At Gamescom last week, PC Gamer’s Harvey Randall sat down with The Elder Scrolls Online creators to talk about where the game is headed in year 10 and how it’s changed along the way. For Matt Firor, studio director of ESO development Zenimax Online Studios, those ten years have been a testament to Zenimax’s willingness to transform the game for the better.
ESO has undergone some drastic changes since its April 2014 launch—a launch that brought the game a lukewarm reception. A year after its launch, ESO underwent its first major overhaul, abandoning the time-honored model of a mandatory monthly MMO subscription and overhauling its crime and justice systems. The next overhaul came in 2016’s One Tamriel update, which removed faction barriers and replaced area level requirements with a scaling system that allowed players to adventure wherever they wanted.
Since then, Tamriel in ESO has only gotten bigger: expansions have added the Khajiit homeland of Elsweyr, reopened the Oblivion Gates, allowed players to return to Morrowind and Skyrim, and much more.
“Sitting here on our 10th anniversary, you can look back from 30,000 feet and see how much we’ve changed over time,” Firor said. “We’re not afraid to change things when they really need to be changed; that’s the philosophy we follow. The gaming industry changes, player habits change, platforms change. That change is constant and something we embrace.”
Despite this desire for change, when asked if he would have taken a different tack 10 years ago if he had had the chance, Firor said that even ESO’s early stumbles have proven valuable in the long run. “I don’t think I would change anything,” Firor said.
Looking back at ESO’s history, it’s tempting to say that Zenimax shouldn’t have launched with a mandatory subscription. But, Firor said, evaluating the game in real time as players played with it allowed the studio to find a better solution than it otherwise would have. “We knew a lot more about the game when we moved to the new revenue model,” Firor said. “We knew better how to design it, and we never would have had that knowledge.”
Rich Lambert, imaginative director of ESO, agreed, but said he’d give himself one piece of advice if he were starting his journey over again. “The only thing I can think of is to choose the game you want to make,” Lambert said. Some of the game’s early struggles, he said, stemmed from trying to reconcile two competing visions for its direction.
“It wasn’t MMO enough; it wasn’t Elder Scrolls enough. We were trying to find a happy medium between the two,” Lambert said. “It wasn’t until we said Elder Scrolls first that everything really took shape.”
While ESO only benefited from the refocus to elevate its identity as an Elder Scrolls game above all else, Firor and Lambert said it was a complicated reinvention. As an example, they described how, in early versions of the game, half of ESO’s quest design made massive utilize of “phased” content, similar to how certain areas in World of Warcraft change dramatically based on where the player is in the story. In ESO, this meant that players who were adventuring together would often see their friends disappear when they entered an area because they were at different stages of the relevant questline.
“It was done with honorable intentions,” Firor said, but “it destroyed the multiplayer aspect.” The solution, Lambert said, was to go through the Sisyphean ordeal of redesigning all those phased quest areas. “That was six months of my life after launch,” Lambert said. “Six months of just going through and fixing those things.”
It looks like the effort paid off: As of April 2024, The Elder Scrolls Online has earned almost $2 billion.
