General:Gavin Niebel's Posts

Gavin Niebel's Posts
Medium/Format	Online Forum
Interviewee(s)	Gavin Niebel
Hosted By	Reddit

2019Edit

A huge thank you to all our fans, from Sparkypants (12-06-2019)Edit

To all our fans,

As you may have already heard, Bethesda has shared news regarding future content for The Elder Scrolls: Legends. From the moment we were given the privilege to work on the game we have been nothing short of obsessed with making it the best it possibly could be. Completely rebuilding a pre-existing title from scratch under deadline with a new client, game server, and backend was no easy feat, with every system, gameplay nuance, animation, and visual effect having to be recreated. The result was a mad dash to initial release that was decidedly rough, but we, along with Bethesda, loved the game, wanted it to continue, and had been working heads down on a shared vision we hoped to bring to all Legends players.

Over these last 18 months the connection we experienced from the Legends community has been wonderfully uplifting. You supported us through every release and some significant bumps in the road. You challenged us when we missed the mark and that helped us to learn and grow. Nothing was more enjoyable than seeing your excitement from each expansion, feature addition, and requested quality of life change. You put a smile on our collective face every time with your kind words and passion. Truly we couldn't have asked for a better fan base. We love you.

Moving forward it is up to Bethesda to decide the shape of ongoing support for Legends. Most questions should now be directed to CVH or Customer Service. As far as the Asian version goes, while it is being built on our reworked version of Legends we've not been directly involved beyond the very occasional consultation. But we're excited to see where they take it! With that said, please know that we are still around. Some of us have moved on to other endeavors, but a core of us are still here, always open to a quick chat. <3

Thank you again from the bottom of our hearts and to Bethesda for being a great partner. It's been a heck of a time.

All the best,

The Sparkypants Team

2025Edit

Thank you everyone. It was such an honor <3 (02-01-2025)Edit

I hesitated writing this post because it had been so long since I last participated here and I thought maybe it would be uncouth to post now, but not saying farewell to you all feels so wrong, so here goes.

Working on Legends was an absolute highlight of my career. There are so many small moments, personal and professional, that enhance why my time on TESL was so incredible, but the large and obvious achievements and experiences are what really shine through in my memories. I'm pretty sure I could write a book (or at least a novella), about all the amazing/shocking/exhilarating/frustrating moments before, during, and after production, but legally I'm not sure I should, haha, so a reddit post with even a tenth of that info is probably not a good idea either. But there are plenty of stories and moments that we all experienced together publicly, on reddit, on stream, and in-game that we can look back on, and I'm so lucky for that. Interacting with you all and doing my part to help make this game into something you loved was my absolute honor.

When things were rough at the beginning of the client switch/re-release, I dove head first into being the "voice of Sparkypants" for the community, and even though 99% of our interactions were about everything broken in the game at the time, it was because of all of you that we were able to right the ship. Every bug, every missing feature, every wrong or lacking VO, VFX, and animation came in from you and I funneled all of it into our QA pipeline. It's pretty insane to think back on how many fixes we were putting out per patch, with the first 3 weeks having around 5 patches, I think? (literally hundreds of fixes) I knew if I just kept everything honest and open with no BS, I could hopefully build back that trust that had been taken from you when the client switch happened. Throughout the following year I felt that trust build more and more, and every day I looked forward to hopping online to play matches while reading the next quality of life requests from you that we could fulfill.

I think my favorite moment of it all was when everyone came together to solve the cryptic social ARG posts I was making, which eventually led everyone, by design, to the website www.decodingthewrathstone.com, (which unfortunately is no longer up, but the wayback machine still gives us a little reminder). Getting past the password of this site then teased the next DLC expansion! I swear I think I remember certain community pockets that never really interacted with each other much, come together to try everything they could think of to decrypt the Abnur Tharn letter. You all even had this post that contained this google doc, tracking everything! <3 It was such a joy to watch, and such a success on our side of things, because we had no budget applied to it. It was just me and Ryan the designer and Ryan the artist doing a little bit here and there, or picking at an idea during lunch, purely out of passion and love for the game and where we could take it.

I was so excited after you all successfully got past the password field, that I started whiteboarding like Charlie from IASIP for what we could do next. At the time the game had yet to be canceled, so Ryan (design) and I were planning on placing clues across 2 future expansions. We wanted clues to be per expansion, as well as cross expansion, and clues from each expansion to apply to the other so players would have to look back at old clues that might have seemed like red herrings to figure out current unanswered puzzles. I also wanted so desperately to have hidden clickable items in the Main Menu that would reveal an important clue if you clicked on each item in a certain order. Lead UI was on board with this and it felt like a dream come true -- a viral, secret puzzle/clue game hidden within the nervous system of a card game. What a beauty she would have been. :) But alas, we got the news that the game was to be put into maintenance mode and that excited mess of a whiteboard turned into a single photo on my phone before I wiped it clean... I never really told anyone this before. I guess part of me always hoped I'd get the chance to make it happen. I'm trying to charge that old phone to see if it still has that whiteboard image. If I ever recover the file I'll post it.

Haha... damn I'm really sad now. But like I said before, this is a farewell, which isn't a goodbye. Maybe one day I'll be the point of contact for another wonderful card game we all enjoy, or maybe some other game all together. But until that moment comes, I hope you all have a fantastic gaming journey ahead of you, and that you never forget these amazing ones we had together. I know I never will.

May you all walk on warm sands,

Deckard

P.S. I wonder how Post Malone is feeling right now.

/u/Tywnis

Thank you so much for your work, we appreciate you and the team greatly

You all are Legends too haha :)

Looking forward to those clues/whiteboard.. dare we ask for unreleased card concepts/arts ? :D

unfortunately there are no unreleased card concepts or pieces of art that Im aware of. Art always came during the middle of the production cycle of a card set, and the timing was that the game was canceled before a new card set was started. boooo

/u/Ilaro

Hey, that Google Docs is hosted by me! I still intend to archive it properly someday.

Gavin, I'm glad that you were the voice of SparkyPants. You were approachable, always listened to the community, and a big help for our efforts at the UESP wiki to document everything this beautiful game had to offer. I have many great memories of Legends through the years, in no small part part thanks to the enthousiasm you people at SparkyPants showed for the game.

And someday, I hope we can see a little bit of what other ideas were planned for the game.

I hope you all well in the future with other projects!

:D Yes yes yes, let's never lose that document. It's a wonderful part of history showing everyone coming together. I forgot to mention that Ryan and I even looked to that document as a marker of just how much harder you all would have enjoyed the next puzzles we wanted to create, because some of you were using algorithmic methods I didn't even think to use for my first attempt at making an ARG lol

/u/Puzzleheaded-Emu2628

Hi Deckard,

I just wanted to say that after reading your post, I decided to create an account on Reddit. I don’t know you personally, but from what you wrote, it seems like you were involved in the development of Legends.

First of all, I want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to post here. Legends was such an amazing game, and I truly believe it was superior—both graphically and in terms of sound design—to Hearthstone and Eternal Card Game.

I just have one question, and I really hope you’ll see it. Maybe the answer has already been given somewhere else, but I’ve never been able to find it:

why was Dire Wolf replaced by Sparkypants as the developer?

Of course, you don’t have to go into all the details, but I would love to understand this decision. The game was fantastic at launch, and I never quite understood why the change happened. Sparkypants also did great things, but I’ve always been curious about what led to this transition.

Thank you again for everything.

Well, as I mentioned in my OP, there are plenty of stories and info I can't share for legal reasons. That being said, the transition did not drain the budget. The main reason the game was put into maintenance mode is the same reason many live service games end -- the customer base decreased over time and the shrinking revenue couldn't support the costs of future development. It's really as simple as that.

Of course, we could share theories and experiences for days about WHY the customer base decreased over time, but you all did that back in 2019, and I definitely don't have any information on Bethesda's budgets/costs. Sorry. But yeah, the transition brought new life and new budget. In my theoretical opinion, the game would have been put into maintenance mode way earlier if the dev switch hadn't happened.

/u/AlarraUESP

Thank you so much for your work! I can't imagine how insane that must've been to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in such a short amount of time.

I'm sad that we didn't get to see the things you'd planned for the future come to fruition, but we appreciate what we did get. :)

<3 <3 <3

/u/Strong-Industry-9841

CVH ?!? Please my brother send me a way to contact someone from Bethesda!

I can’t stand to lose this game! There has to be a way for them to bring it back in some capacity!

I’d love to give a legitimate pitch to Bethesda on how we can bring elder scrolls legends to TES6 similar to how Witcher 3 put Gwent in the game.

I'm not CVH, I'm SparkyDeckard ;)

As for pitching the idea to Bethesda, my guess is plenty of people on the TES6 team have already thought about it or internally pitched the idea. If it's going to happen it will be because someone internal wants it to happen. Sorry my friend.