This week Brian Wheeler, lead PvP designer for The Elder Scrolls Online, dropped into the Elitist Jerks forum to answer questions during a live Q&A.
Wheeler took a number of questions from forum members about the PvP content and other elements of the game. Some highlights included:
On how much the PvP will be based on skill:
"Skill is a tricky thing to measure as when most people talk about skill in Elder Scrolls it's referring to headshots with a bow, blocking, power attacks or dodging at the right time. In Elder Scrolls Online we have many opportunities for players to show their skill as we also have blocking, roll dodging, and sneaking up on enemy players without getting detected. There are opportunities to block power attacks which knock your enemy off balance, opening them up for a power attack of your own! That being said we do have to account for network latency so while it's not pinpoint, there is some wiggle room for dodging that we've found to work quite nice in our Cyrodiil battles!"
Visual ranking symbols:
"Every other Alliance War Rank will confer a new rank Symbol to the player target frame to indicate what Rank that player is. The player him or herself will not visually be different or have an extended title attached to their nameplate other than the symbol. There also are some very cool looking light, medium and heavy armor sets available in Cyrodiil that have an appearance that should be very familiar to Elder Scrolls players."
The economic element of the campaigns:
"Cyrodiil is not simply about fighting over Keeps and killing the enemy. It's an economic war as well. When a wall is destroyed, it has to be rebuilt, and rebuilding it costs gold and time. Your hard earned gold and efforts come into play not only keeping your lands safe and establishing beach-heads in enemy territory, but also hitting the enemy in the wallet! Let's say you're a small group and not enough to take a keep over...you can setup some weapons and destroy wall sections that the enemy has to rebuild and spend gold or alliance points to do so! "
Leaderboards:
"Leaderboards are available in the game itself which is quite awesome! These leaderboards update roughly every 10 minutes or so and can be filtered by specific Class, Alliance and Overall leaders within a Campaign."
Combat mechanics:
"Combat is very Elder Scrollsey (insert trademark here). It's mouse driven (on the PC/Mac) and you aim a reticule on top of the target you want to hit. Clicking the left mouse button will attack and right click will block. There is no "auto-attack" and combat is very rewarding because of that because it keeps you immersed in the world and actively fighting your target just like Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind and all the Elder Scrolls games."
And even the size of the game world:
"Cyrodiil is very very large! On foot it would take you roughly 20-30 minutes to cross it from north to south."
There's much more in the full thread. Check it out at
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/inde...-zenimax-studios-pvp-developer-brian-wheeler/.
