The Elder Scrolls Online - Scalebreaker DLC and Update 23 Preview, Rich Lambert Interview
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Scalebreaker, the next DLC for The Elder Scrolls Online, was announced at this year's E3. The DLC promises to introduce two new challenging dragon-themed dungeons to the game, and if you'd like to learn more about them, and the DLC's accompanying free Update 23 while you're at it, then you should check out this article on the official website. An excerpt:
NEW SEASON OF THE DRAGON STORIES
With Scalebreaker, you can experience two new stories that explore the aftermath of the Elsweyr Chapter and the consequences of the emergence of Dragons from the Halls of Colossus. Both new dungeons feature adventures that are related to the epic year-long narrative, but they also stand alone as unique stories in their own right.
Deep within the ancient ruins of Moongrave Fane, a former member of the Dragonguard and his fellow vampires of the Hollowfang Clan have felled and captured a Dragon. However, they wish to do more than simply destroy the humbled beast, as the clan prepares a ritual to drain the Dragon of its blood and gain its terrible power!
Neighboring Elsweyr, Grahtwood’s Elden Root tree is threatened by a deathly corruption that originates from the nearby jungles of Tenmar and the Lair of Maarselok. Grahtwood’s protectors have tried and failed to destroy the Dragon at the center of the blight, so a truce has been called between the forest spirit Selene and her captor, the warlock Carindon. Together, and with your help, they must attempt to save the Elden Root tree before the corruption can spread.
You can complete the Lair of Maarselok and Moongrave Fane dungeons in Normal, Veteran, and Veteran Hard Mode difficulties. Within these four-player PvE challenges, you can uncover unique rewards such as powerful new item sets and amazing collectibles, including furnishings, mementos, and a pet! In addition, simply by entering either of these two new dungeons, you earn the Dread-Aurelian Mask style page.
UPDATE 23’S QUALITY-OF-LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
Arriving free in tandem with the new DLC dungeon pack, Update 23 features useful quality-of-life improvements in addition to the usual fixes and balance changes.
Multi-crafting
With multi-crafting, you can now craft, deconstruct, and refine multiple items at once. Simply indicate how many times you wish to perform the crafting action and it instantly does it all! This is great if you’re working to quickly improve your crafting levels and clear out your inventory, and you can make fast work of stocking up on potions or completing writs.
Multi-bidding for Guild Trader Locations
With Update 23, you can have your Guild bid on up to 10 different Guild Trader locations each week. Priority is given to the location with the highest bid, and if you miss your first preference, the system checks your second, third, and so on. Once you win a bid on a Guild Trader, all other bids are refunded back to your Guild bank. With this addition, it is easier to ensure you get a Guild Trader location you like (as long as you have the gold to bid)!
Undaunted Keys & Rewards Update
This new update also makes it easier to manage your Undaunted Keys and provides more ways to spend them. With Update 23, Undaunted Keys are now listed as currency, meaning they are in the Currency section of your inventory instead of individual inventory items. Never again will you lose track of your keys! In addition, to acquire Monster shoulder items, you can now receive Undaunted coffers from the different Undaunted quest NPCs instead of using the chest in the middle of each camp.
These coffers contain the usual items you receive when turning in keys, but you gain new options, too. The Undaunted NPCs also allow you to spend more keys on specific coffers from paired dungeons. The pairings are based on the dungeons’ release or relation. For example, you can spend additional keys to acquire a random coffer from the Imperial City DLC dungeons (in this case, you’d have a 50/50 chance to receive either a Molag Kena or Lord Warden shoulder). Another pairing includes the Monster shoulders from both versions of Fungal Grotto. This increases your chance of finding the Monster shoulder you want, but costs more and still has some risk.
Finally, the Undaunted NPCs also offer each month’s Monster shoulder style page for a large amount of keys, allowing you to immediately gain the shoulder style you want (but you still need to venture into the dungeons for Monster Mask styles).
Ald Carac and Istirus Outpost Update
The Battlegrounds maps Ald Carac and Istirus Outpost also received new versions for specific game modes. Now, when you play Ald Carac in Team Deathmatch, Capture the Relic, and Chaosball, you fight in a smaller, more compact version of the map. For Istirus, we also made adjustments to the map for Deathmatch and Chaosball. These changes help ensure each map is better tailored to the different game modes, always making for an exciting and action-packed game!
Then, you may also be interested in this WCCFTech interview with Rich Lambert, ZeniMax Online's creative director, where he talks about The Elder Scrolls Online's upcoming content and performance improvements among other things. For example:
All right. And, of course, there are many, many other topics within the community. So I’ll try to see which ones you can talk about. For example, I always see in the comments on Reddit lots of people recommending Elder Scrolls Online as an MMORPG because it’s got great stories. But at the same time, you’ll see someone chime in and say, the combat isn’t quite as good as it could be. So I was wondering if you have any internal plans to possibly revamp the combat system to make it a bit smoother from the animation point of view, less clunky.
Performance for us is kind of the biggest thing that we’re looking at and trying to improve right now. And that is everything from how quickly the game reacts to the client, reacts to situations. So when you press a button and you animate your character, we’re looking at those kinds of things, especially in high-density situations I think a lot of those performance issues have an impact on how combat feels, it feels a little bit slow and sluggish. In those kinds of situations, we want to fix that and make that better. Once we get performance into a good place where we’re happy with it, then we can look at other things. But until we get that better, it doesn’t matter what we do with the other stuff.
Okay. Is animation canceling going to stay in the game for the foreseeable future?
Yep, it’s part of the game at this point, because we’re, you know, five years old now. Taking that away and removing that is going to alienate a lot of our player base because they’ve learned this system and kind of how it works. I think where we can improve on that is find better ways to teach that.
There’s also a lot of concern in the community specifically concerning the performance in Cyrodiil. So what are you doing there?
That’s another big part of that. We’ve been doing audits of the entire combat system and where the non-performing areas are, that’s part of it. We’re looking at how characters load, we’re looking at our assets load. We’re working on it, there’s just no magic button that we can push that’s like, make it perform better. And always, with every update, we introduce things that try to improve performance. But we still have a long way to go.
