MMOs—particularly the long-lived ones—have a bit of a design problem. Given they're worlds built for all sorts of players, they need to have enough bite to challenge vets while also not scaring away the greenhorns. Which is fine, you can have hardcore raids: Except even the most skilled players aren't going to be spending their time there.
They'll be in the overworld, which—given it makes up most of the game—can't be too challenging. But if the overworld is boring, then people will… y'know, get bored. If I'm asleep at my keyboard for eight out of 10 hours, that's not exactly great design.
This is something the Elder Scrolls Online has been struggling with for years—and, alongside plenty of other things, it's finally being addressed. Towards the tail-end of Season 0 of its new seasonal structure, the game will be getting overworld difficulty functions.
I got to speak with game director Nick Giacomini recently, and he described the same issue with balancing in any large-scale MMO: "That is very difficult to balance—it's impossible to. In the past, we have skewed therefore towards 'Well, this is more casual then'. But understandably, for a player that is looking for something more challenging, that is a less-than-satisfying experience to go through.
This doesn't mean that we're always going to release small things, but for something that's really important to us like this, we didn't want to take a big swing and miss and be off the mark."
As far as those choices go, there'll be a handful of opt-in difficulty settings that provide more rewards for players who go in for the challenge. Giacomini, however, is keen to emphasise that the dev team's starting from ground zero and working its way up:
"In terms of the specifics, we're starting really small. And I do want to set expectations with this, because there's a lot that we want to do with this, and we will be doing more with it … [But] instead of 'let's hold all this back until we've done everything', [we've gone] 'let's start with this piece and then continue to add to it as time goes on.'"
The goal is to flesh out the game's difficulty settings by judging player feedback, explains Giacomini: "This is just like our first foray into this, and we want to see how players interact with it, and what they want to see from it after getting to experience some version of this. And then we can turn this into, over time, a more fully-fledged and robust system."
That doesn't mean all features are going to work on this piecemeal release schedule, mind—just that overworld difficulty's been such a big deal for ESO for so long that the dev team really wants to nail it:
"This doesn't mean that we're always going to release small things, but for something that's really important to us like this, we didn't want to take a big swing and miss and be off the mark."
That's all in-keeping with what both Giacomini and executive producer Susan Kath told me about their hopes for the game's 30-year future—which you can read in the link I just shared. It sounds like ZeniMax is determined to turn a corner, starting with some of the playerbase's oldest gripes.
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