During the opening presentation for QuakeCon 2018, several games were shown off. Of those, Elder Scrolls Online got a chance to get in on the action too with Wolfhunter and Murkmire DLC coming. We sat down with Creative Director Rich Lambert to ask some questions.
Players have known about Wolfhunter for some time now, but hadn’t known when it was coming. Their presentation confirmed it’s coming much sooner than expected with PC players getting access on August 13 and PlayStation 4 and Xbox One players getting it August 28. Murkmire is still under wraps, but will be out quarter 4.
But is there a minimum level to play this week’s expansion? What about Murkmire? Lambert chimed in and explained the lack of a level requirement. “You can go in at anytime,” he explained. “If you have ESO Plus (subscription), you get it for free. Otherwise, it’ll be the cost of regular DLC… That’s the beauty of the game is that anything new, you can jump in and play it. You don’t have to be a specific level.”
Wolfhunter focuses on the werewolves of Elder Scrolls lore and the fight against Daedric prince Hircine. But, werewolves have been a skill line in the game for a while now. How do they work?
“One of the things we did,” he said, “is we updated (the skill line) so that it’s a little bit more player friendly. Right now, it’s very much a kind of in-game player skill line, where it’s really hard to maintain the form, but it’s really powerful. We’ve adjusted it so that now the joy of being a werewolf is being a werewolf and maintaining the form. You can maintain that form a little bit easier.”
“Lycanthropy in Elder Scrolls,” he continued, “in the lore, is essentially a disease that you contract and then you can turn into a werewolf. We do it through an Ultimate. So, over in the bottom right corner, you can see that I’ve got a glowy square. That’s my Ultimate. You earn Ultimate by doing various actions. When you turn into a werewolf, then your bar swaps out again and you have werewolf techniques that you can run around and do things with.”
He spoke about Murkmire next with an explanation of why the Argonians have been long missing from the game and they wanted to do it right the first time. “After Wrothgar, it was Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood and that kinda took priority over Argonians because we didn’t have those in the game at that point. But, we got to do it now… It’s very much its own stand-alone story. It’s about the Argonians. This is about their culture and their history. We did that because we wanted to focus on just that and not try to tell another story on top of it.”
Argonians are known for being, as Matt Firor, Game Director of ESO, said, “weird”. Lambert chuckled and went into more detail. “Yeah, they’re weird. They’re really weird. But, you get to see why they’re weird and what goes on in their brains, which is awesome.”
How does this affect more social players or those that want to play together? Murkmire isn’t necessarily for them, but it still throws them a small bone. “This one is more focused on story content and solo content,” he stated. “We just released a new raid with Summerset… in June. Because we do quarterly updates, we try to make sure that over the course of the entire year, we have something for everybody. So, we try and make sure there’s some PVP missions, some solo player missions, and some group. That’s why we do dungeons and then we do story content and then we’ll do PVP. We have a new dungeon coming with (Mirkmire) as well, which is a 4-player dungeon.”
Dungeons in ESO are always a good way to bring players together, since they allow up to four. But, raids allow for up to twelve players, which we may not see another until 2019. But, it looks like they are focusing on solo and story missions for the time being.
Check out all of the announcements that happened during QuakeCon 2018, including a new expansion to Elder Scrolls Legends and Quake Champions going completely free-to-play.
