The Elder Scrolls Online Interview
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CGM: What are some of the most important things that needed to be done in order to have this feel like a unique experience and to give it the Elder Scrolls feel in such a different type of game.
PS: Importance of The World View this is a fancy way of saying our interface is reduced in favor of showing things in the world. Looking into the world and seeing what is happening there is more important than watching your interface. We concentrate on the audio-visual portion of the game more than text and numbers.
Active Combat. We've concentrated a lot on making sure the combat system is active and engaging. You need to react to what enemies are doing in the world, and it needs to be something that challenges you.
And a highly interactive world. A hallmark of the Elder Scrolls series is world interactivity. Picking up things scattered throughout the world, having NPCs speak to you, traps, lockpicking, and lots of other things. These are important for the feel of the world and making sure it comes to life.
Also, choice for the player. Having a very robust progression system, the ability to equip any weapon type or armor type, and making choices in quests and how you do quests really gives the player the ability to stand out in the crowd. Their experience is going to be very unique. A unique experience within the same environment can help spark good conversation with friends.
There are many other things such as our Alliance War, the way our dungeons work, our social systems, etc. that will also make the game unique. But the core building blocks of the game start with these four things.
CGM: What are some of the difficulties involved with incorporating a full first person mode into the game and why was it ultimately decided to include both POV's?
PS: When you are making a game, you have to make choices. Sometimes what you don't do is more important than what you do. I think the team always wanted first person, but initially it was much more important to get third person in the game and working well because situational awareness is a really big factor in our Alliance War and in a game where monsters can re-spawn right behind you. So that's what we did, got in a very good third person camera. But like us, first person camera view is something our community wanted. Having such strong forces, we want it and our community wants it, puts it pretty high up on the (let's do this) stack.
There are a lot of things that provide a challenge to putting in first person mode. FX are generally created assuming a certain camera position in third person; for instance you might be rooted and have chains on your feet. If you can't see your feet, you probably don't know why you can't move. The way we make our art was designed more for a pulled back camera and allowing 200 players on the screen at once. First person requires more detailed hands, weapons, etc. When we prototyped the first person mode, several of us got queasy, so we had to do some normalizing with the camera to prevent players from tossing their cookies when playing. Even simple things such as positional audio changes because the audio is no longer rooted at (the camera) so to speak. These are just a few of the challenges to make sure the camera feels right.
