Hey everyone,

I was at PAX east yesterday and I talked to a few people from ZeniMax. This is not the norm for me some I'm way excited.
If you want to read about it I wrote up a long version on my Ign blog. Apparently I can't like that so here's a copy/paste. I hope the formatting holds up.

under blogs Lukard

Why I'm Sold on The Elder Scrolls OnlineMarch 23, 2013 by Lukard


First, if you've never been to a Con' you need to go to PAX Prime, PAX East, PAX Aus and/or PAX Dev. What do these shows have to do with liking an MMO, just stick with me for a quick story of how waiting for a friend turns into a Q&A with ZeniMax.


We were at The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) booth at PAX East waiting for a friend who was playing the Demo. We are standing next to the bank-style barriers on the edge of the carpeted area. (Pro-Tip carpeted areas typically have some padding under them, so stand on those when waiting, for a small but significant break from the knee-murdering concrete floor.) While we are waiting -for a guy who was supposed to be in the short line for a free shirt, but ended up in the long line to play the game- an appropriately dressed booth babe comes over to ask us if we have any questions. I immediately said, "Can I have my friend back", but I was thinking, "I doubt you have the answers to my questions". She jokingly said, "In about 20 minutes." It was about that long till the show floor closed. Regardless, another guy I was with asked something to the effect of, Whats the balance between twitch combat and auto fighting. I mentally cringed at this geek-level question because I expected an uniformed answer. Her reply was in essence that you need to be facing the enemy and have the reticule roughly on them and your character will auto swing. There are no head shots just for targeting the enemy's dome-piece. However, skills including dodge and block are based on your timing. You will have a hard time beating an enemy on your level if you don't block or dodge properly.


At this point realized that perhaps I was mistaken about the booth babe thing... it turns out that Jessica is the Community Manager at ZeniMax. Sorry about that. With our knew found treasure trove of knowledge we descended into a frenzy of questioning. Here's some of that dialogue.


"Can a faction be completely eliminated?" The home areas of the three faction are safe from invasion by other players, however in the contested area of Cyrodiil you have to fight to take the land, keeps, supply routes, and artifacts of power, in the ultimate hope of taking the crown. Your faction can be totally pushed out of Cyrodiil.


At this point I said it sounds a lot like Dark Age of Camelot; the last MMO that I truly loved. Jessica then blew my mind when she told me that one of the Devs had worked on Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC). Eventually, I asked, "What good can a level 10 do against a level 50 in PvP?" She had not played a ton of the PvP, but tell us some interesting facts; the giant siege seen here was basically everyone in the company testing things out. This is all in game footage, thought from what I hear some media types doubted this. Also Brian has defeated a Level a 50 at level 10. At this point Jessica goes and gets Brian (Brian Wheeler, Lead PvP Designer) to tell us more about the PvP.


Brian is very friendly and doesn't seem to mind taking the time to talk to non-industry people. We quickly end up talking about Camelot. Again, this makes me very happy. My friend asks about the role of a individual in the grand scheme of things. The game is designed so that everyone can contribute to the war effort in PvP. Even if you cannot take an entire keep as there are always NPC guards, you can disrupt supply routes or affect other support structures. Low level players will be bolstered in hit-points stamina and magika, but not in skills when they enter PvP areas. This allows every one at least have a chance. I also asked about a single group taking a small keep as we had done in DAoC. He did not seem too pleased that such things had occurred, but didn't directly say so. He is expecting about 12-15 people to need around 15-20 minutes to take a keep. Keeps have the ability to function as respawn points, but not while they are flagged as under siege.

So my story got a little long, one reason you need to go to a PAX event is the opportunity to have personal access to the developers of awesome games. We also talked about lots of random things like why my friend in the demo had trouble killing a mud crab, siege weapons (its okay if you build them at the bottom of the hill not at the gate, unlike in some games which shall remain nameless), the "superserver", channels and instances. Most importantly which faction was best on the Percival server.

Question/comments? Drop 'em below.

~Luke
@zzluke



thanks

Hmmm, i commend you for posting but couldn't you have made the thread a bit more presentable in a question answer type of format.

It's a bit jumbled.

If this is actually true, I feel REALLY bad for the Daggerfall Covenant players at this point. =(

Nice you got to talk to them.

Pity there is auto-attack, I hope that was misinterpreted and you have to click to attack every time. Or maybe that's something that should be confirmed/addressed...

I assumed you could be pushed all the way out of Cyrodiil, as it usually is in RvR. Will be fun to lock down all the keeps from the DC and AD...hehehe.

My eyes hurt. But thanks for your story, Luke!

Did you get the impression that they will give us any official information during this weekend, or is that restricted to visitors of PAX East?

Thank you Lukard for taking the time to post this. I feel like I got to share a bit in your excitement of talking to some really cool people.

My stepfather got really lucky and was randomly pulled into an empty seat. I asked him how it was and he said the graphics were incredible and the gameplay was good. I really can't wait.

The T-shirts they gave out are really nice too, so soft and comfy.

Nice post. Nothing new info-wise but always good to read an anecdote about someone talking to a dev. Now, about that missing video footage...hahaha

Why, don't think they'll be a lot of them? I personally love Bretons and Orcs, so I'll roll one of those.

They typically have the least numbers in all the polls.

Nice report, I thank you for you time to type this all up. A* for you good sir.

I'd also offer you a fish stick, but no one gave me one when i joined these forums, so, um, sorry!

From all the survey i've seen it's the AD which will be the under dog, i know on this site the AD has pull back but many other sites have them way down. If you look at the reddit survey that went out across many fan sites the AD is pretty low.

I'm a daggerfall player and I can GARANTUEE you, we will not be pushed out of cyrodiil!

I sort of remember a conversation about players picking the most "badass" thing, but that doesnt have to be true!

alot of players have all kinds of reasons for picking something, I'm guessing the ES fans will pick a race based on their past experiences, maybe EP will be dominating the first couple of weeks, but it'll quickly balance out!

I'm VERY skeptical of their side being popular. I broke it down like this:

For new players:
They will see three factions:
Badass faction - Vikings, red-eye dark elves, lizard men
Pretty Faction - Elves, more Elves, cat people
Boring/normal faction - White humans, Black humans, green humans with bad teeth.

For those new to ES via Skyrim
"I want to go to SKYRIM!!!"

For Morrowind fans
"I want to go back to Morrowind!"


Obviously there are many ES players familiar with the lore that know what an Orc or a Redguard is really about... but all of that is PURELY lore-based. A new player will not really care much about the race lore when choosing their first character if it the race doesn't visually appeal to them first. 1st impressions and all that.

So, yeah - I don't believe Daggerfall Covenant will do well population wise. Sure, some will play it... but I'm POSITIVE it will be in the vast minority faction. Every recent MMORPG today indicates that as such that today's gamers mostly go for the "badass" group...

In many ways, that's why I kinda want to play Daggerfall Covenant. I'm a fan of underdogs, and the majority of the short-sighted [censored] goofballs wanting to go "RAAARH! I"M A VIKING!" will go Ebonheart Pact.

WHat I'm REALLY hoping is that they have some sort of balancing thing when it comes to PVP in Cyrodill right from the get-go. Zeni/Beth has proven now that they're very up and watching player feedback, so they HAVE to be more than certain in knowing the Ebonheart pact is going to be MASSIVELY overbalanced over the other two.

Each campaign is limited to 2,000 players. So if you are talking about your own campaign or slice of the megaserver, you really can't make an educated guess which faction will be the dominant faction. It will depend on which faction is more organized. So if the slice you land in has a guild with 300 hardcoe PvP members playing for the AD, and the other two factions don't have any guilds acting as a counterweight, then AD should rule on that slice.

If ZOS tallys points across the entire megaserver then the faction with the most players in Cyrodiil should be dominant.