“We didn’t do either of them particularly well.”
Ten years later, though, The Elder Scrolls Online is thriving.
“We had to really figure out what we wanted to be, and we chose ‘Elder Scrolls’.
“Skyrim was like, ‘Holy cow!
This is very different from what we’re building.
We’ve got to change things up.'”
“We didn’t originally design ESO to be fully voiced,” he explains.
It also included the game’s controls.
“We started thinking more about what does the controller actually mean?
“Looking back on it now, it’s like, ‘Yeah, we were idiots!'”
He gives an example of a quest where a player has a choice to save a particular town.
On in a multiplayer context, however, this punch in of quest simply doesn’t work.
After all, what if the friends you’re playing with chosenotto save that town?
“Like, duh, of course!”
“That was how we got Elder Scrolls into Elder Scrolls Online,” Lambert says.
But it was something they’d wanted to do “from the outset,” he tells me.
“Ultimately it came down to ‘how do we get more players into ESO?’
And especially when you’re on console, you already have to pay for your online access.
Having another subscription on top of that?
It just felt like it was a lot.”
As a relatively new player myself, this admission surprised me somewhat.
Since 2021, ESO has had one main tutorial that teaches you the basics of its combat and exploration.
It wasn’t a particularly streamlined approach, and it was also a lot of work for the developers.
Expert players love it, he clarifies.
They just get it and understand it.”
For newer players, however, it’s a lot more intimidating.
Rather, they emerged organically as discussions about ESO’s future rumbled on.
Eventually they landed on Chapters, which they’d deliver alongside a major update.
“[Morrowind] was really what put Elder Scrolls on the map,” says Lambert.
So we wanted to do a tribute to Morrowind and that nostalgia trip.”
“With Necrom, we did this major cliffhanger that we’ve never done before.
I personally don’t like doing that.
“I have always wanted to make an online game.
I’ve always wanted to do that, so I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
