ESO’s High Seas of Tamriel event adds ship-to-ship and underwater combat, so I asked the Zenimax devs why and how it did such a thing.
The Elder Scrolls Online's final free content drop of Season One is upon us, and one piece of free content has attracted more hype (and confusion) than any other: ESO is getting sea battles and treasure diving, with the High Seas of Tamriel event running from September 28 until October 14. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway. Zenimax was clear from the get-go that these ship combats are a long way from Sea of Thieves' dynamic, open world buccaneering - but even so, what we are getting looked pretty tasty to me as a lifelong TES fan - so I asked the developers what to expect.
It's perhaps telling that ESO Loremaster Michael Zenke - not Associate Design Director Jason Barnes or Game Director Nick Giacomini - leapt in first to explain High Seas of Tamriel's new, instanced shipboard adventures. Perhaps he's got the best sea legs on the team? Or, just as likely, the event is aimed at telling new and different stories, as much as it is about divergent gameplay.
"High Seas is our weird experimental stab at what an event can be," Zenke tells me. "What events are in ESO is pretty well established, and so the team's whole goal was: 'what are the outer bounds of what this could be?'
"So you have a short, quick, focused, narrative experience where you get to meet a centuries old ghost pirate and become his buddy," he says, "and then you jump into an instance. The best way I can sort of describe it is that it's kind of like one of our delves - one of our small, single player-ish dungeons - mashed up with the experience you get at the end of a long quest line, like a cinematic experience."
We don't steer the ship or fire cannons, it seems. The instance begins with our heroes already on the deck of a moving ship; we're attacked; and we have to repel the enemies via good old-fashioned ESO combat. Meanwhile, characters will need to dip out of the fight to keep our own tub afloat.
"You're on the deck of a ship," Zenke explains, "and the sea elves - the Lice Whisperer sea elves, a terrible pirate cult - are attacking your vessel… but you're simultaneously fighting off the sea elves, keeping your ship from sinking and trying to sink their ship all at the same time. It's a fun juggling act."
After that, he says, it's treasure huntin' time. "Once you either sink their ship or drive them off, you jump in a Dwemer diving chamber - an ancient piece of Dwemer tech that you take to the bottom of the ocean - and then, using the enchantments from the Dwemer diving chamber, you can explore the sea floor," he adds.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-elder-scrolls-online/high-seas-of-tamriel-interview-ship-combat
