The Elder Scrolls Online
Few online RPGs have transformed as much in the past decade as The Elder Scrolls Online. First debuting in April of 2014 as a confused, awkward thing, loved by few. Today, it proudly stands alongside its singleplayer peers. Here’s how TESO escaped Oblivion’s grasp and reconnected with Elder Scrolls fans.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve made a return tour around TESO’s world, wrapped up the main story arc, and got to have a talk with two of the game’s production leads – game director Matt Firor (previously of classic PvP MMO Dark Age of Camelot) and creative director Rich Lambert. Both were eager to share their stories of the highs and lows of development, and how the game found a new identity through one of the most comprehensive overhauls of an online game to date.
TESO’s story begins 17 years ago, an eternity by videogame standards. Oblivion was only 18 months old, and Fallout 3 was an up-and-coming hit. “Our North Star at the time was Oblivion,” reminisces Firor. “The very first version of ESO we worked on – for the first two or three years – was very much a mid-2000s MMO with Oblivion’s IP. And then Skyrim launched, and everything changed.”
This prompted a fundamental redesign of the game, including massive systems and visual overhauls, according to Matt. “Skyrim was like a social phenomenon, and we knew that our original concept just wouldn’t fly in a post-Skyrim world. We were the next Elder Scrolls game to launch, so we had to make the game more Skyrim-like and we only had like a year and a half to do it.”
Among the features that had to be rushed into place were a first-person mode, Skyrim-ish combat (free of the tab-targeting of older online games), and fully voiced dialogue for all the game’s NPCs in multiple languages, a directive that was hard to break to their localisation producer, according to Lambert. It was a valiant effort, but Firor sums up the release version’s primary issue, “It wasn’t Elder Scrolls enough.”
Probably the least Elder Scrolls thing about the game was that it had traditional level-based progression. You chased sources of XP and levelled and gradually unlocked more areas. Players would be fighting over objectives required for progression, as everyone was stuck on the same track. It had some of that Elder Scrolls aesthetic, but it felt like an early 2000s MMO in bad Skyrim cosplay. Players were getting bored and turning to other online games. The next two and a half years of the game’s development were then dedicated to completing TESO’s transformation into a ‘true’ Elder Scrolls game.
ALL FOR ONE
One of the first big signs of TESO’s course-correction came on March 17, 2015. The game previously ran on a traditional retail-and-subscription business
