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ESO and how ZeniMax Online Studios chooses where new chapters are set

Ten years is a long time to actively develop a game, especially one as ambitious and broad as ESO. Over those years we've seen many areas in Tamriel, and other places like planes of Oblivion, become opened up for exploration. From the Systres Archipelago to Vvardenfell, we've been to a ton of places on and off Nirn, and there's plenty yet to come.


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How after ten years ESO is still a "deliciously weird stew"

Elder Scrolls Online to give away free player house next month

New Elder Scrolls Online DLC hits PTS, and you can try before you buy

Follow-up Q&A from ESO 10-Year Celebration Event Community Roundtable



Hi everyone! Below are some questions we received during the in-person Community Roundtable session at the ESO 10-Year Celebration Event in April that we promised to follow up with answers. We hope you find these answers helpful!

Q: Has there been any consideration for guild mounts that show off the guild tabard in some way? (Maybe a raised banner?) What would that take?
A: We love this idea and hear it often from our many players in guilds. We’ve talked about this internally over the years as well. It’s one of those things that is quite a bit trickier on the technical side than it sounds due to how guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded, players being able to be in five guilds, etc. Know that we are aware of the desire for this as a guild feature.

Q: Have there been any discussions about integrated voice chat for PC/Mac, even if just to coordinate for instanced group content? Sometimes people don’t want to install new apps to talk with each other and instead opt to communicate via in-game chat. This is especially painful for pick-up groups.
A: While many players do opt to use Discord or other external voice chat solutions, we understand the pick-up group communication pain point. We’ve discussed integrated voice chat for PC/Mac servers and while it’s not a hard “No, never”, this is another one that requires a significant technical investment and isn’t something we currently have on the roadmap.

Q: What happens to guilds if the guild leader passes away? What is the official process for passing on the role of guild leader?
A: If a guild leader becomes inactive for at least 60 days, for any reason, someone from the guild can contact Customer Support to request transfer of the guild leader role. From there, we look to transfer the role of guild leader to the person who meets the following criteria:
  • Active within the last 60 days
  • A member of the next highest rank in the guild (one of the guild’s existing “officers”)
  • The person who has been in the guild the longest, if everyone else is the same guild rank
  • Not already the leader of another guild

We use this specific ranking system because it is fair, neutral, and allows us to be consistent. It also helps us minimize situations where guild leadership is stolen, passed to a newer member of the guild, etc. Once guild leadership is transferred, that person is welcome to pass it to someone else in the guild if they wish.

While it is a bit more involved, there is also a process in place if someone wants or needs to claim a deceased family member’s account. This process is in accordance with similar laws related to what happens to online accounts when someone passes away.

Q: Will we ever get proper guild halls in ESO?
A: We love the idea of guild halls in ESO and recognize that our community has asked for them since the game launched. We have had many internal conversations about them over the years. The current challenge is the necessary caps. Much like the item limit caps in player housing, there is also a limit to how many characters can simultaneously be in a player home (it’s 25). As with items, these caps are in place to ensure that players on lower spec machines don’t encounter significant performance issues while in player homes.

When we’ve asked ourselves in the past if a 25-person cap would feel good for a guild hall, especially if it’s a guild of 500 active players, the answer has always been no. It’s not the kind of guild hall experience we’d want to give you. So, while the idea of guild halls isn’t completely off the table, it’s important to us that we find a solution that allows us to do it right, and support the ability to have more than 25 simultaneous players in the guild hall.

Q: Do you have any plans for improved guild tools in ESO?
A: While we don’t have any specific plans to share currently, there are many things on our backlog that we’d love to do with ESO’s guild system and the related tools. Over the years, we’ve collated pages of ideas from you, our community, as well as from internal suggestions.

We do want to improve guilds, in general, and the tools that players use to run them. As with anything we add to ESO, it all comes down to time and resources, determining what will have the greatest positive impact for our players, and prioritizing against all the other items on our game features and improvements backlog.

Please keep the suggestions and ideas coming, though. We do want to hear them!

Q: Will we ever get the ability to hide our guild tabard, like we can hide helms?
A: This is another request that has come up often over the years. We understand how important this is to some of our players, especially our roleplay and ESO fashion enthusiasts! Like the suggestion for guild heraldry on mounts, this is something we do have on our backlog and want to improve the overall experience. It’s also not as simple as turning off the visibility of armor pieces such helms and shoulders, for example, due to how our guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded on the back-end.

Q: You all should send out surveys to guilds to get feedback about guild tools and what quality-of-life guild features players want. Would you consider that?
A: Great idea! Yes, we will talk with our amazing Research team about creating a guild-focused survey. Thank you for the suggestion!

One thing you all can do to help us is ask your guild members to consider opting into getting emails from us here. While we can share links to surveys on our social media channels, forums, and in Discord, being able to email it to more players who are in guilds would greatly help us hit a much broader and more diverse population.

Q: Could we get a solution for the guild MOTD text getting bumped/interrupted by automated game messages when typing it up? It’s so frustrating when that happens!
A: Thank you for sharing this with us! We agree that isn’t a great experience. We’ve passed this along to our UX and QA teams for investigation.

Q: Will we ever get Steam achievements for ESO?
A: Steam achievements require a separate (and additional) process from achievements on any other platform. Due to this, we have no current plans to add Steam achievements for ESO.

Q: We’d like to be able to get empty plots of existing player houses, or the ability to “remove” the house from the plot. Is that something you might consider?
A: Interesting suggestion! Historically, the empty plots aren’t nearly as popular as the houses; that said, we will pass this suggestion along to the Housing team for consideration. Due to how we build out the housing spaces, it is unfortunately not as simple as just “removing” the house from an existing space. Even existing player housing spaces would require additional world building where the house is/was.

Scribing’s Developers Share Their Favorite Hand-Crafted Abilities


Discover how the new Scribing System's own developers are utilizing the Gold Road feature to create custom abilities.

Arriving as part of The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road Chapter (landing June 3 on PC/Mac and June 18 for Xbox and PlayStation consoles), the Scribing System allows you to create your own custom-made abilities from a variety of initial options, called Grimoires. Be it to better serve a specific role, increase overall strength or utility, or create new opportunities for roleplay, this system grants you the power to further tailor your builds to your heart’s content.

But how will ESO’s developers make use of Scribing when the Gold Road Chapter launches in June? We reached out to a few key members of the development team behind the new system and asked them for their favorite custom-made abilities.


Gilliam—Combat Designer

As someone who spends a lot of their time tinkering and iterating, I have a very hard time picking favorites, especially from this system. That said, I am particularly fond of the Elemental Explosion Grimoire, as it leans heavily into the super powerful mage archetype where you cast a high-risk, high-reward spell with a longer commitment time.

Due to this high amount of commitment, it changes how I view many combat encounters, where I need to plan and adapt to opportunistic moments to activate and land it. Being able to charge up a super powerful area effect attack that rewards thoughtful activation and placement nails a really satisfying feeling that you can’t get with a lot of other abilities. 

"Repelling Explosion”

Pairing this with the Knockback Focus turns it into an ultra-satisfying disruption tool, letting chaos abound, which brings me some simple joy and lots of laughs. Tack on the Warmage’s Defense Signature for a scaling damage shield based on the number of targets I hit, and the Cowardice Affix to reduce the unlucky victims’ Weapon and Spell Damage, and I can now tank plenty of damage from all the aggro it’ll generate from the people I’ve displaced in PvP. 



Cullen Lee—Senior Systems Designer

One of the Grimoires I’m most excited for is Soul Burst, which you earn at the end of the Scribing quest line. This unleashes a powerful burst of soul magic around you, providing an instant point-blank area of effect. Simple and flexible!

When I’m playing Infinite Archive on my Necromancer tank and things get hectic, sometimes I’ll spot an Infuser about to empower their buddies and I’ll struggle to target them with a bash in time. So, I’m really excited for the Interrupt Affix–even if an Infuser tries to hide behind their friends, I can still easily interrupt their cast thanks to Soul Burst’s eight-meter radius.

“Shocking Burst”

For Signatures, I’m a big fan of the Necromancer Class Mastery script. This increases your Magicka, Stamina, and Health based on the number of nearby corpses. And if you don’t have any nearby corpses, it’ll make one instead! Once we’ve killed each wave of enemies, I can use their corpses to empower myself for the next group (before gobbling them up for Ultimate with Necrotic Potency!).

For the Focus, I’ve been keeping it simple with Shock Damage, but I do find the Immobilize script tempting. I’ll probably bounce back and forth at least a few more times before I make up my mind!


Caleb Noffsinger—Senior QA Tester II

Traveling Knife! Simply put, you toss out a knife toward the enemy, and it returns to the player, hitting your foes on the way back. This can be a great way to apply debuffs to multiple enemies, something dual wield abilities traditionally don’t do.

I use it on my Dragonknight, having it deal Poison Damage as my Focus with Wayfarer’s Mastery Signature and Minor Berserk Affix. I chose Poison Damage because it plays well into Dragonknight as a baseline. The Wayfarer’s Mastery (Ruffian) Signature is stronger than you might realize. It boosts my damage when using Rending Slashes and Rapid Strikes, but it also increases the damage of my allies who are using dual wield while it is active.

"Venomous Knife”

This all completely changes how my build is set up. I went from using Stone Giant as a spammable to Rapid Strikes and got a considerable DPS increase. Putting Minor Berserk on the ability also opened the opportunity for me to swap out Camouflaged Hunter with Torch-Bearer’s Sweep, another scribed ability, and still have those all-important bonuses and passives active without any overlap.


Radacal Alexander—Animator

I chose the Grimoire Shield Throw, which launches your shield at your enemy and deals physical damage. When animating this particular skill, I wanted to create the sense of the full body of motion required when literally hurling a shield at your enemies, and it makes me feel like Captain America!

Because it’s awesome to bounce your shield around a bunch of enemies, I picked Multi-Target as the Signature and added Lingering Torment as the Focus with Cowardice as the Affix. Lingering Torment uses your weapon's enchantment to deal more damage, along with adding damage over time. This in turn allows the sword-and-board playstyle to have some mid-range damage threat.

“Shattering Throw”

Cowardice works well with the close-range nature of sword-and-board fighting, lowering the enemy’s threat. Pairing that with the shields in the weapon skill line makes for an extremely tanky character. I also used this with the Torug’s Pact item set so that it procs weapon enchantments more often.



Of course, these are just some of the unique combinations you can try with the new Scribing System, and we hope this inspires you to try out different Grimoires (and their myriad combinations) with your own builds when Gold Road launches in June. How are you going to make use of Scribing? Let us know via X (formerly Twitter)Instagram, and Facebook.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road arrives for PC/Mac on June 3, 2024, and for Xbox and PlayStation consoles on June 18, 2024. Pre-purchase Gold Road now to receive unique bonus rewards at launch and immediate access to the Welkyndstone Ruins Wolf mount. Don’t miss out.

How after ten years ESO is still a "deliciously weird stew"

If you've only casually passed by an Elder Scrolls game you might assume they're pretty generic. Swords, elves, goblins, orcs, dragons, all stuff the fantasy world has seen a million times before. It takes a while to get to know that the Elder Scrolls series is weird. Seriously weird. I was able to ask narrative director Bill Slavicsek and loremaster Michael Zenke how ESO keeps that weird flag flying.


Read the rest of the story...


RELATED LINKS:

Elder Scrolls Online to give away free player house next month

New Elder Scrolls Online DLC hits PTS, and you can try before you buy

ESO players to get compensation due to lengthy locked account issues

Earn a New Skin with this Special 10-Year Anniversary Achievement


Learn about an all-new Achievement and reward coming with the Gold Road Chapter and Update 42.

Since 2014, The Elder Scrolls Online has enjoyed 10 years of adventure, taking you and your fellow players from the myriad provinces of Tamriel to the otherworldly planes of Oblivion. As part of our ongoing 10-Year Anniversary Celebration, we are adding an all-new Achievement that celebrates and showcases the game’s ever-growing world, titled Adventurer Across a Decade.

This new Achievement arrives with the launch of the Gold Road Chapter and Update 42 in June, and it touches on practically every zone and main story quest in the game.

To earn Adventurer Across a Decade, you need to complete the following:
  • Earn the Hero of the Aldmeri Dominion, Daggerfall Covenant, and Ebonheart Pact Achievements*
  • Complete ESO’s main storyline and triumph against Molag Bal
  • Complete the main storylines for the following zones:
    • Coldharbour
    • Craglorn
    • Wrothgar
    • Hew’s Bane
    • Gold Coast
    • Vvardenfell
    • Clockwork City
    • Summerset
    • Murkmire
    • Northern Elsweyr
    • Southern Elsweyr
    • Western Skyrim
    • The Reach
    • Blackwood
    • The Deadlands
    • High Isle
    • Galen
    • Telvanni Peninsula and Apocrypha
    • West Weald

That’s a lot of questing, but don’t worry—if you’ve previously completed the story quests (and earned the Achievements) for any of the above zones, they will be automatically counted when Update 42 is live.

Upon earning this new achievement, you’ll also unlock an exclusive skin: Fractured Glory.

10 years unbroken

Whether you adventure alone or with allies, this unique skin will allow you to proudly show your dedication to the game and mark you as a true veteran of Tamriel’s Second Era.

Are you excited to earn this new 10-Year Celebration Achievement? Which zone storylines do you need to complete? There’s still time before Gold Road and Update 42 launch in June! Let us know via X (formerly Twitter)Instagram, and Facebook.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road arrives for PC/Mac on June 3, 2024, and for Xbox and PlayStation consoles on June 18, 2024. Pre-purchase Gold Road now to receive unique bonus rewards at launch and immediate access to the Welkyndstone Ruins Wolf mount. Don’t miss out!

*Awarded by completing a certain number of quests in each of the Alliances’ key zones—check the Achievement tab in your Journal for all the details.