The Elder Scrolls Video Interview and Preview

The Elder Scrolls Online’s coverage has ramped up lately, with features coming from GameInformer, PC Gamer and EDGE almost every day. Today is no different with a long, more-than-30-minute video roundtable on the title’s combat from GameInformer that discusses the ability design, enemy’s ability usage, stamina mechanics, the “finesse” reward system and more, and a short article on the game’s quests from EDGE, from which I’m going to quote an excerpt:

(Ask me what a good quest is, and I’ll come back to Stand By Me,) laughs Sage. (‘Do you want to see a dead body?’ That’s a great quest. When we’re putting quests together, we get together in a room, and we look at an area, and we work out what the story is for that area. At the end of the day, a quest is a story: I want at the end of this quest to save this town from a werewolf invasion. On top of that, we put choices you head into town to fight the werewolves, and then, hey, there are these people barricaded in a church. Do you want to help them out, knowing that, if you do, something else won’t be available to you?

“We spend a lot of time trying to work out how to give the player interesting choices like that. I’m okay with people being frustrated with not seeing the cool thing, as long as the thing they did was still cool. When both things are cool, people have bought into the experience. It’s when they don’t care we’ve lost them.)

And the key to not losing players? Don’t get too bogged down in lore, and remember to keep it personal. (When we talk to the content teams about building quests, I’ll say, (It’s great to be the hero of the world, but it’s better to be a hero in someone else’s eyes,) says Sage. (If your NPC says, (What you did for me was remarkable,) and you see the effect it has on them and that area, then you can go and add in the lore. You create a great quest, and the lore starts to come in naturally and works as this rich backdrop. What you should be concerned with is what’s happening now, though: you have to channel the lore through the personal stuff.)