Garbrac

Next month, Elder Scrolls Online officially adopts a hybrid revenue system that will include the moniker "Tamriel Unlimited". We caught up to the ESO team to ask a few questions about the upcoming changes and what it means for players.

With patch 1.6 finally on the PTS and our review of its major changes being out, I think it’s time I sit down and have a one sided discussion with Zenimax. I’ve sat idly by enjoying all the fantastic content and changes that ZOS has been doing to the game but there are areas of The Elder Scrolls Online that haven’t seen any love since the launch of the game almost a year ago and they need to be addressed.

With patch 1.6 now live on the Private Test Server (PTS) we finally get to enjoy all the exciting changes we’ve been speaking about for the last few months. In this preview I’ll be taking a look at the Champion system, Justice System, and I’m even going to discuss some of the aspects of PvP that will be changing.

With the announcement of The Elder Scrolls rebranding itself to The Elder Scrolls: Tamriel Unlimited and utilizing a Buy to Play model a lot of people are questioning if it is worth subscribing to the game after March 17th, myself included. Let me explain why.

At the end of December Zenimax announced what players are going to receive when the champion system is released, 30 champion points. If you had at least one character veteran rank 1 or higher you’d receive 30 champion points when 1.6 goes live. It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent the last 9 months playing the same veteran 14 character, or even had eight veteran rank 14 characters, you’d still receive 30 champion points. As you can see there is a major flaw in this.

Seriously, it’s the end of the year already? This year has flown by! It feels like it was just a couple of days ago I was helping to slay the werewolves of Camlorn and when it fact it was roughly 270 days ago. Time really flies when you’re enjoying every moment of it. Well almost every moment of it, waiting in the LFG queue is never an enjoyable experience. Within these 38 weeks since the game released, so much has changed and improved.

This past weekend the crew behind Trials of Ascension did a live AMA where they covered a lot of information that hasn’t previously been discussed. While the AMA was being streamed, it felt more like a developer play session that it did an AMA. The reason I say this is because the developers talked among themselves more than to the audience. But that’s not a bad thing. As the discussion progressed they delved deeper into topics at hand, instead of providing simple short and concise answers.

The Elder Scrolls Online has had one major problem that has been a major focus ever since Patch 5.0, unimaginable Looking for Group (LFG) queue times. When update 5 was released, with it came scaling dungeons and daily dungeon pledges. These two new features had players wanting to do dungeons more often and of course that meant more players putting themselves into the LFG queue, only to be faced with endless queue times.

If you’re like me, you might have never heard of this game before, but you’re going to be glad you’ve heard of it now. If you like Voxel Sandbox games, you should definitely check this one out. It might appear to be a typical game in this genre, at least from the outside, but once you step into Oort Online your eyes will be awestruck by the outstanding graphics. Add to it the community driven development and this game definitely has the potential to be a major contender.

Update 6 is a big one. Not only is it going to have the Provisioning Revamp, introduction to the collector system, and even the Champion System, but one addition to Update 6 is one that hasn’t received a lot of attention. One I think is a pretty awesome change. In Update 6, as long as everything goes according to plan, we’re going to be seeing some massive combat animation changes.

As much as this is an Elder Scrolls Online column, the topic I want to discuss branches itself across almost every MMO. It is something that no game has really figured out how to master. What I would like to discuss this week is Private Test Servers (PTS).

Patch 1.5.2 went live on Monday and with it came some major improvements that we already knew about. But it also included a few changes that we did not expected. Were these unexpected changes good or bad?

One thing that has always bugged me about The Elder Scrolls Online was the lack of a need to login to do something. As much as it bugs me to admit this, World of Warcraft did it right with dailies. Dailies give an additional reason to login every day, and give another avenue for players to feel like they are progressing. At least they had that in WoW, no so much ESO. However patch 1.5 is trying to change that.

“By order of the Jarl, stop right there!” Even though I have not logged nearly as many hours as a lot of people, that phrase is one I know all too well. Anytime I’ve tried to be a sneaky thief, there was always a guard right near me ready to confiscate my stolen good. From what I saw at the Guild Summit, this phrase (or variations of it) will be playing a lot through my speakers as I play The Elder Scrolls Online.

Taking a game that has been in development for seven years, and within seven months of release completely changing the “end game progression” would be a hard thing to do. The amount of pride that would need to be swallowed is unfathomable. But that is something Zenimax has, and is, doing.