very big issue!

I suspect this is a very big part of the issues they need to resolve before implementing cross play.

I don't know how they could resolve this but our user id and character names are probably the most important parts of our accounts for a lot of players.

Besides the name issue, PC and Console have very different ways of doing many things. I can foresee a lot of conflict arising from this.

By the time they'd get around to releasing crossplay, they'd have time to align whatever it is you're referring to. I mean, adding mods to consoles is really a first, GIANT step towards crossplay, if we're being honest, and that's already up and running well, from what I can tell.

Not so much. It's bug riddled. When itworks, it works. But the AutoSave bug/error gets old really fast.

Well, rats. I hate to hear that.

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

By the time they'd get around to releasing crossplay, they'd have time to align whatever it is you're referring to. I mean, adding mods to consoles is really a first, GIANT step towards crossplay, if we're being honest, and that's already up and running well, from what I can tell.

Add-ons for consoles has no effect on what they will do about duplicate names, which is a very big consideration.

Where did I say it would? You've made it extremely clear that you really, really, REALLY do not want to be impacted by a name collision. I really, really, REALLY think the number of people impacted by such a problem would be tiny, and most of them wouldn't care. I sure wouldn't. I'd gladly change my character's names to let someone else have it. The actual account name is a different matter. Being as I play through Steam, I can't just change my account name willy-nilly. But while I don't think that's going to happen very often, it's something they must address to do crossplay, so if they really do get to it -- and they're not just stringing us along -- they'll figure it out. They have to. And now I'm back to my original comment. They are now trying to do this major thing with a reduced staff. If it even happens at all, there's going to be a lot of runway to figure this sort of thing out.

I think it would be a big issue for a lot of players. I'd like to see how players feel about it so I created a poll.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/682478/how-would-a-forced-name-change-due-to-crossplay-affect-you#latest

SilverBride wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

By the time they'd get around to releasing crossplay, they'd have time to align whatever it is you're referring to. I mean, adding mods to consoles is really a first, GIANT step towards crossplay, if we're being honest, and that's already up and running well, from what I can tell.

Add-ons for consoles has no effect on what they will do about duplicate names, which is a very big consideration.

As stated multiple times before in the thread. They can add platform symbols to the name. Other games are doing it like this too.

Your names will be safe, im sure

amiiegee wrote: »

As stated multiple times before in the thread. They can add platform symbols to the name. Other games are doing it like this too.

Your names will be safe, im sure

What will this do to future names once crossplay goes live? Will every name, whether there is a duplicate or not, have the server initials after it?

I just find that to be immersion breaking, unless they only showed the server intitals when mousing over the character, or something like that. Or if we had a way to not show it, like we can now with titles, etc..