The Elder Scrolls Legends – Alliance War – Coming April 15th, 2019

Bethesda Game Days 2019 brings us the long-awaited Legends roadmap.

Good tidings, citizen: Bethesda and Sparkypants deliver what the Legends community has been asking for. And they deliver in style, confidence and with a bang: Alliance War, the new cardpack expansion will release on April 15th, 2019.

After Bethesda has shifted developers to Sparkypants, we are now seeing the opening of a new chapter for The Elder Scrolls Legends. While Direwolf Digital was not able to deliver new Legends content at a velocity requested by the community, Sparkypants has announced to deliver four expansions in 2019. The content drought is over and seems to belong to the past.

Legends Roadmap 2019 – Four New Expansions

Bethesda and Sparkypants are announcing four cardpack expansions for The Elder Scrolls Legends in 2019. Alliance War is the first and will see light on April 15th, one year and 10 days after Houses of Morrowind. Summer, Fall and Winter 2019 will each see a full cardpack expansion.

In addition, the cardpack expansions are accompanied by more features for the game client. Also, the company has deliberately decided to not communicate any definitive dates as of yet. This is totally fair as specific dates are difficult to provide in the gaming unless very close to deployment. Finally, TESL-players can be certain, that their investment will be supported by a continuous stream of new content.

Legends Roadmap: Master Series confirmed – 50k in Prizes

The Legends roadmap also contains announcements on exciting events. Like last year, Spring 2019 will see the Master Series Qualifiers and Summer 2019 will feature the Master Series Finals at Quakecon. Quakecon is scheduled for July 25th-28th in Grapevine, Texas. Similar to last year, Bethesda confirms a prize pool of 50,000 US Dollars for this event, with 20,000 USD for the winner. Mark this in your diaries…

PvP Events in Fall – The Return of Gauntlets & The Rise of In-Game Tournaments?

Fall 2019 will see the (re-)release of PvP Events. Little more has been communicated around that yet. Speculation has it, that PvP might be similar to the Gauntlets we know from the old client. In an interview for the Fun & Interactive podcast from November 2018, Peter Janaros, Designer at Sparkypants highlighted that they taken a decision to not simply re-implement Gauntlets. Instead, they are potentially looking for cool ways to combine them with in-game tournaments. In six to seven months we shall know more. This is another piece of great news and Bethesda plans to deliver on another feature requested by the community.

Balance Patches, Continuous Support and additional Enhancements

Additionally, Monthly Patches with balance updates and bugfixes will continue to be shipped. We will also continue to see the Monthly Reward Cards and get improved animations as as well as more cardbacks and alternate art cards.

Anything Missing?

An absolutely exciting package for 2019. Four expansions will get the game to the best place possible, as fast as possible. Unfortunately, not much information has yet been provided about the new features. I guess, this leaves Sparkypants with some flexibility, if the development of the expansions takes longer than they anticipate. After all, card content is probably the biggest feature in any card game. Still, the company is very close to the community and listening carefully to what people are saying.

Another observation: the roadmap does not include news about promo sets or more story expansions. Possibly, they felt that story expansions take a lot of time to develop and do not provide for the same return of investment than pack-based expansions. Nonetheless, story expansions are definitely seen as a key differentiator for TESL by Bethesda. Thus, they may want to keep things vague so that the community does not “over-expect”. I think it’s better to deliver on what you say you will deliver and so far Sparkypants have done a great job.

However, these are just their plans. A roadmaps is an intention to release something, not a firm definitive commitment. I will personally treat these as plans, and plans can always change. That doesn’t even have to be a bad thing!

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