The Elder Scrolls Online Blog Update: Creating Keeps

There’s a new blog entry up on the official The Elder Scrolls Online website, and this time the team at ZeniMax is giving us an artwork-laden tour for the design work they’re putting into the game’s keeps and the warfare that will ensue outside and inside their gates. A few paragraphs:

At first, we tried some more traditional multi-floor constructions with secure interior rooms, but we found in testing that the bottlenecks created by stairs and small passageways didn’t work well from a combat perspective. We always wanted an outer and inner keep (a facet of multi-stage fights), and we liked the idea of the battle getting tougher for the attacker the further they progressed, so we moved to a single-floor approach but provided locations in the inner keep where defenders can gain height advantage and rain down spells and arrows on the invaders.

Our designers pored through books with images of medieval fortifications for inspiration not every keep is exactly the same, and these real-life examples helped us create buildings with some variety to their floor plans that made sense in the terrain. For instance, the large structures that guard Artifact Gates are different than the smaller outpost-style keeps, and the landscape around some keeps provides natural defense. For a victorious assault, you’ll need to know what kind of fortifications you’re up against and plan your approach carefully.

We also had to decide how attackers would claim a keep. We considered having a powerful NPC that invaders would need to defeat, but found that this took focus away from fighting enemy players the assailants would group up and rush to the NPC, sometimes forgoing combat with other players in a mad dash to kill the keep’s lord and gain control. A few iterations later, we came to our current system, where the attackers need to bust into the keep and occupy two flagged locations for a period of time to gain control of it, all the while facing down the defenders trying to drive them out.