When Bethesda was working out how to turn their popular Elder Scrolls RPGs into an online behemoth to rival World Of Warcraft back in the late 00s, the initial pitch was “Elder Scrolls with friends,” creative director Rich Lambert tells me. A simple idea on paper, perhaps, but one that proved to be a lot more complicated in the realisation of it. Zenimax Online Studios was founded in 2007, a year after The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion landed to universal critical praise, but it wasn’t until seven years later that The Elder Scrolls Online finally released for PC in 2014. At launch “we were walking this weird line between ‘online game’ and ‘Elder Scrolls game’,” Lambert says. “We didn’t do either of them particularly well.”
Ten years later, though, The Elder Scrolls Online is thriving. At last count, the game has over 24 million players galloping about the plains of Tamriel, and later this June, it will receive its eighth major Chapter expansion, Gold Road, which adds Oblivion’s West Weald to the game and wraps up the mystery of the new Daedric Prince that arrived at the end of the previous expansion, Necrom. But the path ESO has taken to get here hasn’t been nearly as glittering, with its PC launch in particular generating “a lot of feedback”, as studio director Matt Firor told press at the game’s tenth anniversary event last week. In fact, it wasn’t until ESO came to consoles in 2015 that the game really found its voice, says Lambert. “We had to really figure out what we wanted to be, and we chose ‘Elder Scrolls’. As soon as we hit that core pillar of ‘It’s Elder Scrolls first, online second,’ then it really just helped inform everything we’ve done since.” Trouble is, when the thrust of ESO’s development straddled the launch of two very different Elder Scrolls games, even nailing down that first part of the pillar proved to be more challenging than expected.
About Author
