Death of a Game: The Elder Scrolls - Legends (ESL)

rip me saying tes 5 for tes 6

#DOAG . Death of a Game is a series dedicated to uncovering the mysteries surrounding the death of a game or company. nerdSlayer defines the term "death" in the context of the show as either... 1. Literally dead. 2. Had a mass exodus of players and never recovered (expectations etc). 3. The company ceased to exist. We follow a timeline of events, to uncover clues concerning why a game or company doesn't do well, and attempt to put it all together at the end for a deduction explaining how or why the game failed based on the evidence gathered.

Sources:

[nerdSlayerstudioss]

Greetings detectives! This one was cooking in the oven a bit extra for you guys, but I hope you notice the improvements and enjoy the end result! This was a surprisingly fun project for me to cover. Thanks for the continued support, the next DOAG is certainly a special one :).



PS: Also sorry I said TES 5 and not 6, almost like my brain forgot about Arena.

[mrdylanwintle]

Man, it hurts when the game you're currently playing pops up on this channel.

[Shuma_tsu]

"There were only so many times you could sell Skyrim, right?"

Oh boy.

[umbrellacorpsecurity]

Just how bottle caps in Fallout are the new currency. I imagine in our future after the apocalypse copy's of Skyrim to be our currency.

[abhinavjain]

"there were only so many times you can sell Skyrim right?
*Todd introduces Skyrim special edition for PS5*

[ChryI]

Well, at least it could have been worse. It could've been Artifact.

[mrdylanwintle]

I'm a player of this game with a cumulative 2500 hours or so, I've played in a good number of tournaments (nearly made it into Masters Q_Q) and have played the game since launch, albeit rather spottedly since the maintenance began, more or less to say my goodbyes to the only game I ever felt I had a community presence and true relationship with. This video is remarkably well researched in the majority of topics, and thankfully avoids the obvious pitfall of calling the game "Hurr dur hearthstone clone" and calling it a day. It however bears a few marks of being a retrospective I think I might be able to offer my point of view on. Little bit of a read coming, so buckle up. Also worth noting my engagement with the game was through primarily Reddit, YouTube and Discord, so my biases lay there. That said, here we go.

5:38
Minor discrepancy here, cards placed in the stealth lane are only stealthed for a single turn or until they attack. At the start of your next turn, or once you attack with a creature, they're just the same as if they were placed in the field (left) lane. This is fairly self-evident when you watch the footage so I'm guessing this was a miswording or misreading of the game's mechanics. Doesn't mar the point of the video in the slightest though. In case anyone's wondering why the lanes are this way, the game is set up so that the stealth lane, due to the inherent protection creatures being set up to attack have, always allows the player an opportunity to subvert board dominance, and mount a counteroffensive to ease pressure on your health total. The field lane however is harder to take control of, and easier to hold control of. It's a clever system. God damn it I loved this game.

On Houses of Morrowind's reception
This is where I see the first actual issue. Adding the "tricolor" decks was a major shake-up for the game and whilst news outlets generally positively recieved it, it was one of the first things in the community's history that truly caused an uproar I was aware of. There are pro-level players and serious community figures who cited this decision as a major reason for the death of the game and/or their disillusionment with it. The addition of three colours allowed for many combinations of cards which previously couldn't be put together, and it largely resulted in the homogenization of decks, as previously colour combinations were built to have specific weaknesses, which now could be patched with a third colour that counters that weakness, for an ultimately boring and relatively unfocused deck that was powerful nonetheless.

On Direwolf's replacement:
I don't think this was entirely a conflict of interest thing. I think a lot of it came down to design decisions Direwolf had made as of late. Direwolf toward the end of their tenure released a lot of cards and mechanics that were considered problematic. Tullius' Conscription (released slightly before the houses of morrowind expansion), which allowed players to pull full boards from their deck with a single card, created the game's first true controversy. To say the card became ubiquitous would be an understatement. It, and the hate against it was ever present. Even tournaments devolved into salt mines when the card was brought in. It was the beginning of the cracks forming in ESL's balance. Direwolf was extremely hesitant to nerf the card in any significant way, and it spawned a large amount of vitriol in the community at users and designers of the card.

Tricolour as mentioned was a significant and potentially destabilising change for the balance of the game. Many were into it, many were against it.

Unite the houses, which allowed a player to win if they had a card of every colour in play was considered a balanced but restrictive card to print. Many suggested that the card would ultimately be the first card to be removed from the game should the game go on long enough.

Following the restabilisation of the meta with several nerfs to Tullius' Conscription, Nix Ox Telvanni appeared, which was a similarly broken deck that in many cases was combined with the weakened but ever-strong Conscription decks to create the Telvanni Conscription meta, which had a chokehold on the game's meta for at least two expansions afterward. The meta was about as stale as food from the Fallout universe.

These problems all arose and were digested by the community within a couple months, which l think largely lead Bethesda to ask Direwolf what the hell their game was. This possibly could have heightened allegations of them sabotaging Elder Scrolls Legends' meta to bolster Eternal's playerbase, a game which did end up absorbing a lot of lost players from ESL as time went on.

On Sparkypants' new client:
Something that should be noted was that whilst the initial switch to Sparkypants resulted in a borderline unplayable client and a board which was unfamiliar and uncomfortable to many, the transition to Sparkypants came with numerous upsides that Direwolf could not offer. The primary of which was the speed of the client. The client started off very weakly, but as Sparkypants continued to labour in spite of the vitriol levelled at them, the community opinion changed from "This client has killed the game" to "I can't believe they're actually still working on it" to "It's not as bad technically but I'm still not a fan of the design" to in the majority of cases "This client is pretty much better than Direwolf's was." It's a hard change to see if you weren't part of the community at the time but it was an important one that I think is integral to understanding Sparkypants and how they impacted the game.

The secondary advantage of Sparkypants was their communication. Their "representitive" of sorts, SparkyDeckard (Gavin) was an incredibly tolerant and likable member of the company who took the vitriol of the community in his stride, and I think in the end truly did win over the trust of the community. Any mention of a bug would be followed up with a request for an informal bug report, at which point the majority of bugs would be fixed within the month. I can count 5 bugs I personally reported to Gavin and saw fixed in the next patch. There's a very slim chance he'll read this, but if you are, I salute you.

On Alliance War:
I've relatively little to say about this expansion. It cemented tricolor as forever the superior choice of deckbuilding strategy and it's when many more broken combos began to arise. The majority of the community realisation of just how poorly tricolor was impacting the game's meta came here. I was on the anti-tricolor train early, but this is when it truly left the station.

On Moons of Elsweyr:
Moons of Elsweyr is a bit of a weird one. This expansion was mostly well recieved to my knowledge, with the exception of a singular card: Alfiq Conjurer. This card was generally considered too strong, and cemented blue as a very dominant colour in the meta for the rest of the game's history but this card was given nerfs shortly after release, and I think most considered the set a fun, albeit underpowered set. The consume mechanic introduced in it was a welcome addition, and in general I was quite confused to hear this mentioned in regards to the game's balance. I think it was perhaps the best balanced set since the Skyrim expansion.

On an... omission:
There's a rather important part of this game's history I think you left out at the end, possibly for time reasons but regardless a mechanic which definitely deserves mention: invade.
Invade was the main mechanic of the final expansion of the game that was considered by most perhaps the most toxic mechanic in the game's history, and one for which Sparkypants was once more vilified by the community, much as Direwolf was with the release of Conscription a year and a half before. I don't believe it was too good personally, simply too frustrating to play against and simple to pilot. At the time of writing the top post when I look at r/elderscrollslegends... is a post complaining about invade. This game closed in relatively short order after the release of Jaws of Oblivion so I'm going to hazard a guess and say the game was marked for death before the expansion released, but if mismanagement at the highest level killed this game (as I think it did), this was a fire lit on the coffin. It scared everyone away from mourning the death of this game out of sheer frustration at what the meta had become in the game's last days before maintenance. I believe it is because of Invade that this game will never be resurrected.

Afterthoughts:
I really don't think it was Sparkypants that cracked the balance of this game. I think the writing was on the wall as far back as Houses of Morrowwind. The game needed a boost, and I'd wager risky and in the long term poisonous design choices were made in tricolor and conscription that put the game on the countdown to either a major rework, or its demise.

The comparison of house mechanics to hero powers I don't really get, hero powers are always available seperate to cards and repeatable every turn, house mechanics like plot are just effects put on cards associated with a particular house. I think there was some miscommunication somewhere down the line here.

If anyone wants me to back up anything I've said I can link reddit threads I was originally going to include in this mini-essay but ended up omitting for bloating reasons. I've found sources for more or less every claim I make here.

Thank you, nerdSlayer for making this video. It truly is a strong overview of the game's history regardless of my inputs. It's given me a chance to properly voice my final thoughts and give this game a eulogy to an audience I never thought this game would see again.

[narev]

You know what could have saved this? A "further adventures of the lusty Argonian maid" expansion.

[Lazergician]

I was lucky enough to cast a bunch of tournaments for this game, create content for it, be part of a team playing it, and even host the Masters Series in 2019. This game was a very major part of my life for a good while, and I made some really amazing friends through it. I really can't stress enough how much this one meant to me, and I'm still sad over half a year later that it's dead.

[ryuusei]

"Theres only so many times you can sell Skyrim, right?",
Me:already expecting a xbox and ps5 version of it to be announced soon.

[danielsecara]

This has always been a Hines' pet project. It received no love from the studio execs, no real advertising, no marketing campaigns and it struggled af after the dev switch -- I remember the forums were on fire, and the reddit sub? son, it was crazy!
I played it. I played it a lot. And I loved it. But before the downfall there were clear signs Bethesda didnt gave a crap on veteran players and only catered to new players. Their obsession for new players and expanding their playerbase forced older players to switch to other CCGs.
What really hurts is that I used to love this game and it's sad because it had huge potential...

[Chunkerstein]

It's unfair that this game died. The gameplay was far more balanced than Hearthstone.

[timhouston]

I really miss this game. Only card game that really clicked with me.

[qwerty]

Don’t you DARE make me sit through that Skyrim opening scene again!

[chainsawmidnight]

This game is insanely fun to play. Also I haven't spent a single cent because all stories and decks can be bought with in game currency that you get for just playing.

[aspiringartist]

I thought you were talking about Blades for a moment, I had forgotten that this existed

[galacticbob]

I played in the beta and for a few months afterwards. Bought a few packs, made some decks, and had a good time.

I never knew that there was any expansions for this game! I saw no ads, got no emails, nothing. Am I the only one or was perhaps a lack of marketing partly responsible for the game dying out?

[viktordyrby]

Holy crap I miss this game. I have about 800 hours, and I still feel heart broken whenever I'm reminded of it's demise.
RIP TESL :(

[doctorwiiu]

I legit said out loud when i seen this pop up in my feed "What the hell is Elder Scrolls Legends" I had totally forgot this was a thing

[chief_critical]

This was the only Card game in years that kept my attention. I really hope that it gets revived. It can easily survive if it adopts cards and mechanics from the online game before ES6 comes out.