Earlier this year, ZeniMax revealed Elder Scrolls Online had registered over 24 million accounts since its launch. The game is also closing in on $2 billion in customer spending. It was nominated for a BAFTA award last year, and the studio says it is the largest cross-platform RPG on consoles.
As the game now celebrates its 10th anniversary with the addition to GeForce NOW and with a free play event live through April 9 on all platforms, ZeniMax Online also discussed the upcoming launch of the new Chapter, Gold Road, due on June 3 on PC and Mac and June 18 for PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
As previously announced, it will include the usual set of features fans have come to expect:
- 30 hours of story content.
- The West Weald zone (comprised of three different-looking biomes: The Gold Road, the Valenwood Annexation, and the Colovian Highlands).
- The hub city of Skingrad, which Elder Scrolls buffs will remember from Oblivion
- The new Lucent Citadel 12-player endgame Trial. Similar in scope to the Sanity’s Edge Trial added with Necrom, it is an ancient but recently rediscovered Daedric vault that houses a dangerous energy resource. Keshargo, a Khajiit member of the Scribes of Mora, will ask players to remove it. Rich Lambert said the team outdid themselves with Lucent Citadel, achieving things he didn’t believe possible in the engine and introducing brand new mechanics.
- A new type of World Event
- Lots of new loot, achievements, and earnable cosmetics
- New Music
There are, however, two changes. The first is that the two new companions won’t arrive with the Gold Road Chapter, having been moved to the Q4 update. The second is the big new feature of the Chapter, the Scribing system, a precursor to the fabled Spellcrafting that was promised shortly after the launch of Elder Scrolls Online.
The developers allowed press and the influencers to check out the new system by accessing a preview server where we could select a maxed-out character with Scribing already unlocked (you will have to get through a storyline first when playing on the live servers).
Scribing takes place at the altar of the Scholarium. Upon interacting with this crafting station, you’ll be presented with a list of the Grimoires you have at your disposal. These are the base skills you are then able to tweak.
There’s only one per weapon type. Dual Wield gets Traveling Knife, a thrown enchanted dagger with a range of 15 meters that returns to the player after a short delay, hitting additional enemies in its path. Vault is the Bow’s skill, effectively a backflip executed after firing at your own feet. The healers’ Restoration Staff gets Mender’s Bond, a tether between you and an ally that lasts for 12 seconds in a range of 20 meters. Elemental Explosion, the Destruction Staff’s skill, conjures a magic blast of a 10-meter radius in a range of 28 meters. Tanks will have Shield Throw, a Captain America-like skill where the shield is thrown and returns to your character, for their One Handed + Shield builds. Lastly, Smash drags your Two-Handed weapon on the ground and then hits an 8-meter cone in front of the player.
Then there are the World, Guild, and Alliance skill lines that Elder Scrolls Online are very familiar with. Soul Magic within the World section is the only skill line to get two Scribing skills: Soul Burst is an area of effect explosion centered around the character with a radius of 8 meters, while Wield Soul launches concentrated magic to a target at up to 28 meters. The Fighters Guild’s skill, Torchbearer, conjures a flaming torch that sweeps three times in front of the player in an 8-meter radius. The Mages Guild’s skill, Contingency, triggers runes if you cast any ability while under half Magicka or Stamina. Lastly, the Assault skill line gets Trample, which conjures a charging horse.
When you go to customize these skills, you have three Scripts, starting with Focus, which determines if you want to deal damage (and if so, which types), heal, get a damage shield, generate Ultimate, or inflict effects like taunt, immobilize, pull, knockback and the like. Then there’s Signature, which adds things like damage over time, healing over time, life siphon, snare, damage reduction, resource restoration, but also very specific things depending on the skill line. For example, Soul Collapse consumes a Soul Gem to deal 8% of the enemy’s Max Health as Oblivion Damage. It also deals up to 100% more damage to foes under 50% health; this part of the effect can only occur every 3 seconds. Soul Infusion, on the other hand, generates 3 Ultimate up to once every 3 seconds. Both Soul Collapse and Soul Infusion consume a Soul Gem from the player’s inventory. Lastly, there are the Affix Scripts, which may grant your character a Minor/Major buff or inflict a Minor/Major debuff, or set them off balance.
Do note that there are limitations to the system. For instance, upon selecting the healing Focus Script for one of the Soul skills, the Damage Over Time and Soul Collapse Signature Scripts were blocked from selection, and the same goes for the Breach, Defile, and Cowardice Affix Scripts. This is likely due to balance reasons, and it makes sense.
Even so, the developers said there are over four thousand combinations available. However, in practice, I noticed that some made way more sense than others. While this is somewhat expected, it’s good to go in understanding that this is not at all a completely freeform system. Still, it will almost assuredly increase the variety of player builds, which is always a win in my book.
The absence of any Scribing skills for the Alliance War support skill line as well as the Psijic and Undaunted Guild skill lines stings a bit, but ZeniMax will likely add those at some point in the future, as hinted in the Q&A below. Scribing had to start somewhere, after all. One thing I’ll say is that the animations of these Scribing skills are not always up to par with the others in the game, though that may change by the time the Gold Road Chapter is released in June.
By the way, there’s also a visual customization side that comes with the new system. The preview server allowed us to automatically unlock the following cosmetic changes for existing skills:
- Barrier Blue
- Cleave Red
- Dawnbreaker Dark Purple
- Entropy Yellow
- Expert Hunter Red
- Force Shock Negative
- Grand Healing Purple
- Low Slash Orange
- Magelight Green
- Meteor Orange, Poison Arrow Red
- Regeneration Blue
- Reverse Slash Red
- Snipe Red
- Soul Trap Purple
- Trap Beast Illuminating
- Vigor Blue
- Wall of Elements Purple
- Warhorn Orange
- Weakness to Elements Purple
- Whirlwind Orange
With the 10th anniversary of Elder Scrolls Online, were there any discussions about an ESO Classic server?
ESO Classic is interesting and we’ve definitely talked about it a lot internally. My snarky response is always that nobody liked ESO at launch. I mean, a lot of people did like it, but it wasn’t as successful as it is now, so I don’t think that people would be super excited to go back to 2014 ESO.
WCCFTECH – Is there a limit on how many skills created with Scribing you can equip at any one time?
Well, you only have five slots on each bar. Actually, technically six, because there’s the Ultimates. That’s the limit.
Do people need to own the Gold Road Chapter to get Scribing?
Yes. You unlock the Scribing skill line by doing the quests, and you can only get that quest through the chapter.
What were the criteria for a bad ability in Scribing when it comes to that compatibility filter?
The one example I’ll give is in that healing example, it was an AOE heal. It would be really bad if it was also an AOE damage ability. That would just be broken. Players would love it, but balance-wise, it would just be absolutely broken. It’s a lot of those kinds of rules as we’re trying to establish how that stuff works.
WCCFTECH – Are skills created with Scribing meant to be every bit as powerful as the best ones already available in Elder Scrolls Online? Would it be problematic for you if many builds featured these custom skills?
I mean, the hope is builds incorporate these skills, right? That’s why we’re building the system. They are balanced to standards that we’ve already got in place. But the difference between the scribed abilities and those we’ve already given is they’re a lot more customizable.
If your build, for whatever reason, doesn’t have Minor Force, you can put that in there with one of these abilities. There’s Class Scripts that do unique things based on the class. So the Arcanist one, if you put a class script on there, that ability will generate a Crux for you. So, if you don’t want to use any of the Crux spender or builders that we’ve already got with the Arcanist, you have this here. It just offers a lot more flexibility to help plug holes in your build.
What’s the cost of changing a Scribing skill?
That’s what the Inks are for. You can get them in multiple places. They drop in the world, and you get a bunch for completing quests. We wanted there to be a little friction, but we didn’t it to be so painful that people would hoard these things and never change their abilities. That’s the balance point that we’re looking at.
Are there any Ultimate abilities available with Scribing?
I think I’ll leave that up to you all to jump in and start looking at. Um, I purposely didn’t go through and give an exhaustive list of things, uh, because I really wanted people to go in and start playing and experimenting with them. Definitely take a look and see what you think. In particular if you’re really interested in seeing some of the fun things that you can do with it, take a look at Trample and what it does and compare that to which mounts that you have favorited and see what happens.
Can you scribe other skill trees like Undaunted?
Just the 11 ones we have for launch. There’s 4,000 combinations right now. We couldn’t do everything. The plan is to continue to support this like we do with all our other systems in the future and add to it.
Are you able to compare the size of the new zone with any previous Elder Scrolls Online zones? Is it similar in size to, say, Necrom or High Isle?
It’s almost exactly the same size as our last few Chapters. It is one big zone, we didn’t split it up amongst things, and there’s tons of stuff to do. I only touched on the fact that there’s 30 hours of story content in there, but it’s got all of the trappings of a Chapter.
There’s world bosses and delves and public dungeons. I didn’t really touch on the new world events, which are called Miramore Incursions. They are really cool and different from anything we’ve done before. So yeah, there’s, there’s a ton of stuff in this chapter.
Since in our preview we’ll have Scribing already unlocked, we won’t have a great idea of the progression. Can you talk about roughly how much time and effort it might take for someone to reach the point where we would be at the level we will be in the preview?
It’s a pretty involved storyline. I think it’s probably going to take you six or seven hours to play through, but there’s also some other components to this. For instance, the weapon skill lines, you can’t scribe them until you’ve actually unlocked the skill line.
Is there any new info you can give us about the PvP updates coming in the final quarter of this year to Elder Scrolls Online?
Right now, we’re focused on the Chapter and trying to get all that done and out there. We will talk about it soon. Just be patient a little bit longer.
Besides the color change, will the styling feature have other visual changes players can add in the future?
Maybe. At launch it’s color, but part of the reason we built the system the way we did was so that we can expand it to things like that. A lot of questions we get from players are, I’m a Warden and I’ve had the same bear forever. Can we get different pets? Sorcerers are like, hey, that Winged Twilight is getting old. I would love to see something else.
That’s the idea behind the system. When we do that, if we do that, is unknown right now, but we’ve built the styling system to incorporate all of that feedback.
If, say, a skill like Wall of Elements is scribed with a new effect, would a unique like the Maelstrom Arena Flame Staff keep its effect, or will it also change?
So, if you put the Wall of Elements style, the purple style on there, that will take priority. It won’t actually change the physical properties of the ability, it will just change the visuals.
Since the West Weald was shown in Oblivion, how closely did you look at Oblivion’s depiction when developing Gold Road? Are there familiar landmarks or references you wanted to bring in that we can look out for?
There certainly are. Obviously, Skingrad is one of those, because that’s the hub city. We spent a long time going through that stuff and looking at what it could be. I’m really interested to see what players start to think about and postulate in terms of some of the lore that we put in here.
Obviously this jungle has kind of sprung up overnight. If you’re into the lore side of things, there are books that say Cyrodiil was a jungle at some point. There’s lots of neat, interesting tidbits that we’ve put into there that we want players to explore and interpret on their own.
You’ve previously said you’re aware of a lack of guild content in Elder Scrolls Online. Are there any updates in mind for this year, or are they on their way further down the road?
Nothing that I can think of.
Was it always the plan to go to this location?
No. A lot of that starts to shake out organically based on the realities of the story that we want to tell. One of the ways we try to figure out where we go next and the story we want to tell is we look back at what we’ve done.
We’re just coming off Necrom, which has this cosmic horror vibe. It’s kind of alien, Cthulhu-like if you will, and we wanted to do the opposite of that, something that was a little bit more grounded in the world, at least on the visual side of things. We ended up falling in love with this West Weal location.
As we were going through that, one of the things we started talking about really, really early on is, well, if there’s going to be forests, how do we make them cool? We’ve done a ton of that over the last 10 years and walking around in this giant green thing all the time is monotonous and gets boring. That’s when we landed on the autumn colors. That Fall setting just hits home and hits hard when you go in and look at that stuff.
Are Scribing Grimoires earned across all zones, or are they all in West Weald, or random drops anywhere, etc.?
You will get a bunch by completing the quest line. There’s also a vendor that unlocks that you can buy them from, and then, yeah, Scripts and Grimoires can drop basically anywhere after that.
WCCFTECH – I understand there aren’t major tech advancements in Gold Road like NVIDIA DLSS and DLAA or AMD FSR2 in previous Elder Scrolls Online Chapters and updates. Is there anything on that front coming in the future?
We’ve added all kinds of rendering tech over the years, and we’re going to continue to do that. We want to keep ESO as modern as we can. One of the things we actually have been focusing on is kind of shoring up that technology, but also making it more sustainable. We just went through a big initiative to reduce our carbon footprint. We looked hard at how much power is being consumed, where it’s being consumed, why it’s being consumed, and that’s where some of the things that shook out with Update 41, where now if you go AFK for five minutes your screen will darken on PC. That significantly reduces power when you’re not playing. We have done things like in the UI that reduce the amount of energy that your PC or your console uses. We’ve been working on that kind of stuff, but we are working on other technology, too.
Are there plans for additional Scribing cosmetics becoming available in the Crown Store?
Yes. At launch, our goal was to get the system out in a really, really good state That first batch of styles is 100 percent earnable in the game. But yeah, there will be other cosmetics that shake out over time, ones that you can earn and ones that you can purchase.
Do you have a favorite key moment in development or a favorite Chapter update over the 10-year journey of Elder Scrolls Online so far?
Oh, wow. That’s a lot. Yes, of course. There’s been so many cool memories over the years. Probably the most proud moment was actually getting to launch. We worked on this game for seven years before we launched it. We learned a ton. And the launch was just the start. We had to learn and iterate on the game and choose what the game was going to be instead of this kind of weird hybrid that it was at launch. But if I have to pick a favorite moment, it’s probably Orsinium.
That was the very first thing that I got to work on as the creative director. I had been the Lead Content Designer before that, so Orsinium was kind of my baby and I got to shepherd that all the way through. That was awesome and cool to do that for the first time.
There’s tons more. Finally getting Dragons in with Elsweyr was a big one. Ithelia is huge – we got to design a brand new Daedra Prince.
You’ve mentioned before it would be a miss to not include romance options in Elder Scrolls Online at some point. Is there anything we can expect on that front this year?
It would absolutely be a miss if we didn’t do it at some point.
Are there any plans for a second Maelstrom Arena?
That’s an interesting question. Maybe? Infinite Archive was kind of the next Maelstrom Arena, taking lessons learned from that. The Maelstrom Arena was actually supposed to be both a solo and duo and group arena. That was what it was originally pitched as. We just didn’t have the technology or the time to do it that way, so it became a solo arena.
Infinite Archive, I think, turned out spectacularly. It allowed us to do things and reuse some things that we spent a great deal of time and effort on and allowed you to get that smaller scale grouping in there. But yeah, I wouldn’t say no to Not having another maelstrom marina. It’s some of my favorite content.
Thank you for your time.
