Elder Scrolls Online - The Road Travelled

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In a new post on the Elder Scrolls Online webpage from two weeks ago Game Director Matt Firor looks back at the development of the MMO.

The Road Travelled
As you all know, 2014 has been a very busy year for us at ZOS. We launched ESO on PC and Mac and immediately started addressing any issues that cropped up, going on to release five huge updates that introduced new content, new systems, tweaks and fixes to existing systems, and tons more. We've done so much since launch, in fact, that we've sometimes run the risk of doing too much and disrupting your play routines or character builds with the frequent changes.

With everything we've done, we firmly believe that ESO is a much better, more stable, and more fun game than it was six months ago. This is the way online games like this work: the game you launch is a starting point that inevitably evolves over time-and of course, community feedback is one of the most important parts of that process. I am very happy with the evolution of ESO up to this point, and I hope you all agree.

Here's just a small list of some of the work we've done to improve ESO since launch:

• Made in-game chat much more peaceful by implementing many different lines of defense against black market gold farmers, spammers, and botters
• Fixed a far-reaching quest bug that prevented quests from advancing properly-a bug that plagued us through the first few weeks of launch
• Released Craglorn, our first major update, with new Veteran Ranks, a new zone for veteran players to explore, and 12-player Trials
• Released many Veteran Dungeons, giving veteran-ranked players the ability to experience new adventures that add to the dungeon storylines introduced in earlier levels
• Re-designed many of the delves throughout Tamriel to be larger and more challenging
• Introduced the Dragonstar Arena, which presents four-player groups with a progression of challenging PvE encounters
• Introduced new quality-of-life systems like the ability to dye your armor, new upgraded conversation and face animations, guild tabards, chat bubbles, and much more
• Smoothed combat animations and timing, which is an ongoing process
• Reconfigured Campaigns in Cyrodiil to make them shorter and more interesting
• Made repeatable dungeon and crafting quests, and implemented scaling dungeon difficulty
• We've found (and are still finding!) solutions and are always applying changes to rectify our mistakes- we aren't perfect, and this process will be ongoing, but we're committed to continually improving the ESO experience
• Worked to increase our overall transparency and communication with you, our community, which is also a continuing effort

We couldn't be more excited about everything there is to look forward to in 2015. We'll be introducing some of the new systems that we've talked about publicly over the last couple of months, and of course, we will be bringing ESO to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

For the team at ZOS, the remainder of 2014 will be spent working on one of our largest updates yet (more on that below) and continuing our work on the console versions. For you, this means that we will continue to listen to your feedback and make changes where needed with our regular smaller patch cadence of bug fixing and polishing, but we won't be adding any new systems until Update 6 hits PTS in January.​