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What Can ESO Learn from Elden Ring?

By Andrew | 22 Mar 2022 | Share
What Can ESO Learn from Elden Ring?
Elden Ring has been all the rage over the last three weeks since it launched, maintaining around 600,000 concurrent players on Steam for most of that time, and peaking at 950,000, a very impressive number indeed.

It goes without saying that a portion of this number are regular ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) players, and that was reflected in a drop of around 4,000 concurrent ESO players at peak time, just after the release of Elden Ring. (Source: Steam Charts)

While it looks like the Elden Ring train is now starting to slow down a little bit, and while ESO and Elden Ring aren’t extremely similar games, they do both have RPG and online elements, so this got us wondering if there is anything that ESO could learn from the success of Elden Ring.

Elden Ring's tough combat has not disappointed players who were anticipating the game's releaseElden Ring's tough combat has not disappointed players who were anticipating the game's release

What Elden Ring features could work in ESO?

We did a bit of research and asked ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) players who have also been playing Elden Ring what they like about each game, and if they thought that anything from Elden Ring could be implemented in ESO.

Some of the respondents simply said that they didn’t see any real potential for Elden Ring features to work in ESO, and that’s fine.

However some things that were mentioned by other respondents were:

  • Some more difficult Overland content. Elden Ring is famed for its challenging battles and boss fights, while in ESO you pretty much have to join group content if you want that kind of thing. The Overland content is currently almost universally of low difficulty, and many players outgrow it sooner or later.
    There were two suggestions that came up for how this would work, one of which was to have some Overland areas that are easy and some that are harder, and another was to have a “difficulty setting” for Overland content, similar to what we currently have for dungeons and trials. This would then port the player into a “hard mode” of whatever zone they were in currently.

  • More interesting build diversity, as opposed to a solid “meta” with Best in Slot items. This is something that has been cropping up for a long time now. In its earlier days, there was a lot more flexibility in terms of how you could build your characters in the Elder Scrolls Online. However power creep and the introduction of powerful new items has effectively put a small number of sets in a class of their own, making the many hundreds of others simply sub par for high level gameplay. The game would definitely be more interesting if Zenimax found a way to balance this out again.

  • Mounted Combat. This could possibly be implemented into ESO and might add an especially interesting new dynamic to Cyrodiil, assuming performance in Cyrodiil campaigns is improved first. It would add a completely new way of fighting in PvE, too. Perhaps it could come with its own skill line, but this would require pretty much a total rework of mounts in ESO. It is unclear if this is something that Zenimax would consider doing.

Some ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) players would like to see some more difficult Overland contentSome ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) players would like to see some more difficult Overland content
In spite of all of this, it should of course be noted that Elden ring and ESO are two substantially different games, with different visions and somewhat different target audiences. There is no way that one should try to imitate the other in any way. But it is always worth looking into what is attracting people to a different product to see if there is anything that can be learned from that.

We hope you enjoyed this article about Elden Ring and ESO.
ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) is a massively multiplayer online game, developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
Locked ESO accounts compensated with Event Styles, Seals of Endeavours, and more
Locked ESO accounts compensated with Event Styles, Seals of Endeavours, and more
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