Creative director Rich Lambert tells us about ten years in Tamriel
For starters, the camera perspective was “more MMO-based,” he says, pulled out to give a wider view of the player’s surroundings. But when the first and third-person “Skyrim cam” made an appearance, that was one of many features the team felt they had to incorporate and iterate on afterwards. “If [Skyrim] was going to be the game that everybody knew as Elder Scrolls, we had to be more closely resembling that game,” Lambert says, recalling how they had to throw out the game’s original “great walls of text” and opting instead for a greater focus on voiced conversations. “We didn’t originally design ESO to be fully voiced,” he explains. “We didn’t have the immersive interactions with the NPCs, we didn’t have them talking to you. We didn’t have all the emotion on the faces and things like that, so we had to solve those problems.”
It also included the game’s controls. Skyrim had been a monstrous success on home consoles, which meant The Elder Scrolls Online had to also follow suit. And naturally, designing an MMO that played just as nicely on mouse and keyboard as it did on a gamepad affected everything from combat to the game’s general interface. “We started thinking more about what does the controller actually mean? It was mouse and keyboard originally, so controllers meant we probably had to do less buttons, and figure out how that worked.”
The result was a skill system that let players assign themselves five distinct abilities - on keys 1-5 on PC and a combination of the face and trigger buttons on gamepads - along with a single Ultimate attack. It’s quite pared down compared to other MMOs out there, including World Of Warcraft andFinal Fantasy14, but one that arguably puts a greater emphasis on the game’s role-playing focus. It’s more of a “choose your build before you go into combat” kind of game, says Lambert, “rather than ‘I have access to eleven hundred abilities and I can just use them all at once.'”
But even with Skyrim changing the course of ESO’s development for the better, its shadow continued loom large over the game’s release. Lambert openly admits that ESO “wasn’t a particularly strong Elder Scrolls game” when it came out, and that’s in part because the studio still hadn’t really got their heads round what it meant to play with your friends. “We had a lot of stories early on that separated players by the choices they’d made,” Lambert explains. “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. “In a singleplayer game, that works really great,” he says, as you can choose to be the hero and the world will update to reflect that, allowing you to make a meaningful and tangible impact on your surroundings. On in a multiplayer context, however, this type of quest simply doesn’t work. After all, what if the friends you’re playing with chosenotto save that town? The result, it turns out, was that players were getting separated as the game tried to rectify what they should be looking at. “My wife comes to an objective with me and suddenly I disappear and she’s left all on her own because she hasn’t done the quest and I have - like, that’s just not good,” Lambert says. “Like, duh, of course!”
This realisation led to Lambert and his team to spend six months after launch effectively “undoing a lot of that stuff” and making significant changes to their various questlines. There are still quests that give players some degree of choice and agency over their decisions, he says, “but now those moments change the skybox colour, or the NPCs change”. Smaller, less game-breaking changes that still reflect a player’s journey through the world, but which don’t prevent them from travelling and playing together as a party.
But before they created the Keywright’s Gallery, Lambert recalls they had six or seven tutorials in total, and they’d “always be focused on getting you into the story of the latest chapter.” It wasn’t a particularly streamlined approach, and it was also a lot of work for the developers. “We were hoping that it would allow us to not have to make a new tutorial every year,” he laughs, but really, the Gallery was mostly created “as a bit of an experiment” to see what would happen if players could simply choose their own adventure.
“It’s not been, like, a huge success,” Lambert confesses, which again is a shock to me, particularly after hearing about thetravails of World Of Warcraft’s new player experiencelast year. Expert players love it, he clarifies. “They go in there, and they’re like, ‘My character is going to go this way this time.’ They just get it and understand it.” For newer players, however, it’s a lot more intimidating. “When they go in there, especially when they’re new, they see eleven portals and they don’t know what to do.”
Even in the couple of months I’ve been playing ESO, the Keywright’s Gallery has continued to change shape, the arrangement of its portals shifting around as new updates arrive. At time of writing, there are still four portals to choose from at the end of the tutorial, but Lambert says that with Update 41, brand-new players will “only see one portal that takes you to your Alliance starter zone”. The hope is that this will reduce the game’s friction even further, but Lambert’s still very much in a “we’ll see how that works” frame of mind about it, suggesting there may yet be even more changes to come further down the line.
“[Morrowind] was really what put Elder Scrolls on the map,” says Lambert. “I mean, Arena was great, Daggerfall was great, but Morrowind was really the ‘Oh my gosh,thisis Elder Scrolls, this is cool’. So we wanted to do a tribute to Morrowind and that nostalgia trip.”
Surprisingly, he admits that it took “a little bit of convincing” on his part to go ahead with it. “With Necrom, we did this major cliffhanger that we’ve never done before. I personally don’t like doing that. I hate the ‘[the] movie’s good, you’re just getting into it, and then it ends, and it’s to be continued - and I’m like, awwww.” In the end, though, he agrees that “it was the right thing to do”, as players “went bonkers” for it.
Indeed, with Gold Road and its conclusion to Necrom’s ‘Shadow Over Morrowind’ story arc due to arrive on June 3rd for PC (with consoles following on June 18th), it seems fitting that The Elder Scrolls Online begins its second decade with another reinvention. This is a game that’s had to change and evolve multiple times since its inception, sometimes out of necessity, and others out of pure happenstance. But the results speak for themselves, as this is a game that’s transformed from a disappointing Skyrim chaser into arguably one of the biggest MMO juggernauts around. The road ahead seems clear, but as my chat with Lambert draws to a close, I ask him whether, if The Elder Scrolls Online were being made again today from scratch, would it still be an MMO? Or would it more likely fall into the service game bracket like Destiny, Fortnite and many of today’s other big hitters?
“It would be an MMO,” he says confidently, adding there’s still enough differences between the two genres to make them feel unique and distinct. “I have always wanted to make an online game. I met my wife playing EverQuest… like, that’s the thing I just - it means so much to me, and so being able to build a game and create a world that people can lose themselves in and meet other people, or meet their significant others, or meet their best friends… I’ve always wanted to do that, so I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
