The Elder Scrolls Online: The Road Ahead
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1724
ZeniMax Online Studios president Matt Firor has penned a new blog post that focuses on "the road ahead" for The Elder Scrolls Online, in particular the state of the game's ongoing beta testing, the improvements they've made based on player feedback, their plans for the launch later this year, and more. A few such paragraphs:
While surveys have shown that players really enjoy the game as they progress, particularly after level 10, we heard from some of you that the beginning of the game left you feeling too constrained. The game was originally designed that way so that new players were not overwhelmed, and could learn the game before dealing with more challenging situations. But because ESO is about choice, we made adjustments to those opening hours of the game in response to the beta feedback. After exiting the modified, more streamlined tutorial in Coldharbour, new characters now wake up in the first major city of their respective Alliance as opposed to being forced to go through the starter islands. We're adjusting the level curve around those cities so that you'll have plenty to do and discover without running into enemies that are too powerful at the start. If you want to go back and experience these islands (which have been re-leveled to provide a regular content experience) the option is there, but players who prefer can just start exploring the rest of Tamriel.
Another piece of your feedback we've implemented addresses our combat system. We continue to identify ways to make melee combat feel even more substantial. In addition to many tweaks and changes to animations and audio, we've added player collision with NPCs, which means your character will no longer be able to run through NPC enemies. This is a frequently requested feature that we think succeeds in making melee combat more visceral and exciting.
In addition to gameplay changes, your time in testing also helps us to address and plan for less obvious improvements as well. The worldwide interest in ESO is gratifying but staggering, and each test we run allows us to prepare for a large number of players during our launch phase, and allocate resources as needed. We have constructed large datacenters in North America and in Europe to support this game. North America is fully operational and our European datacenter will be soon, but we have found during our beta tests that the location of these servers is not going to affect the gameplay experience. Our testing has now confirmed that millions of players from Europe (and beyond) can play on our North American server and experience ESO as it was designed without latency or lag problems. (Please note that users in our last scale test had lag issues, especially in Cyrodiil, but this was a game bug, not a location issue all players, no matter where, experienced that particular problem). So, regardless of a player's location or the datacenter being used, the confirmed efficiency of our platform architecture will prevent anyone from enjoying a gameplay advantage. And as both datacenters become fully operational, we will continue to add capacity to meet the demands of gamers worldwide.
We are doing everything that we can to ensure that every player in North America, Europe, Oceania and many places beyond, will have a polished low-latency launch experience. Based on the existing number of our beta signups and because we anticipate that the ESO community will continue to grow after launch, we plan to add capacity to keep up with demand in both our North American and European datacenters. The North American and European megaservers will first be hosted in North America. This gives us a more efficient way to address any platform issues that may arise at launch. After the initial launch phase is over, we will move the European megaserver to the European datacenter but this will be a seamless migration for users, without additional downloads, logins or action required.
