The Elder Scrolls Online Deep Dive – Designing Tamriel’s Bosses, Part 3

The third and final part of the deep dive series dedicated to The Elder Scrolls Online’s boss design is now live. It covers the mechanical challenges of creating a boss and the QA that goes into it. You can find the previous two parts over here. And here’s the latest one:

The final part of our series that dives deep into the creation of Tamriel’s Dungeon and Trial bosses, this update delves into balance, the importance of QA, and post-launch iteration. We are thrilled to be once again joined by Lead Encounter Designer Mike Finnigan and Senior Content Designer Shane Slama to share their knowledge with the rest of the ESO community—so let’s jump right in!

When designing a new boss, how do you balance complex mechanics and power?

Mike Finnigan: We have some basic starting points that we have for numbers, depending on what type of attack it is. For instance, we have some ideas on how hard we want blockable attacks to hit, so we plug in those numbers early. As far as the more complex or unique abilities go, they’re balanced via iterative playtests.

It’s funny because one designer’s bosses might hit you way too hard right out of the gate, whereas another designer is the opposite and their attacks are going to barely tickle you. Fixing all that comes from playtesting and fine tuning.

There’s also a question around how many possible things you can be hit with at once or whether an attack is going to hit different targets in the team. In other words, if the designer wants an ability to threaten a tank, it’s going to one-shot everybody else in that party, so they can’t often make it an area-of-effect attack. But if they wanted to threaten the damage dealer, it’s probably not going to do anything to the tank. Those are the kind of things that we think about when balancing mechanics and power. It’s about knowing the target audience for the abilities you’re making.

Shane Slama: Yeah. And as we’re playing these encounters, we’ll often identify an ability that needs more work and clear the runway for it. If you’ve got a big ability that’s important, we want to highlight it, so we’re going to tune the fight and say, “Okay, let’s cut this out for now and just focus on this one important mechanic.” And when that moment is over and we’re done tuning, we resume working on the rest.

Talk to me about the role that QA plays. When do they come in and how do they help you improve the boss?

Shane Slama: We would be nowhere without them, that’s for sure.

Mike Finnigan: Yep!

Shane Slama: They are integral. Critical. And we try to have them get in and test builds of the encounters early in the process, so they can help us go down the right path. They’re very highly trained players and know their stuff, so they give excellent feedback.

Even mid-cycle when they get in there and start testing with an eye on bugs and other problems, it’s monumentally important to the integrity of the fight. They make sure there’s no exploits, and they’re a big part of the balance work. They also help to make sure the numbers are right and that the abilities are firing at an appropriate time, plus they call out all sorts of moments that we would see as problematic or where there’s weird overlaps with certain abilities.

Bugs are a big part of it for sure, but they are the first players, other than the design team itself, to see the encounter, and they’re giving us feedback from the players’ perspective. It’s integral to the process for sure.

Mike Finnigan: Oftentimes, they’re seeing this content in about the roughest state it can be, but they’re so used to sitting down and going through stuff with us that they can see past the rough edges and give us feedback on the actual mechanics.

Shane Slama: Yeah. And much like we were saying earlier, when we reach out to the various teams, we get all sorts of cool ideas from them. There’s lots of stuff in the game that only made it into the game due to a QA suggestion. We could be deep into the process and getting close to the end and wrapping this content, and they could throw out a cool idea that could result in a major shift.

How does the PTS cycle help refine or improve a boss?

Mike Finnigan: While our QA group is fantastic (and this is going to sound like a bizarre statement), they’re almost too good. A lot of the time, we won’t see stuff that’s too hard, or because we’re all really close to it, we might think that a mechanic is messaged correctly when it’s not. We won’t know for sure until the public sees it, and then we realize that something didn’t hit quite the note that we wanted it to, or is more difficult than we had intended, or something like that.

While QA is finding a lot of stuff early, the minute a boss hits PTS, we’re going to find a whole slew of new things to fix that we just hadn’t seen before. It’s just more eyes on it, right? The more perspectives we get on a boss, the better.

Shane Slama: I think the rise of streaming has helped a ton, too. I don’t know how developers made games 15 years ago without it. It’s such an important tool for us when a boss hits PTS. We see things differently because we’re so close to it, so having those first impressions are huge. Are they picking up on all the mechanics? How did they figure something out? Maybe they see something in a certain way that we haven’t.

Aside from bug fixes, do you continue to iterate on a boss after it is live?

Mike Finnigan: Once something gets live, we don’t want to wholesale change it. We don’t want players to come into an encounter and say, “Oh, this is completely different.” So, 99% of the things that we’re going to do to an encounter after it’s live will be tweaks to numbers and readability of mechanics and stuff like that.

The fight isn’t going to fundamentally change. We’re going to either take the edge off or put the edge back on it in some cases, although we generally try not to increase difficulty when something is live.

If an ability is exploitable or something like that, we’re going to fix it, but we generally try not to boost difficulty too much. Most of our changes are going to be after we get the data and realize the completion rate on a boss is low and that we want to dig in to find out why and make tweaks.

Shane Slama: Sometimes we get situations where a bug has come up on live that we have to be very careful with, because when we fix it, it’s going to make the encounter harder in general. We might fix this bug, but we will then also probably need to tone something else down so that the difficulty stays where it was.