The Elder Scrolls Online “Designing Skill Lines” Blog Update

A new blog entry on the official The Elder Scrolls Online website shares the team’s reasoning behind the design of the character skill lines, the challenges they’ve encountered with skills during development, how they tie into exploration, and more. It’s a pretty good read to complement yesterday’s character progression trailer:

We know what fans have come to anticipate from an Elder Scrolls game. We wanted you to be able to pick up and use any kind of weapon or armor, and to have lots of ways to approach various situations. We wanted you to feel rewarded for exploring the world and to offer the things you expect as an Elder Scrolls fan, like the ability to join NPC guilds, become a vampire or werewolf, and to be able to create your own weapons, armor, potions, enchantments, or food.

By making many of these activities into their own skill lines, we can give your character that broad range of options. As an added benefit, more options mean your choices have more impact. When you gain a skill point, you can put it into any skill line that’s available to you. Every skill point is a chance for you to define your character and to choose to specialize or branch out and give something new a try.

A question we often see is, (Why not go classless?) In the end, keeping class skill lines exclusive while opening many other skill lines to everyone worked best choices stay important, but everyone has freedom to choose from a large pool of options. It helps us encourage diversity while still providing choices, and it allowed us to emphasize multiplayer strategy members of the different classes have access to their own skill lines, which creates opportunities for you to work with your allies, coordinating your unique skills and adding depth and variety to team gameplay.

Your class is an important decision to make, but it doesn’t chain you to any one playstyle. Every class has three of its own skill lines, each with different skills that are thematically related to the class. Combine those three with the many, many other lines available to every character, and each member of a particular class can be wildly different from the next. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to spend a single point in your class lines. However, you’ll know when you see a Templar who has decided to focus on his or her class abilities.