The Elder Scrolls Online Update 44 completely overhauled the PvP mode Battlegrounds, swapping the 4v4v4 mode added with the Morrowind chapter in 2017 for 4v4 and 8v8 modes.
That’s not the only big change, either. In Team Deathmatch, every death now reduces your team’s lives counter until you run out and the round ends. However, ZeniMax toyed with introducing a permadeath version of the mechanic closer to something like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: you die, that’s it.
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“We looked at other competitive games that have a life system, but they’re kind of like a one and done,” lead combat and PvP designer Brian Wheeler tells TheGamer. “We thought about doing that for some of our Deathmatch modes. We thought abut doing one life, and we found that it’s a cool idea, but with our combat — with how fast things can go — one life could be really, really difficult.
“So we looked at three lives, we looked at five lives. But the flip side is that we found when you were dead, if you were a little bit more reckless or were new to things, we needed to give you something to do, So we were like, ‘Okay, let’s look at a spectator cam,’ because other games do them. Why not us?”
Why Only Team Deathmatch Has Lives
The only mode in the newly revamped Battlegrounds to feature the lives mechanic is Team Deathmatch, but there’s a good reason for that.
Wheeler explained to us that, during the PTS, it experimented with lives in other Battlegrounds modes, but found that players would ignore the objectives just to wipe out the other team until they won, effectively turning every match into Team Deathmatch.
“Our hardcore PvP crew are like, ‘Well, if I just kill all your lives, screw the objective, and then we win.’ So we’re like, ‘Fair point.’ We need to make that purely just a Deathmatch mechanic. So we have now a blend of Team Deathmatch that has lives or doesn’t have lives, spread between the 8v8 and 4v4 queue.”
The Elder Scrolls Online is an MMORPG enjoyed by millions of players, set in the continent of Tamriel. Initially launched in 2014, multiple expansions take you to Skyrim, Morrowind, and other iconic locations from the series. You can choose from one of ten races and five classes before taking on a multitude of quests, dungeons, and trials.