ZeniMax Online has recently started its celebration of the 10th anniversary of Elder Scrolls Online with an event in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Bethesda kindly invited and arranged for Wccftech to attend the celebration event, which was mainly centered on the upcoming Gold Road Chapter due to launch in June for PC/Mac (where the game is also now playable via GeForce NOW) and consoles. While we previously covered the finer details of Gold Road’s main feature, the Scribing system, here’s a full transcript of the one-on-one chat I had with Elder Scrolls Online Creative Director Rich Lambert during last week’s event in Amsterdam.
I think the main thing we have to discuss at first is the 10 years. How does it feel? I remember pre-ordering the game when it was first announced.
Yeah. It’s remarkable, and it doesn’t feel like 10 years, it feels like almost yesterday. Because we’ve been going nonstop since then, but it’s also kind of remarkable when you think about that I’ve been on this game since 2007. Matt’s been working on this game since 2007. And that is kind of even scarier because that’s 17 years working on The Elder Scrolls Online.
Again, doesn’t feel like it’s been 17 years, but it’s really cool. There’s not a lot of games out there that have made it to 10 years live and been successful. We’ve been super successful, and we have this crazy, cool, vibrant community, and that’s just awesome to be a part of.
Talking about the history of Elder Scrolls Online, obviously, the launch wasn’t as smooth as it could have been.
I suppose you could say that.
Well, it was probably the way people went into it. I know that, before I did any writing and knew as much about the games industry, I just came into it thinking, right, I’m going to be playing Elder Scrolls, but it’s going to be with other people. But then you learn an online experience can’t be the same as a single player. How have you developed the game into making it into what it is today, and how has that been a process for the studio?
Launch was kind of this weird hybrid of an online game and an Elder Scrolls game. We were right in the middle, but we didn’t do either one particularly well. We had to figure out what we wanted to make, what we would have. Ultimately, what we decided on was it’s Elder Scrolls first. As soon as we made that decision, that solved a lot of the, well, what about this? What about that? What about this kind of stuff? It was like, is this Elder Scrolls? Yes. Then we go that way.
How do we make Elder Scrolls Online? That really was the biggest core pillar change for us. It’s Elder Scrolls first. That just really started nailing things down. Like One Tamriel came about. Once we decided we were making Elder Scrolls first, which was go anywhere, explore, be creative, and customize your character the way you want to, play with anybody you want to, right?
Before One Tamriel, we were a leveled world where you had to go in a very linear order through things, and that was not how Elder Scrolls was made.
That makes the most sense to me because that’s what people want. Before we go into Gold Road, it’s always hard to pick your favorite child, but what would you say is your biggest, favorite achievement in Elder Scrolls Online?
There’s so many. If I had to pick one, it would probably be Orsinium. That was the first chapter, if you will, of trying to figure out what it could be and how it could work. That was where we proved our One Tamriel technology. That was also the first thing that I was the creative director for. I was the Lead Content Designer all throughout pre-launch to launch and then I was promoted to the Creative Director role. And it was kind of my first baby, so that’s probably my favorite just because it’s still sentimental, but the story is awesome.
With Gold Road, what was the sort of deciding point to take yourself to the West Weald?
One of the first things we do when we start talking about a new zone is look back at what we’ve done because we don’t want to do something that’s similar. We want to try to do the exact opposite.
Necrom was this kind of weird alien kind of vibe. It was cosmic horror. We started talking about, you know, how do you make that feel different? We wanted to focus a little bit more on something grounded in the world. Then we started talking about, well, what does that mean? How does that work? What does it look like?
And we were like, well, we’ve got this really cool section here. It’s a forest. How do we make a forest look cool? We started talking about what looks great, what looks cool. How do you make a forest look different?
Autumn. Four colors, right? Like, instead of all greens, it’s gold and yellow and brown and then we just kept iterating and going through that and stuff. We already had the story that we wanted to tell because we had already set it up in Necrom and we were just looking for a location.
Right. Like you said, you’ve ended Necrom on a cliffhanger, so that helped set up Gold Road for you. You’ve obviously got the woods that appear out of nowhere and other aspects. You’ve got the core story. Have you got any more little secrets for people to find?
There’s lots of cool stories. One of my favorite objectives, or side stories if you will, in Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road is called the In-Between. It is a location in the zone where just weird stuff is happening. Almost, kind of like, weird, timey-wimey things are happening. And there’s a reason why, it’s just a really clever story, a really interesting kind of objective, and you get to learn many cool things.
When you’re looking at the actual gameplay mechanics, you’ve now obviously gone into a bit of detail on Scribing. Is it a way to give Elder Scrolls Online players more control over their abilities?
Yeah. It’s interesting because new classes always excite players. People love the Arcanist, and it turned out amazing, but some bits of feedback that we got is, ‘I don’t really want to start a new character. I don’t want to have to build a new thing from scratch’.
Is there a way that we can give players that excitement of new abilities without creating a class? That was just another kind of check mark for us to make Scribing because we wanted to do it for a long time for the customization reasons, for the role-playing reasons, but just that little extra bit of feedback from players, which is, can we get something where we don’t have to restart our character?
When the presentation was on, I thought – maybe it’s just my anarchic sense of humor, but I know you’ve made it so the system will block off incompatible things. Did it ever cross your mind just to keep it so people could make incompatible spells? Maybe you’ve got a healing spell that then sets you on fire just to show the chaotic way of magic, so somebody’s making a new spell and they end up blowing them up when they’re trying to heal themselves. Did you consider doing that?
We did, and then we started going down the route, because I always play the, if you will, the troll. What are players going to do to make other players’ lives miserable, right? That’s kind of the role I play a lot, and I started going, if I can kill other players, how much fun is that gonna be? It’d be fun for me; it won’t be fun for the players that are dying.
So those are the things we start thinking about when we go down that path. But, ultimately, because this system is so huge, there’s over 4,000 unique combinations. There’s a lot of unique combinations of abilities in this, and we didn’t want players to have to struggle through the really bad ones, so that’s why we started coming up with the incompatible stuff.
Could you tell me a little more about the Lucent Citadel Trial?
Yes. It’s a 12-player endgame content for our veteran Elder Scrolls Online players. There is a normal mode, a veteran mode, and then there’s hard modes that you can trigger in veteran mode for all of them. As I said earlier, the team has taken everything they have learned from all the previous Trials they’ve built and really outdone themselves. They’ve done some things in here we’ve never done before.
The last encounter in particular is not your traditional boss fight. I don’t want to spoil it, though. The gear in there that you can get is really cool. There’s a badass mount that you can get there.
You said that this is just sort of a build-up period for the 10-year anniversary of Elder Scrolls Online. You mentioned there’s going to be a spotlight on housing and a few others. Can you go into more detail?
I’m really excited about it. I think the housing community is going to absolutely love it because it’s something that they have wanted for a long time. Soon! I’m sorry, but I cannot say more for now.
There was a PvP spotlight as well in the roadmap. Have you got any other spotlights that are coming up?
The third and fourth quarters are definitely the housing feature and then the PvP feature. Obviously, there’s other things going on with that. Companions are coming in the fourth quarter as well. It was one of the things I didn’t really mention in the presentation, but we moved the companions and their stories to the fourth quarter.
It was easier for us to get the work done because we’re trying not to kill the team doing it. And then, yeah, obviously we’ve got big plans for next year as well. Teams are already working on that.
I’ll be honest, I’ve not played it in the past year or so. For somebody who hasn’t played Elder Scrolls Online or a year or two, what would you recommend to do?
If you haven’t played the Arcanist, definitely jump in with Necrom and get the Arcanist. The Arcanist is remarkable. It sounds amazing, it looks amazing, and it’s very new player-friendly.
Necrom’s storyline is really, really cool. And then get to that cliffhanger, which sets you up for Gold Road. We have never done a cliffhanger like we did with Necrom, that was the first time we ever did it.
What was the thought process behind that?
Well, generally, when we have done, like, to be continued, we try to keep it kind of subtle. Maybe after they’ve already played the next thing, they’re like, oh, it tied into this, and here’s how. What we wanted to do with Necrom is really smack you over the head and say we’re not done yet. There’s more story coming.
I’m not going into any detail, we know how the games industry’s been lately. It shows a good level of confidence by ZeniMax, and the game’s obviously stronger than it’s ever been. That sort of thought process shows confidence, like, we are continuing.
Maybe there’s a little bit of that, but it was more like we wanted to do something different and try not to be so subtle. Like I said, we’d never done it before and players actually really liked it. I was really worried people were going to be upset.
I’m one of those types of players, you know, even watching movies, when you get to the end and it just ends and you’re like, come on, really? The team actually had to kind of talk me into it. But it was great, and it was really cool as people went off like ‘What do you mean a new Daedric Prince? What does this mean?’ They were left waiting for a little while. And then we dropped Ithelia on them and they just went off. Awesome.
Excellent. I can’t think of anything else. Have you got anything else you think that’d be good for players to know?
I think the biggest thing is the 10-year anniversary. We’re celebrating this over the next 15 months because we have a PC launch and a console launch. It’s a celebration, right? The team has worked so hard over the years to get this done and to continue to improve the game. I’m humbled by it, but I’m also incredibly proud of the team.
Well, you’ve got a right to be. I suppose the only other question I would have actually is when you’re sort of looking and designing the new content, when you’re thinking about what could be next, do you ever link in with Bethesda so you don’t want to overlap?
Absolutely. It is a different time. We’re a thousand years in the past, but they are ultimately the IP owners, so we work really closely with them on everything we do.
We worked with them on Ithelia, like every story all the way through. Elsweyr was a big one, right? There’s no dragons in our timeline, so how do we get dragons in there? We work really closely.
What you need to do is get them to start dropping in some stuff from Elder Scrolls VI!
That would be pretty cool.
Thank you for your time.
