The Future Elders Scrolls - Upcoming features with notes & videos. (roadmap)

It would be nice to see Entropia have some of these concept features added sometime over the course of the next 10 years; Maybe even a roadmap presentation like this one with their communication. Then again, it is also nice to be able to dream too.

Recently posted was the soon to be upcoming content patch # 3, for those who missed the video, here it is again: To follow this video is the an overview of what the future holds for The Elders Scrolls Online, Quakecon recap.

Content Update # 3

Quakecon recap on upcoming features in ESO:

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 rewards.
• 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

Thumbnails, click to enlarge.

• 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.

 

New armor and weapon models with Jared Carr

Kothringi Ceremonial Armor/weapon Set



Morag Tong



Dark Brotherhood



Thieves Guild



Glass Armor & Weapons


Glass armor heavy in Zbrush and medium ... Thumbnails

 

High Level PvP Armor for Ebonheart



Undaunted Armor Set from Undaunted Treasure Chests



Undaunted Armor set earned from dungeons (Thumbnails)



Imperial Daedric armor from Imperial City

Dwemer Armor (Heavy & Light)

 

Adventure Zone: Murkmire



Thumbnails of concept art.

• .....
  
  
  • 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

(Thumbnails to click)



Some concept art of the zone scenery (Thumbnails to click)





And a video to enjoy :)

 

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

And a video to enjoy :)

 

Q&A

• Werewolves are in need of updates. Are there changes in places for werewolves?
  • Nick: Yes, absolutely. There are two phases of changes. For starters, we are going to balance the ultimate – decrease cost, increase damage etc. In the second phase we are going to add in more active abilities.
• Who is the old man that appeared in the spellcrafting presentation?
  • Nick: That is a special stone mason the mage guild has conscripted. There are some lore around it and you can get his costume.
• Barbershop?
  • Paul: We like to introduce a RP mechanic where players can earn these and give them to each other. It is coming, just a question of how and when.
• When you stealing, is the bounty timer based?
  • Paul: If you incur a high bounty, you will remain Kill on sight until you pay the bounty.
• Why do some quests get broken from one patch to another
  • Rich: Tons of moving parts. When we fix a quest in one area, it won’t work everytime and under all conditions/load.
• When are the new facial animations coming?
  • Jesse: Unknown at this point. The technology is there, it is a production issue due to all the dialogues. Probably months of additional work. We can’t commit to a time period at the moment.
• Plan to adding dueling feature?
  • Paul: Dueling system sound simply but it is not very simple. There are a lot of things to consider. When the Justice system is place, maybe we can get it in place.
• What are the future plans for the PvP system
  • Brain: Imperial City coming, more gear, figuring out how to continue to progress your character, more consumables to use.
• When will we see minigames?
  • Matt: Horse racing, better fishing system. We will reserve it until we have more information.
• New crafting motifs?
  • Paul: Yes
• Plans for stamina builds to compare with magicka builds
  • Nick: Medium armor already have a stamina reduction. Some stamina weapon abilities will get damage boosted. Doing some balance between spell crit and weapon crit. For ultimates it will pick to see the higher of the weapon attack speed or spell attack speed.
• Plans for Roleplayers in the future?
  • Paul: Justice System, Guild traders. Ongoing effort overtime.
• Respec cost too high
  • Nick: For the first week of update 3, we will make respec extremely cheap (i.e. 100 gold). After that we will reduce the respec cost by 25%. We will also add in respec for just your morphs that is really cheap (100x cheaper than a full respec).
• PvPers have an advantage in PvE content? (i..e PvP passives) What are you doing about it?
  • Nick: We don’t have any specific changes but we will look into it.
  • Paul: We don’t want this game to be one where if you are good in PvE, you can’t do PvP.
• Plans to discourage Emperor trading?
  • Brian: Condense amount of campaigns from 10 to 5. We are increase the amount of AP need to become emperor (increased to 50k AP from 10k AP). Adding faster decay on siege weapons. Adding in 3 day lockout in home and guest campaign switching.
• Are the spelltomes consumable? Can you make stamina abilities?
  • Nick: yes they are consumable. We have other plans for stamina abilities but we have a spell you can use to gain stamina (magicka to stamina).

 

Now if MindArk and Planet Partners of Entropia Universe alike could do a development roadmap with a demonstration from the developers of what they are working on (WIP) to provide to their customer base like the majority of other games do as part of their professional standards in keeping it real, rather than a whole lot of hot air each time, then things like the customer's attitude towards MindArk and other customers who use the service would be a lot more positive.

In the meantime there are lots of exciting things to look forward to coming soon in ESO.
Cheers.

 

Content Update # 3 is now in place along with the mini-update that fixed the guild function issues.

Enjoy! Time to get some