14 DAY TRIAL // Brian Wheeler, Lead PvP Designer for the upcoming massively multiplayer online title The Elder Scrolls Online, was kind enough to offer a considerable amount of fresh information on maps, guilds and combat.
During a Q&A session hosted on the Elitist Jerks forums, Wheeler revealed some much sought-after info regarding the MMO's PvP combat system. Here's the rundown.
The Elder Scrolls Online will feature three factions warring in an open-world conflict for control of Cyrodiil. PvP will see players capturing and holding the resources of strongholds, employing siege weapons in order to take down walls and gates, and ultimately conquering the imperial city and crowning a new Emperor, the top player of the winning alliance.
The size of the world map is pretty large, as Cyrodiil would take about half an hour to cross from north to south, on foot. Cyrodiil will look familiar to Oblivion players, but will be much more spread out.
PvP combat will offer many opportunities for players to show their skill, bow headshots, dodging at the right time, blocking attacks, successfully doing power attacks, roll dodging and sneaking up undetected on enemy players.
“There are opportunities to block power attacks which knock your enemy off balance, opening them up for a power attack of your own! That being said we do have to account for network latency so while it's not pinpoint, there is some wiggle room for dodging that we've found to work quite nice in our Cyrodiil battles,” Wheeler said.
On the question of competitive campaigns and rules, he said that the system was very flexible at the moment, as they have the ability to make scoring changes and duration changes depending on player needs, and that they'll analyze how scoring goes in order to determine if alternate rulesets with different duration and scoring are needed, and also if player level restrictions should be implemented into campaigns.
People that have a competitive edge and win often at PvP will be able to show off their progress in-game, as every other Alliance War Rank will confer a new rank symbol to the player target frame, indicating such Ranks. There will not be any visual differences or extended titles, but players will be able to differentiate using the symbols.
There is much more detailed information on the Q&A forum thread, and interested gamers should definitely check it out.
There's also an Elder Scrolls Online PvP trailer, released earlier this month, and those of you who missed it can find it here.