Greetings and Happy New Year, Khajiit, Nord, and Argonians alike!

TL:DR Version of this Update:

- Lots of samples arriving

- Things remain on schedule

- Pledge Manager now slated to close in August (this does not affect our delivery timeline in any way, shape or form)

- We continue to go to great lengths to make this a truly authentic experience, right down to the the amount of thought we're putting into... well... sandwiches.

--------

We hope your holiday season was absolutely wonderful, and that your 2024 is off to a lovely start! We've been absolutely *sprinting* on The Elder Scrolls since the holidays ended. With the game content complete and playtesting all but wrapped - it's been a whole lot of work on all the *non*-gameplay stuff this last month that's been keeping us busy. And, we'll let you know up front that despite this being one of, if not THE longest update we've put out for this campaign, we are STILL holding a decent amount of stuff we could show back, simply because there's just so. much. stuff. in. this. game. Whew!

Boxes, books, save trays, colors, tokens, artwork, layout, etc - these have been the late December and January focuses (or foci, if you prefer. Yes, we did look up the proper usage. And yes, both are acceptable). You may think "Oh, approving color samples is simple and fast!" But then your manufacturer sends you an entire tray full of color samples and it again dawns on you just how many things are in this game. Take a peek at all the pretty colors!

And these are just the flat colors. We're doing cool things like swirl/translucent effects on the stat tokens that go into your mat that need their own special approval (note that these tokens will have a colorblind friendly icon on them in their final form, but these samples were made using the mold from our Too Many Bones scar tokens):

Oh, and we got a near-final new sample of the magnetic day and group experience tracker! Check out how smooth these chips turn, and how strong the magnet is!

The point is, there's a LOT of stuff to get designed, prototyped and approved for this monstrous game, and we're well on our way. Let's jump into some of the more interesting bits!

General Progress and Art Notes

We'll start by noting that we are still full steam ahead and on schedule to deliver this fall. The biggest remaining to-dos are still on the art side, where all of our artists continue to churn out amazing pieces that you'll see featured throughout the update.

Our graphics team has been busily laying out ALL the item cards, delve cards, race/class cards, and chips in their final format as they are able, and we are already a good ways into the proofing process on a huge number of these items (with more components like delve and encounter cards soon to come). As they go from "being proofed" to "approved and final" you can expect to see a lot more final componentry in the next month or two. Because they all exist in different states of approval (with many having multiple notes/corrections/edits needed right now) we are going to hold back on showing much more final componentry until next month when we are planning to have a huge chunk of things truly ready for print.

One note on the art you'll see sprinkled throughout: remember that all the art being made for this game is being created for a specific component, so if you see a piece that looks a little more sketch-like or less detailed, it is likely being put on a chip. Higher detail items generally will be going on cards where their detail can be appreciated!

Blacksmith Pack Update

We're almost ready to approve the Blacksmith Pack! We have yet to see a sample of the D6, but the metal sword pegs and metal ouroborous are looking (and feeling) sharp! A little too sharp, in fact, as these samples were not tumbled to soften the edges yet. The final versions will be tumbled, however, ensuring they're a little more gentle on the old fingers. As you can see, they're cool and they're metal. And as you know, metal always makes board games better. It's science. Or perhaps it's alchemy...

Art and Lore Book Update

We've said almost NOTHING about the art and lore book since the campaign finished, but that's about to change. We've been working behind the scenes on things, and we finally have a firm direction. We've received a couple of samples of treatment options for the Art and Lore book, and as a result, we're moving forward with this embossed cover format for the BotSE book! Now, this is just a sample with a generic dragon on it. WIth the pricing locked in, we can now begin work designing our own cover with actual Elder Scrolls assets.

Note that this book is smaller (roughly 5" x 8") than the final TES book will be (8.5" x 11"). We've taken this photo on top of the map mat from our upcoming game, Wroth, in case you're wondering what the heck all that neon looking craziness underneath is ;-)

We're also already beginning the process of laying out some of the art sections. As we wait for final final approvals on some of the lore bits we'd like to include, right now that's as much as we can do. Take a peek at a handful of spreads the graphics team has started putting together! There will be much more to come in this regard (both in art and lore) as approvals continue to be finalized.

A Beefy Box

Another of our non-gameplay related tasks, obviously, is that of fitting all of this insane content into a single box. With the componentry for the game now completely known and development but final, we at long last are able to begin the box design process in earnest. So just how big is this beefy boi?

Well...big. But actually not *quite* as big as we feared it might need to be. Take a peek above at ALL of the content for The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era stuffed into one of our Cloudspire Miniature Vol. 1 boxes. It all fits with just a little bit of lift. This has given us nearly final dimensions on the box. These could flex a hair in a few directions, but the final base game box size will be very close to 14.5" x 12.75" x 7". Prepare thy Kallaxes!

With the size of the box locked in, we can now have the graphics team start working on final package/box design. That's always one of the most exciting parts of this final sprint, even if we don't expect it to change all that much from the mockups we've shown from the beginning. Hold on, let me quick down this bowl of sweet skeever gumbo before we continue...

*slurp* Mmmmmmm...delicious!

BeTRAYal of the Second Era

We promised you save trays. We did NOT, however, promise you a card tray. BUT, we like adding free things that make our games better. So, behold: two tray samples, one (the aforementioned card tray) that is near final and one (save tray prototype) that will see a bit of tweaking but is off to a great start!

There's no way around it: this game is a table hog. It's a sprawling epic with a ton of cards, chips, tokens, and things to track. As we continued to playtest the game, it became apparent that we needed a good way to get the huge variety of cards organized, so we went to work on a card tray not terribly dissimilar to the very well-received one we did for burncycle. The result will really help clean up your table and is included for free in every copy of the game!

The design and dimensions on the tray are all but finished with the exception of the text in the tray. All of the words will be changed into iconography which will allow us to not need a separate/unique mold for each language edition of the game.

Let's take a look at it all loaded up!

OK, so that's the card tray, but what about the promised save trays!?

These have a little more work ahead of them, but we have received an initial sample, and we are LOVING the direction these are headed. The main thing we'll be changing up here (because many things aren't necessary to track between sessions) are the little spots for pegs (such as up by the battle forms). These are the weakest part of the tray, but also almost entirely unnecessary. Aside from that, we need to line up a few things with the mat better, but as you can see in the video below, these are really slick even in their prototype form.

Still hungry... Anyone fancy some chicken and biscuits?

Translation Plan and Timeline Projections

As we head toward the finish line on the game, we're beginning to turn our attention toward the translation process. Many of you have asked how we are approaching this, and what these timelines may look like in comparison to the English version. We'll start by saying we absolutely have the goal of releasing each language edition of the game as close to the English version as possible. We will also note that our translation partners vary in their size and that this is a big game, so we do expect a bit of a staggered release schedule based on the resources of the translation teams. Owner/lead designer Josh Carlson offered this information on our Discord a few weeks back, and we feel it's worth sharing here:

For those asking about our plan for translations:

As SOON as we feel we have a rulebook and how to play/tutorial complete enough (in structure and in content), we will send that to all language partners. Our goal for this is January. This will not be the version we are asking them to translate; this will be the version they themselves can learn the game from and familiarize themselves with terms, mechanics, etc.
Soon after that, we hope to be able to send all language partners a version of all written materials that they can start to translate. Our hope is February for this version. From this point forward, it requires us (CTG) to keep a change log on everything. That means we don't want to rush this part if we can help it.
Our goal is to fully wrap all change logs and proofing of all content by March for English file submission. This would allow production of the English version of the game to begin (including all components for other language partner orders that don't require translation).
From there, the plan is to let each translation team work on the game at their own pace (as we know team sizes and resources vary) with the only request being that final translations be fully submitted and approved by CTG by Aug. 1 (four months after receipt) in order to release with a similar timing as the English version (currently slotted for Oct 2024 fulfillment). To be clear, there is no requirement for partners to meet that deadline, even though we will strongly urge them to do so. As some of you have mentioned, oftentimes on large projects, translation begins after the original language releases. We wanted to coordinate as much as we could on this to allow the chance for other languages to release at the same time as the English version without holding any version hostage. As translations are completed, they will be produced. For some translators, four months might not be enough time. That's OK; it just pushes that language's delivery into 2025.
If this all goes as planned, it would mean we could actually keep the pledge manager open as late as July to allow for as up-to-date addresses as possible. Then we would close it with intent to start English fulfillment approx 2-3 months later. Also, as soon as the PM closes, our plan would be to start fulfillment of all non-TES products people have added to their pledges. This does a few things. It allows backers to get certain things sooner. It cuts down on the amount of things we need to ship out when TES is completely produced and ready for fulfillment. And it allows us to pre-box TES items in just a few configurations so that they can basically be sent as soon as they hit port versus a massive pick and pack fulfillment project that would lengthen delivery timelines by as much as two months. In some cases, this could increase shipping costs (which would be on us to deal with), but in most cases, people adding other things like TMB will be getting two packages anyway, so why not send the other bits sooner?

We will, of course, keep you all updated as we begin to prep files for our translators.

This Game Rules

(Pretty sure we've used this exact pun for this exact purpose on every CTG campaign in history...sorry)

We have a near final version of the rules text for the game in hand, and are still in the process of editing the heck out of it and trying to get it down to its most concise and readable form before beginning rulebook layout in earnest. So no huge updates on rules materials this month, but we will have plenty to share very soon!

Update on Pledge Manager Closure

It's official: you have a little more time to Late Pledge for this game! We are planning on having the Pledge Manager open up until right around Gen Con (early August). This will have no impact on the delivery of the game, but we wanted to give folks a chance to take a look/demo the game at Gen Con this year and still have late pledges open. The current plan is to close the Pledge Manager right after Gen Con closes. We will likely begin address verification very soon after that so we can begin shipping non-Elder Scrolls things fairly quickly thereafter.

What's that? We hadn't mentioned that yet!? Well, it's true. In order to expedite fulfillment of The Elder Scrolls once it's ready, and because almost any order that includes non-TES products will need to be shipped in *at least* two packages regardless, we are going to be shipping out whatever we can early. This will allow us to pre-pack a whole lot of things over in China before being loaded onto containers so that we can hopefully absolutely fly through fulfillment when allllllll the BotSE things arrive :-)

So if you're still on the fence, you still have time to late pledge! There's still about 10k of you out there following along who have yet to take the plunge! Let us know if there's anything we illuminate to help you get off the fence!

The Story of a Sandwich (With, you know, updates on playtesting, art, and other stuff too...but mostly The Story of a Sandwich)

Finally, with the “newsier” portion of the update is out of the way, we wanted to tell you a little story about the creative work we've been doing on the game that will *simultaneously* update you on our current progress along the way. If you just want to know the concrete information about the progress we're making, we'll put those parts in bold for easy perusal, but for the rest of you, curl up with a mug of cocoa for what we're calling “The Story of a Sandwich.”

The story of this particular sandwich began during the BOTSE campaign last March, when popular demand for more items spawned the Thieves Trove expansion (which, if you read the last update, you now know is being incorporated into the core game, with a subsequent release-date MSRP price bump that means all backers and late pledgers are still getting the items for free). Co-owner and design lead Josh Carlson asked one of our developers on this project, Logan Giannini, to come up with several more items for the game, and Logan adapted some ideas he'd been working on into some new item types that have provided the game's items with a really unique design personality: potions, clothing, enchantments, and consumables.

Logan designed the effects for all of what would eventually become the Thieves Trove's 100 items, assigning names to them as he went. After he was done, fellow developer and game co-writer Ryan Howard went over all of the names for flavor, changing some of them to better fit in-game items (for example, renaming several of the enchantments and potions after Elder Scrolls Online enchantments and potions that could describe their effects) and changing others to in-game items that we all thought were fun or silly. If you've ever played ESO, you know that there is an absolute wealth (one might say a Thieves Trove) of unique items in the game, and we wanted to plumb that depths to find items that fit CTG's unique and quirky sense of flavor (we also wanted to find items that would be fun for our artists to draw and for our players to look at. More on that later).

There was one consumable, a common item that healed all adventurers for 2 HP, which Logan had originally named Elinhir Roast Antelope. Ryan decided to rename it to The Skald-King's Patty Melt, because that's a very funny name that someone on the ESO team decided to call one of the game's many, many food items. In the period of Tamriel's second era when ESO (and our game) is set, Jorunn the Skald-King is the Nord king of Eastern Skyrim and the leader of one of the continent's three alliances, the Ebonheart Pact, and we loved the idea that this figure of titanic importance to the lore of ESO also had a patty melt. Was it made in his honor? Is it his recipe? Is it a reference to a time when he was braving the wilds of Eastern Skyrim, and the only food on which he could survive was some marbled rye, mammoth cheese, onions, and slab of Skyrim's finest ground beef? The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Anyway, that was almost a year ago. The Skald-King's Patty Melt went into the game, the name approved by Zenimax, and it was put through its rounds of playtesting, which was largely overseen by Salem Scott (who also did a huge amount of development work on the game, including modifying item effects that weren't working for playtesters – although the patty melt's simple mechanic stayed intact from its conception). It survived through our content completion in October, and it's survived through the end of playtesting. We issued our last game update to our external playtesters in December, and we're currently intaking their final feedback and are locking in final designs of the last bits of content as we speak. We expect to be fully done with this process by the end of January, give or take a week. Through it all, The Skald-King's Patty Melt has survived – useful, distinctive, and delicious.

Well, at least it sounded delicious. But would it look delicious also? When we commissioned our artists to work on the Elder Scrolls art, we and they sometimes had to get creative with the item visuals. When you see a piece of food in your inventory in ESO, the sprites they use are just big enough to fit inside your pack inventory, and several of them are duplicated. This works great for ESO, where the flavor text is enough to add distinction amidst your giant inventory, but since you are going to sitting with these item cards (including a generous section for unique art on each card) in front of you while playing BOTSE, we wanted each piece to have its own distinct look and flavor.

So, how does one make a patty melt distinct? What makes a patty melt worthy of Jorunn the Skald-King? Perhaps, we thought, it could somehow incorporate Jorunn's banner, which looks like this:

Melonie Lavely, our creative director, worked with our primary item and battle hex artist Yoann Boissonnet to bring this image to life. Thanks to Yoann and our other artists, we have now submitted all but one piece of item art to Zenimax for approval, most of which has now been approved (the rest simply need a few small aesthetic changes that we don't anticipate will need much time). Yoann's work on the items has also allowed Anthony LeTourneau to focus on hero pieces and Federico Pompili to focus on finishing the rest of the unit art, and both of them are approaching completion within the next month or so as well. On an equally important front, our graphic design team has submitted all the game's icons for approval, and almost all of these have been approved as well.

Cut to a couple weeks ago. We were having our first meeting of the year with Zenimax – specifically, with ESO Loremaster Michael Zenke, Studio Art Manager Morgan Godat, and Licensing Project Manager Brent Keith. It was an important meeting, because all of the flavor text for the game has now been written and submitted to Zenimax, and, as stated above, the last of the item art had been submitted as well. During the meeting, Zenimax approved a large chunk of what was left to approve of the flavor, which is great news, because it frees up our design/development team and and our editor Liz Davidson to start finishing off our initial editing run of all the game's materials, which can then be sent to graphics to be placed into their final card/sheet/dice templates and be given a final look by our company and Bethesda before they're sent to the printer. This process has already begun, and we expect to have some nice new graphic elements to show you during our next update (check out last month's update if you want to see some of the recently-approved graphic templates with non-final text). Once this process is complete, these files can be sent to our manufacturer and our translation partners, along with the rulebook, which is not quite ready to show but which is being diligently worked on by Michael Gernes (we are aiming to have that in hand by the end of the month).

Once we finished our brief and productive discussion about the flavor text, we turned our attention to the item art up for approval. Most of it was approved as is, and Morgan had some good notes for the rest of it that will help it appear more accurate and lore-rich to the setting. Then, we got to The Skald-King's Patty Melt. It looks like this:

Yoann did a great job, right? Not only does this look like a delicious patty melt, it also looks like a patty melt worthy of Jorunn, bearing a scorch mark in the shape of his sigil! We loved the way this piece turned out, and the Zenimax folks did, too. However, Michael said that even though he thought the look was very funny, he regretfully had to be a stickler for period accuracy: specific shape-searing technology seemed a bit too modern for ESO, and even though the attention to detail was excellent, he didn't want the piece to ruin immersion. The final piece was approved otherwise, but the scorch marked sigil had to go. “But I love this. You guys should still show it to people,” he said.

So we are.

Now, why did we write all of that? Who cares so much about one piece of item art? Well, for one thing, it gets tiring writing updates in the same format month after month, and we thought this would be a fun way to communicate the information you needed to know in an entertaining way. For another thing, we really do like this art piece, and so with Michael's encouragement that we share it, we wanted to show you a fun little process piece that, even while it won't appear in this form in the final game, is one of the many, many moving parts that go into getting a game from its initial idea to an actual physical object that people can play. However, the biggest reason we wrote all of that is that we wanted to show that we are really taking this seriously. We are taking the game design seriously. We are taking the editing, art, and flavor seriously. We are taking adding silly little things like sandwich scorch marks seriously. We have put a lot of thought into every tiny little speck of detail in this game, to make it feel unique, lived-in, faithful to the source material, deep, fun, and worth the incredible investment of time and money you are making in your purchase, and, by extension, in us.

2023 was a wild year for us and this game. We have been working on this project for three years, an eternity for a company like ours, and it's finally approaching completion. It will still be several months before it comes out, but everything is coming together, approaching physical reality, and that's really, really exciting. All that's left is to work out those fine details, to get everything as intricately tuned and presented as possible before the game can be made and shipped to your doorstep. It's a story of a sandwich, and to mix a metaphor, we hope the final product will be as delicious for you to play as The Skald-King's Patty Melt looks to eat.

We'll have much more to show you next month as we continue to polish and move this baby closer to going to print. Here's hoping we don't look like this draugr by the end of all of this...

Okay! That seems like enough for one month! 😅

BUT! If this update has left you hungry for more CTG goodness, we would ALSO mention that we are doing a 20 Strong official release livestream and Q&A tomorrow at noon central time! While the stream is 20 Strong focused, the opening Q&A with Ghillie is open to questions regarding all things CTG, so come and hang out!

Even trying to make sure we cover all the topics at hand feels exhausting. This project is such a beast, but it continues to feels amazing that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks for your enthusiasm, support, and excitement around this game. We cannot wait to get it into your khajiit paws!

Until next month!

- Team CTG