Elder Scrolls Online developers open up on Rumors, a set of 15 new “narrative scavenger hunts” with no quest markers, Morrowind style.
The final free content drops of Elder Scrolls Online Season One are coming next week and, while there's much to look forward to, the new Rumors system immediately caught my eye as an old-school Morrowind fan. 2002's TESIII: Morrowind, as superfans /love/ to remind us, was the last time Bethesda properly made us find our own way around the RPG's world; omnipresent objective markers came in with Oblivion in 2006, and they've been with us ever since. They're the little glowing compass arrows that launched a thousand grumpy op-eds.
Now, 20 years later, ESO's latest new feature takes inspiration from Morrowind's 'read the ****ing map' attitude by ripping out the UI aids to give you /actual/ trails to follow - and I was so excited about it, I quizzed the Zeinmax Online developers directly to find out how these quests-that-aren't-quests actually work.
"I keep referring to it as a narrative scavenger hunt, where you're finding things out in the world and you, as the player, are piecing them together," ESO Associate Design Director Jason Barnes tells PCGamesN. "It's not the UI telling you where to go. You don't have a giant icon pointing you N or something like that. It simply comes down to what I collect and the things I find."
When the Rumors system launches on Monday, September 28, it will initially add 15 of these mysteries to solve, Barnes tells me, with three levels of difficulty: Whispers, Plots, and Conspiracies. "The base category [Whispers] is very simple," says Barnes. "Like, if you really pay attention, you're going to be able to figure it out. But as it goes up and escalates in difficulty, you have to start paying attention more. There are more of these red herrings that are thrown at you." Conspiracies, they promise, are properly knotty, multi-stage head scratchers that'll take time and careful attention to work through.
And red herrings, the Zenimax chaps are keen to underline, are a core part of how the Rumors are designed - music to my ears, as someone who still remembers trying to puzzle out the path of the Nerevarine. "The unreliable narrator," says Barnes; "that's like Elder Scrolls in a nutshell. And so when we built these, we built them in a way that not only can you collect them in any order, they're not a linear path.
"You're finding clues out in the world that then connect to other things," he explains - "but there are red herrings. There are things that they try to throw you off. And as you uncover clues, you're like, wait, this said that, but that doesn't match up with this? So now I need to figure it out."
After 12 years, ESO is hardly lacking in content. But, in the new zones, events, and systems coming in the MMO's quarterly 'Seasons', it's clear the folks at Zenimax are focusing on experimenting with weird new stuff to keep surprising and engaging players - or, in this case, reconnecting with familiar, special experiences fans associate with Bethesda RPGs, that are perhaps tougher to realize in an MMO.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-elder-scrolls-online/rumors-update-revives-morrowinds-detective-work
