Team Dire Wolf is back with their 2nd monthly dev update! Read below...
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Welcome to Return to Clockwork City, our newest and greatest story expansion for The Elder Scrolls: Legends! There’s nothing quite like those first few days after an expansion hits, and we can’t wait to see what you guys think of the new cards and the single-player content.
Today, we want to talk a little bit about how and why we make stories, and our inspirations when it came to Return to Clockwork City.
Creating stories in Legends doesn’t take much motivation because, in the end, we’re able to create stories for an Elder Scrolls game. It doesn’t get much better than that! The Elder Scrolls has a long tradition of amazing single-player experiences – even ESO can be played for many, many hours on your own – so from the beginning we’ve known that a strong single-player experience would be a core part of Legends. That’s why we launched with such a deep intro campaign, and feature game modes like Solo Arena.
Then came Fall of the Dark Brotherhood, which really starts to show off how we can tell stories in a card game. The map format allowed us to be less linear, peppering in sidequests and alternate ways of reaching objectives, which felt true to the spirit of The Elder Scrolls. It also allowed us to produce even more content. Fall of the Dark Brotherhood is noted as having 25 game nodes, but when you add up all the alternate versions of games you can unlock through your choices, the number is a fair bit higher.
Return to Clockwork City is even bigger. It’s got roughly 40% more missions and cards. There’s a few reasons for that – beyond the fact that, obviously, we love making cards and missions. For one thing, the story we were telling was bigger in scope. We also knew that players had been playing with the Heroes of Skyrim meta for a long time, and wanted to be sure this set had enough going on to shake up the meta and give players a wealth of new decks to explore. When you play it, you’ll see that we’ve sent the Forgotten Hero and company on a truly epic journey unlike any we’ve attempted before, packed with as much goodness as we could fit.
You also might notice that Return to Clockwork City is a little less challenging than Fall of the Dark Brotherhood. While the player feedback was overwhelmingly positive for Dark Brotherhood, our analytics indicated that new players were playing it in droves, and struggling more than we would like in some places. We tried to shoot a little lower on the difficulty curve for Clockwork City. So if you’ve got a friend who’s getting into the game, you might want to advise them to play Clockwork first. But experienced players shouldn’t worry – for you we’ve got that incredible-looking Swims-at-Night promo waiting at the end of Master Mode. We included that promo for one reason only: We think Master difficulty is a blast, and a real challenge, and we want to reward you for completing it.
As for the story itself, we really wanted to give players a change of tone from the grim and morally grey world of the Dark Brotherhood. For Clockwork City, we were inspired by classic adventure stories. Our story was set hundreds of years after Sotha Sil’s death in The Elder Scrolls III: Tribunal. What if this was the story of a lost city, and the treasure hunters seeking it in search of loot? That would give us a very different feel from the story The Elder Scrolls: Online is telling in the same location thousands of years earlier. We think that with this setup, the two expansions complement each other nicely; TESO introduces you to the Clockwork City in its heyday, while Legends shows you its ruins and lets you decide its final fate.
So get ready to dive in! Adventure awaits when you in Return to Clockwork City!
- The Dire Wolf Digital Team