ESO Quakecon The Future of ESO Panel Notes

ESO Quakecon The Future of ESO Panel with notes and videos on the upcoming ESO features.

Developers

Brian Wheeler – Lead PvP Designer

Rich Lambert – Lead Designer

Jeese Mcintyre – Lead Programmer

Paul Sage – Creative Director

Nick Konkle – Lead Gameplay Designer

Jared Carr – Art Director

Imperial City with Brain Wheeler

PVP zone

Unlocked by Corydiil Keep ownership.

Rid the imperial city of Molag Bal’s Planemeld, tons of bosses and mini bosses to kill.

Clear out enemy players.

Capture and hold different districts of the city. You get rewards and can respawn in that captured districts.

Repeatable PvE quests with high gold and XP reards.

Craftable Imperial Daedric Gear.

Arena District

Daedra taken over the city, thrown the Imperials into the arenas to have some gladiatorial games.

Arboretum District

Not completely taken over by the Daedra, still have some flora. You get to go in and make sure life goes on when you kick out the daedra.

Market District

You can capture this district. Once you own it, you can respawn and gain alliance bonus. Specific tradeskill stations that allow you to craft Imperial Daedric gear.

Temple District

Temple of the One in Oblivion. This is where the daedra trying to start the planemeld.

How do I get in?

Enter Imperial City via the sewers, a homage to Oblivion. There are three locations to enter the sewer with a safe zone for each alliance once you enter the sewer. There will be a lot of PvP outside the sewer entrances to stop people from getting in.



There is a crossroads sewer level where the three alliances cross path. There are portals that pop underneath and spawn monsters.



Only one alliance can own a district, you can come in to flip it and kill all the other alliance players that are in there.

Content with Rich Lambert

Grouping updates – 5 initiatives underway to improve grouping

Gamewide audit to fix quests so players aren’t separated so often



More quests have shared advancement (one group member collecting items will give shared credit to the entire group)



You will always be able to sync with your group leader’s instance.



Journal and quest tracker to show common quests.



Confirmation for quest sharing (success or fail)

City of Ash – New Veteran Dungeon coming in Update 5

Veteran mode continues the story where the village elder havn’t returned from the portal and it is your job to go in and check it out.

Dungeon Scaling

Scale dungeon level to group leader. This includes monsters, items, XP and gold.



Solo instance difficulty will scale to you.

Dungeon repeatability

Daily dungeon runs come to ESO – Leverage the Undaunted.



New passive skills added to Undaunted skill line.



Daily rewards through Undaunted pledges



Get keys to open undaunted chests in various alliances headquarters – new armors etc

Craglorn

Third chapter (Mage and Warrior were the first two chapters) will have improved itemization, new crafting trait and a brand new 12 player trial focusing on the Serpent.

Dragonstar Arena

Four player group mini trials



Progrsssively more difficult timed PvE encounters with better rewards.



Leaderboards.



Two difficulty modes (normal mode and veteran mode). Veteran mode will have rez restrictions and leaderboards.

Facial Animation with Jeese Mcintyre

Current NPC characters are like sock puppets in terms of facial animations.

The upgrade is powered by FaceFX. It is in a lot of games already.It takes audio and text of the dialogue and identify phonemics, the sound we make in speech and map them to mouth shapes.

Our artist and programmers work together to make believable mouth shapes. Our game has 120,000 lines of dialogue translated over 3 languages (your average feature length film only has 1000 lines). The humanoid and beast races have very different facial structures. Our robust character creation also allow you to modify the facial structures.

Veteran System with Paul Sage

Player feedback: Players like to keep the same character and going into the various alliances. Players also like keep getting new items and we are working constantly on adding new items.

Challenge: There is a split between players who find post 50 content too difficult and those who like the challenge.

There is also the issue of infrequent reward – need a predictable reward path. We have a good progression system to level 50 but this isn’t there post 50.

Experience too different between 1-50 and post 50. Gaining Veteran points isn’t same as gaining experience points and can be confusing.

We are going to get rid of veteran points, instead veteran ranks are gained by experience points. You will get a rested XP for not playing in a certain length of time to allow you to catch up to players who play more.

Champion system – We are going to introduce a ton of passives. As you gain experience, you get champion points to spend on passives.

Example passives (The Tower Constellation). You can keep putting points into them to increase their %.

Blade expert – increase the base damage any player can do with a blade. It does not increase any “extra” damage from damage type on blades.



Tenactiy – increase total stamina regen by a %



Shock Boost – increase damage done by shock and increase resistance to shock



Precise strikes – increase the percentage on the weapon critical derived stat.

Champion points are account wide and able to spent on all characters independently.

For more points you put into a path/constellation you gain unlocks.

10 pts: Impatience – A significant increase to success chance at forcing locks



30 pts: Fortune Hunter – Gold found in Chests is Increased



50 pts Deflection – Blocking now returns a % of the mitigated damage onto the attack



100 pts Counterstrike – A successful block at lower than 10% health has a & chance to prevent and return 100% of the damage back on the attack. 10 Minutes cooldown.

New gear, no longer restricted by Veteran ranks. New items are come in with new content in “seasons”. They will be rare to acquire in the current season. The previous season items are easier to acquire and might be even be purchaseable directly. No one will fall behind the item chase but there will still be an item chase.

Justice System with Paul Sage

You can take items from crates etc as normal but instead now you are stealing items. Items will have value if they are stolen. To steal something, you need to be hidden. If a guard caught you stealing, you can pay a bounty but it remove all your stolen goods.

You can also murder NPCs.

If you cannot pay a bounty when caught by a guard, you can try to flee and guards will attack you.

You can also be guards and hunt down players with bounty – active world PvP.

Spellcrafting with Nicke Konkle

You are going to be able to find and combine various spell effects in the game and create new abilities you can put on your hotbar.

It is a bound system that is not completely unbalancing the game.

It might be something you can only do after you have completed the Mage Guild quest line.

Mage Guild discover new ancient doorways and found new ways to organize magic.

A lot of exploration in this system, you get a spell that summon a ball you have to chase to find the various ancient doorways located all over the world.

Inside the doorways you will find stone tablets. Some are whole, some are broken into pieces and scattered all over the world.

Using an interactive UI, similar to lockpicking, you will be using charcoal and paper on the tablet to recreate the spell and collect it.Once you collected the spell, you throw them into a book of all the spells you have collected.

Once you collected the spells, you want to recreate the tablets you found in order to learn that spell. First thing you do is to collect the base effect of the spell using the method described above. You can then customize it by using different focus (morphs).

Base, Ultimate, Enduring, Reduce Cost, Ritual, AoE.



If you put the AoE focus on Lighting Bolt you will create a chain lightning spell. If you put the enduring focus on a flame antronach it will become a permanent pet. You can use the ultimate to make the spells into ultimates.

The better stone you use for the tablets to create the spells, the more powerful and expensive the spell will be. Tablets can be traded with other players. Once the tablet is consumed, it will grant you the permanent ability.

In summary, you explore the world to collect base spells and then customize it with the six different focus and different stones for the tablets.

Combat Responsiveness with Jared Carr

Button responsiveness

We are improving the audio feedback for actions such as drinking potions and depleting magicka/stamina



We have fixed many bugs, such as Nightblade abilities randomly locking out and will continue to do so.



Better tools for QA to analyze unexpected behaviour with abilities and animation

Animation Timing

We are improving the actual timing of impacts.



We are improving the velocity and arcs of motion on weapon skins so that combat feels tighter.



We are making aesthetic improvements to combat poses and animation

Particle effects

We have now allocated more of the overall PFX budget to combat abilities



We have added more robust PFX priority culling rules into the system (my abilities and the enemy abilities on me are the most important and should appear first)



We are exposing these culling rules as player options in the UI, including a total PFX memory cap slider and a rendering distance slider.



We are now pre-caching all combat telegraphs to make sure they are always in memory and therefore always play.

Weapon swapping

We are now pre-caching all weapons in memory so weapon swapping is instant

New armor and weapon models with Jared Carr

Kothringi Ceremonial Armor/weapon Set

Morag Tong

Dark Brotherhood

Thieves Guild

Glass Armor

Glass armor heavy in Zbrush (left) and medium (right)

High Level PvP Armor for Ebonheart

Undaunted Armor Set from Undaunted Treasure Chests

Undaunted Armor set earned from dungeons

Imperial Daedric armor from Imperial City

Medium (left), heavy (right), ingame render of heavy on second row.

Dwemer Armor

Heavy (left), light (right)

Adventure Zone: Murkmire

Like Craglorn, supports 4 player content in overland and delves. Also have 12 player trials.

Province of Black Marsh, under Shadowfen

Swamp in the north, upland area in the middle, bog in the south.

Dominant creature is Argonian.

New non player character race called the Naga

New monsters include a dreug variant, fire turtles, argonian behemoth that eats Naga

Some concept arts

Solo PvE Zone: Wrothgar

Shared by all 3 alliances. In it up north between High Rock and Skyrim. Originally given to the Orcs when they joined Daggerfall

Orc’s ancestral capital, Orsinium, is in this province in the Black Mountain area.

The followers of the Code of Malacath are distrustful of the Orc King and his Daggerfall allies as the Bretons and Redguards destroyed Orsinium a while back. Simultaneously, the Orc Sing is sympathic a sect of another cult that wants to destroy the Malacath worshippers.

You are asked to help to rebuild Orsinium and determine the future of the Orcs there

Female giant creature added

Q&A