The first major details about the upcoming Firesong DLC and Update 36 in the Elder Scrolls Online are set to be revealed on the Bethesda Twitch Channel this Friday at 9:30 PM CEST with the PTS likely to follow next week. After the drama surrounding the previous Lost Depths update, with lots of disagreement in the community about the direction and scale of the changes made to combat, will Zenimax decide to leave the combat alone in this next update?
Change Fatigue in the Elder Scrolls Online
There has been fairly common talk of "change fatigue" in the ESO community, with this thread on the ESO Forums being just the most recent example. It's a problem that seems to primarily affect the more "serious" ESO players who are trying to stay in touch with the meta by maintaining an optimal build. When the meta changes seemingly every major patch, this eventually starts to annoy a lot of players as they feel like they spend more time keeping their build up to date than actually doing the stuff they enjoy in the game, be it dungeons, trials, PvP or something else.On the other end of the spectrum, players who are more casual and aren't really trying to chase optimal results from their build in ESO tend not to be so fussed about the frequent changes to combat. There has always been a bit of a "casual versus hardcore" dichotomy in ESO where the two camps seem to be fighting each other for the developers' favor and perceived control of the game's future (or sometimes just arguing for the sake of arguing), and this was inflamed quite badly during the Lost Depths PTS - one only had to look at discussion on the ESO Forums and on other social media platforms to see that.
ESO Lost DepthsThis, along with talk of endgame players quitting the game either due to dislike of the combat and balance changes themselves, or due to "change fatigue", might have raised some alarm bells at Zenimax. During the Lost Depths PTS cycle a "long term plan" was mentioned a couple of times by ZOS developers, and while this was never elaborated on, it could well be something that involves further combat changes in upcoming patches. But given the amount of discontent that we saw surrounding the previous patch, it might actually serve the developers well to keep combat and balance changes to a minimum this time around, and focus on fixing the most obvious problems and bugs. This would surely improve the mood of some of the more disillusioned players. Only time will tell if this will be the path they decide to take though. The PTS is normally released along with full patch notes, the Monday after the ESO Live stream revealing the patch, so we will have our answer fairly soon.
We hope you enjoyed this article about the upcoming Firesong update in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
