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As a part of the ESO Gold Road launch and the 10th anniversary of the MMO, I had a chance to sit down again with Rich Lambert (Creative Director) and Matt Firor (Studio Director). Over our half-hour conversation, we covered a lot of interesting topics about the past and potential future of Elder Scrolls Online.
It’s an MMO I’ve been privileged to see grow from the very beginning, playing in the earliest accessible playtests, and checking out each expansion as they’ve come down the line.
I spoke with Rich Lambert and Matt Firor about several topics, such as the early days, before going free-to-play/changing the scaling, how they stay fresh and current, and of course, trying to get scoops or sneak peeks of the future.
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It’s always a pleasure to talk to the ZeniMax team, and though Gold Road just released, there’s no time to rest on their laurels. The ESO team is always looking for the next great adventure.
ESO developers discuss the past, present, and future
Q. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today! ESO is celebrating 10 years of live service, and it’s certainly had its share of ups and downs. The game has also certainly evolved a great deal from its very humble beginnings. What are some lessons you’ve learned about game development over these past 10 years, thanks to ESO?
Rich Lambert: That's a good question. I mean, there's definitely lots. It's no secret that we're a lot smarter now than we were when we first started making this game in 2007.
Matt Firor: [Laughs] Not smarter, just more experienced.
Rich Lambert: [Laughs] More experienced. Yes. I mean, I tend to lean more towards things that, you know, sound great on paper or sound great in a single-player game that doesn't necessarily translate to an online game.
So, for instance, at launch, we had lots of player separation issues. We had all these quest lines that, you know, had these huge sprawling world kind of changing stories where you go into a town that is under attack, and then you liberate the town and then it goes from hostile to neutral. That's great in a single-player game.
And that sounds awesome. But that also separates you from your friends. So when you go to the same location, you can't see each other, you can't play with each other. It turns out players really don't like not being able to play with each other.
So having to just solve a lot of those types of things, like that was the first six months of Live for me and a bunch of my team, was to fix a lot of those types of things. And then it just continues from there.
You know, how you build zones, you know, how you direct players through zones, like lots and lots of learnings like that.
Matt Firor: And then bigger things like changing from a required subscription to an optional subscription. And then the biggest change probably of all was making the game levelless with one Tamriel. Because we still had the player separation problems, you know, even after the quest separation.
If you can't, you know, if you've been playing the game for a month and you want to get your best friend in and you're level 50 and he's level five, you know, the old way the game worked wouldn't let you play together. There was no way you could really group together in any meaningful way. So, like, just making the game more modern over time, I think, was the biggest education for us.
People just want to jump in and, like any Elder Scrolls game, you just want to jump in and play and run in any direction you want and find something to do. You don't want the game telling you you can't do it, because that's not really what Elder Scrolls is about. It took us a while to figure that out, but once we got it, we got it.
Q. While ESO has had plenty of good times, there were some … very rough times. Specifically that first year, when ESO was more like a traditional MMO, compared to what it is now. What led to that very safe (but admittedly unpopular) choice to not scale everything to player level, and try the typical MMO approach?
Matt Firor: I would never describe that as a safe decision. The ramifications behind the scenes are so drastic that it amazes me that we pulled it off. Rich will probably have his answer for this, but I think the answer for me goes back to when we launched, we were kind of old-school MMO on top of an Elder Scrolls IP, and the Elder Scrolls IP made it kind of hostile to regular MMO gamers of the time.
The fact that it was so level-based put off a lot of the traditional, well, frankly, all the Elder Scrolls players, because they just weren't used to that. This is literally what we did when Rich said it's six months after launch. We sat down and we put together a list.
I wrote it all out in a GDC presentation earlier this year. There were like 35 things on there that were mostly under the headings of player separation problems and bug fixes, which Rich was talking about.
The other was not Elder Scrolls enough, and then we broke down what does not Elder Scrolls enough feels like, and we came up with a list that went through, ‘I want to be able to group with anyone anytime, I want to go anywhere I want anytime’, like all of that, which then culminated, I think, two years later in one Tamriel.
And then after that, that list was pretty much complete, but Rich has his own. So I was on the top kind of looking down on it. Rich was actually in the trenches at the time, slogging through innumerable quest changes.
Rich Lambert: I spent a few days at your house over the Christmas holidays, too, arguing about what's right and wrong with One Tamriel.
Matt Firor: Yeah, Rich and I actually had One Tamriel over a break at my house, because it was just the two of us because the ramifications were huge. It changed the business of the game. It changed who we marketed to, and how we marketed.
It was a huge, huge thing, and it was the right thing to do. But we had to make sure, between the two of us, that we knew what it was we were pitching to the rest of the company when we pitched it to them, which we did in January, and then it went from there.
Rich Lambert: Yeah, and I think how we got to where we were for launch, we were trying to appeal, I think, maybe a little bit too hard to both crowds. We wanted to throw as wide a net as possible. There was the MMO group, there was the Elder Scrolls group.
We wanted to try to find that happy balance between them. And it's clear that we didn't hit that, and that's what all the feedback was, was it doesn't feel Elder Scrolls enough, and so we had to try to figure out what that meant. And once we did, I think we nailed it, and the rest is kind of history. But yeah, it was definitely a challenge trying to figure out how all those things work.
Matt Firor: Yeah, and again, I talked about this a little bit in the GDC presentation I gave this year, but even while all this was happening, we had a very committed playerbase that admittedly not as large as we thought it was going to be. But we had people that were playing every day from launch on, like for years and years and years.
So we knew we had something, and we put a lot of time into looking at what those players were doing and doing more of those things and less of the things that they weren't doing over time.
And that led to a lot of the horizontal systems that you see today, like the card game and antiquities and housing, because people tended to do some things that we didn't even think they would want to do.
Like run around and find Mages Guild books and, you know, kind of the fun activity side of the game instead of just the core leveling and questing side. So we knew there was definitely a hunger for players to do more virtual world stuff inside of the game, and that led us to do a lot more of those systems. And we continue to do that with Scribing and Gold Road is right out of that playbook.
Q. ESO has been around for a good long while now. Staying fresh can be a challenge for any game, much less one with the tenure of Elder Scrolls given the amount of lore and depth players expect. How has the team managed to keep up with the flow and keep players engaged for so long, and what does the next evolution of storytelling look like for ESO?
Rich Lambert: I like how you sneak the little ‘future thing’ in there at the end.
Matt Firor: Well done.
Jason Parker: Gotta try!
Rich Lambert: I mean, I think that I can't really answer the last part of that question, which is kind of, you know, it's just iterative. And you've kind of seen how we tell stories over the years and how it's improved over the years. We're going to continue to do that like we always have.
But I think the big thing in terms of keeping it fresh, a lot of it comes down to when Matt and I sit down and we start talking about, like, where are we going to go next? And we try to distill things down to a word or a feeling or a mood that the team can kind of rally around. And that really helps because it helps kind of guide the team towards what we think is important.
You know, obviously, with Necrom, it was cosmic horror, and so everything we did kind of was through that lens of kind of cosmic horror-y type things. You know, in Gold Road, it was more kind of that autumn feeling. We wanted it to feel bright and airy but, you know, different.
And so that helps a lot. It also helps that when we're pitching stories, it's super collaborative. Like, it's not just the lead writer, the zone lead, and myself in a room throwing ideas out. Like, it's a collaborative thing, and those stories come from everywhere, which is cool.
Matt Firor: Yeah, as for the kind of follow-on to that, I think to answer your last question that you slipped in; I think if you look back over the 10 years that ESO has existed, we have not been afraid to make changes and try new things. And so, you know, we've done years where we did four little DLCs. We've had years where we just did one giant one.
We've had years where we did both. So, like, we're constantly trying to find the right mix of system updates and quality of life updates and new content updates. And, you know, we'll keep – if we need to change, we'll change.
You know, so that's just the way we operate. And so look at the last 10 years as a blueprint for not being afraid to change things when they need to be changed. And, you know, every year we'll evaluate what we need to do.
Q. We’ve come a long way since the game just featured the base classes. With Warden, Necromancer, and Arcanist being fan-favorite classes, was there any discussion about adding a new class in this chapter, or was it just too soon from the advent of the Arcanist?
Rich Lambert: I mean, there's always a ton of ideas. That's one of the things we do, brainstorming sessions for classes. But it takes a long time to build a class. Like, it takes us 18 months or so to build kind of a chapter and a zone. It takes longer to build the class. We had already been hard at work on the scribing while we were still working on the chapter. So it just didn’t make sense.
Matt Firor: I'll also say we really wanted to focus on scribing for this update and to add a new class and Scribing at the same time would have been utter chaos.
Rich Lambert: Yep. There are 4,000 unique combinations in ESO Scribing. That’s a lot of ability work.
Q. While it’s been great to adjust the looks of certain skills in ESO, thanks to Gold Road, some of the abilities - Trap Beast, and some of the two-handed skills in particular, have less flashy animations. Wall of Elements looks amazing, but other skills don’t have the same visual parity. Are there any plans to adjust these in the future, or add more animations, to make these look flashier?
Rich Lambert: We'll always take feedback and look at it, but some of those were actually conscious decisions because those abilities aren't kind of the forefront of your rotation. Like Trap Beast, you probably don't want that to be as cool as, say, your Spammable, like Wall of Elements or something like that, right?
Because it's just a thing, it goes off, and then it basically disappears until you drop it again. So we made conscious decisions on that, but any feedback we'll always take a look at and evaluate.
Matt Firor: And way, way back in the day when we were designing the effects for the different abilities, we really tried to draw a line between what is magic and what is mundane. So if you're using a two-handed sword and waving it in front of you, that's not really magical, right? It's a video game, so it has to play some effect, but it's not supposed to look like an explosion of demons when you just do an uppercut.
It is an Elder Scrolls game, right? We do have to stay at least somewhat in line with how the other games did that. You had a weapon and you had magic, and so that's the underpinning of your question.
Some effects are just bigger than others, and they take different colors much better because they're bigger and flashier. And some of that is by design because if it's a weapon skill, it's not supposed to be big and flashy. But that's the way it was designed.
Q. This question might venture a bit into spoiler territory, but we’re curious. There’s a section in Gold Road involving Ithelia, where we travel to different paths and encounter alternate-reality versions of her and her followers. By the end of this, the relics used also lose their power, but that isn’t really the end of the Multiverse travel, right? Or was that a one-off, just to help push the narrative forward?
Rich Lambert: There is a series of quests that you unlock if you've completed both Necrom and Gold Road. That might answer that question.
Matt Firor: We wanted to give a little treat to players that had done Necrom as well.
Rich Lambert: There’s definitely a compelling arc there if you’ve done both.
Q. ESO has taken players all across the Tamriel continent, but there’s more out there. Have there been any pitches for chapters/expansions that have been planned, but for whatever reason were rejected/set aside?
Rich Lambert: I mean, that’s kind of game development, yes?
Jason Parker: I’m just always curious about “what could be”.
Matt Firor: In the early, early days, we actually had a Summerset zone as part of the launch, and that got nuked because we wanted to focus more on the mainland and just did Auridon instead. But I know there are others. That's just the first one that comes to mind.
Rich Lambert: Murkmire is a good example of that. We pitched that in 2013 and didn't get to it until 2018. It was good though. Orsinium is another really good example. We worked on Orsinium for a year and then put it down right around launch because we had to focus on launch issues and then picked it back up and iterated a bunch on there. So yeah, there's lots.
Matt Firor: That's why if you play the Thieves Guild DLC, there's an area that goes into one quest that takes you into Murkmire, kind of a teleportation. The reason was we had all this Murkmire art lying around that we weren't using because we hadn't worked on Murkmire and it was really cool, so we did that just to show it off a little bit.
Rich Lambert: But yeah, tons and tons and tons of examples like that. Sometimes we go back to it, sometimes we don't.
Matt Firor: Yeah, that statue of Sithis that is in the Thieves Guild DLC in the Murkmire area was the whole reason why we put that in there because it was so cool just having that and we wanted people to see it.
Q. What’s the future look like for ESO? I am sure there is plenty of content on the way, but is there anything particular players can look out for? Or some kind of cryptic hint you want to give the fanbase to ponder?
Rich Lambert: Our cryptic hints always come out in December. I'm super excited about the housing feature that's coming out in the third quarter. We still haven't announced it, but we've teased it a few times. Super stoked about that.
Matt Firor: There are two new companions with quests coming out in the fourth quarter.
Rich Lambert: And a PVP feature too. There are lots of things to be excited about just this year.
Jason Parker: Awesome. I’m especially excited about anything to do with housing.
Matt Firor: It is the true endgame. It really is.
ESO Gold Road is now available on PC, with a console release on June 18, 2024. There is a ton of exciting content coming to the game over the next several months, so stay tuned for all the latest updates.
