At Gamescom 2024, I caught up with Rich Lambert, Game Director for Elder Scrolls Online at ZeniMax. This wasn’t the first time I interviewed Rich – I met him in person at E3 2019, and then we had a number of remote interviews over the past five years or so. This year, though, is special for the MMORPG, which has turned 10. ZeniMax is doing several celebrations with the community throughout the whole year, with the excuse that the console version launched around a year after the PC version.
With the release of Gold Road, the yearly expansion (or Chapter, as they like to call them) firmly behind us, we looked to its making and then moved to the future, answering quite a few long-standing community questions on highly requested features.
You announced some new events as part of the 10-year celebration, right? In Milan and elsewhere.
Yeah, Milan, San Diego, and then I don’t know if it’s 100% announced yet, but we’ll go to PAX Australia as well.
Cool. Overall, how is the ten-year anniversary of Elder Scrolls Online going for you so far?
It’s been amazing. The players and the community that has gone to these events are just really enjoying themselves. They get to see us, but they go to see their friends. In Amsterdam, we had a group that has been doing podcasts together for almost 10 years, and they’ve never actually met in person. One lives in Turkey, the other guy lives in the United States, and the first time they met each other face-to-face was at our Amsterdam event, which is cool. That just kind of echoes all the way across things. Also, putting the event together was really cool because we had to look at stuff we hadn’t looked at in years—literally years—and so it’s just been really cool.
I imagine this is also kind of a unique opportunity to get more feedback on the game live from the fans.
Yes, one hundred percent. We sit down; we talk with them. Actually, at the tavern, which was in July earlier this year, I had a number of people come up to me with thick books with just notes of things. Some of them were poems and pictures and stuff like that, but others were like, hey, we polled our Guild, and these are the things that we would love to see added or changed or updated in Elder Scrolls Online, so it was really cool.
You released the Gold Road Chapter. What was the reception like compared to last year’s Chapter, for instance?
It’s been really positive. Players have really reacted well to the zone. It’s a forested type of area, but it’s not greens and browns, right? It has bright colors and interesting environments. Then they love Ithelia, the new Daedric Prince we created. They absolutely love her.
Since it was a different type of story from the ones you’ve done before in the game, what did you do differently? What were some of the challenges?
I think the biggest challenge was that we were writing a brand new Daedric Prince, and that’s never been done before. Figuring out how to make her stand on her own and not feel the same as all the others was a big challenge for us. And then like, what are her traits? Because a lot of the Daedric princes cover a lot of the different traits.
When we started going in and thinking about well, Hermaeus Mora is all about order and keeping everything in line and knowing everything. We started bouncing in on what’s the antithesis of that? That’s where we got into this chaos, the threads of fate and bouncing around, and so that was a really fun project to figure out. Once we got that, it helped inform some of the stories that are going on in this one.
When you came up with the idea of Ithelia, was Bethesda Game Studios already on board with that, or did it take some convincing?
It took a little negotiating. It’s something new, right? And it’s never been done before, but that’s kind of how we work, frankly. We pitch ideas, we talk, we work things out. Dragons was a really good example of that as well. They didn’t want us to do dragons initially at launch because they weren’t in our timeline, or at least there was no recorded history in our timeline of dragons, and then we worked through ‘What if we did it like this?’ The players were the source of this. So, in the end, they were like, ‘That’s cool, it can work.’
You’ve just released a new Elder Scrolls Online update dedicated to housing, right?
On Monday, yeah, travel day to Gamescom. The team back home was hard at work launching Update 43. The big system that we added was Home Tours, which allows players to easily share their homes with other players so they can see what they’ve created with the housing system. Our housing system, as you know, is really unique in that you can build anything. You can put chairs and ceilings, you can put tables and chairs and sofas together to make some other objects, and so that creativity is something that was really hard to show off because you have to know somebody in order to go to their home. Now, they can just share it, and you can go there right away.
On that note, here’s a question from the community: they’d like to get a furnishing bag.
Yeah, we’ve heard that a lot. It is something that we’ve been looking into for a while. It’s not as easy to do as the crafting bag because with the crafting bag and how databases are set up, it is very cheap; I guess it is the easiest way to say, or less intensive, to just implement a number in a row in a database than it is to add more rows.
With the crafting bag, it is a small number of items that stack nearly infinitely, but with a furnishing bag, it is a large number of items that don’t stack. We’re working through how to do that without destroying the Elder Scrolls Online servers and the database, because it’s really expensive. We have millions of players all having thousands of objects, so it adds up very quickly.
What about an Armory bag?
An armory bag. We’ve talked a lot about that when we did the Armory system, and we went back and forth on whether we can just pull stuff out of your bank or not. And there were actually a lot of scenarios where players could break the game. For instance, what if your inventory’s full and you’re pulling stuff out or into the bank? Or your bank is full. What if there’s lag? What happens if two items get duplicated, right? There’s lots and lots of issues with doing that.
What we decided was we were just gonna not give the player more inventory before their item sets, and instead go the route of what we did with the stable, where you could still collect them all and get them out of your inventory, but not easily be able to swap back-and-forth.
With Gold Road, you added Scribing, a precursor to Spellcrafting, to Elder Scrolls Online. How are you planning to build upon this new system in the future?
Actually, in Update 43, we did add some more scripts, which allow players to do more things with them. We added some Frost-based scripts, so now you can have Frosty magic if that’s what you’re into. I believe the updated number of unique combinations is 5500 or just over 5500, so there’s lots of opportunities to mix and match stuff. But if players continue to play the system and really enjoy the system, we are going to continue to support it.
Does that include styling as well?
Styling actually had a bunch of new additions in Update 43 as well.
What about new Sorcerer pet models or skins?
We have had a lot of feedback on this well, ever since we did the Warden and the Bear skin with that. For the Sorcerer pets, it is not a ‘we don’t want to do it’, it is more a ‘how do we not blow the game up doing it’? Because there are a lot of performance issues with that. But we have absolutely been looking at that.
Will companions be able to wear helmets in the future?
We made the design decision really early on that we wanted the characters to always be visible because that is their one personality trait, the unique face. We kind of go back and forth on that, but that was the original intent. Players can customize their abilities and all that other stuff, but we still wanted their personality to show.
What about them using player gear?
I don’t know. That’s a good question. I’d have to dig into that war. Companion gear is different from player gear. We did that again for performance reasons. The player items are very, very expensive on the database, and all the companion items are not, so whether or not they could actually wear player gear in the future is something we have to talk about.
Recently, you introduced curation for the Undaunted. What about curating other stuff like motif pages that can drop from city daily quests?
We’re slowly going through and looking at those pain points. We did the Undaunted this past update. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn, but we also did some Imperial City curation. We curated the weekly Trial rewards as well, so we’re going through that and looking at what makes sense.
Can you make mount upgrades work for all characters?
We get that feedback a lot, too. Not easily.
Could you ramp up the speed with which old styles are made available again?
I can talk to the group that manages all that. There’s a kind of a balance in that if you do it too much and too often, then players get overwhelmed, so we have to be careful.
Can you increase the total furnishings in the house?
We’ve got that one a lot, too, and those limits are there for performance. What we don’t want to ever happen is a player puts something in their home and then they crash and can never get back in there. That’s why the limits exist, but we are looking at ways to improve and increase that. But they’re there for that reason. We don’t ever want players to be in a situation where they can’t access the house.
Speaking of performance, you still support PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but there are already whispers of the console generation that will follow PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X. The question is, how long do you plan to support them for Elder Scrolls Online? Will you maybe drop them at some point?
As long as players are on them and playing, it doesn’t make sense to remove them. We have shown in the past that we will do it when it makes sense. With Windows 7, we supported it for a very, very long time. When it became end-of-life and Microsoft stopped supporting it, and there were fewer and fewer players actually on it, we dropped support.
So you still see a lot of players on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One?
There’s tons of players. And on Mac as well, that’s another one we get questions about why we support Mac. Because there’s players there to play. We don’t ever want to take it away if we can.
Elder Scrolls Online recently launched on GeForce NOW. Did you see an influx of new players from the cloud?
Absolutely.
I asked you before in a previous interview, but are there any talks with Microsoft about adding the game on Game Pass?
It’s on Game Pass for consoles but not on Game Pass PC. There are various technical reasons why it’s not there, but we are looking at it because we get a lot of game continues, and it makes sense.
I know you completed the server hardware upgrade a while ago. Are you still looking at ways to improve server performance beyond that?
Yeah, the new hardware helped, and for the most part, things are pretty stable and solid. However, there are absolutely still periods during peak hours when it’s not as good as we want, so we’re definitely looking into further improvement.
The next update will focus primarily on PvP. Are there any tidbits that you can share? Anything at all?
I believe Gina Bruno (the Elder Scrolls Online Community Manager) let slip that it might be Battleground-related.
What about the Alliance War? Are you doing anything about that?
That’s where we start to look at performance, and then also at some quality life, such as item curation. Then we’re constantly adding new cosmetics that you can earn through PvP, adding new item sets and Rewards for the Worthy.
I know this is a question you get asked repeatedly, but do you have any thoughts about crossplay? Is it even doable?
It’s never been a no; it’s always been a holy hell. We made many decisions in 2007 that are very difficult to change, and then we’d have to get all of the first parties together to make sure that they’re good with how we would go about implementing. It’s a huge technical challenge to solve. Do I think we will get there in the future? Maybe. I think that’s where technology is just going in general. People just want to be together and make it easy and remove all the friction to play with each other. But like I said, we started building this game in 2007, when that wasn’t even remotely a thought in anybody’s head back then.
On that note. Elder Scrolls Online has turned 10. How long do you have a roadmap for internally?
Game development, there’s a fuzziness to that, right? We have a 5-year plan of where we want to go, then we have like a 3-year, more solidified plan of the things that we want to focus on, and then we have an 18-month locked-in roadmap. We’re constantly iterating and updating that. Just because we have a 5-year plan doesn’t mean we will stop after 5 years; it’s just that’s as far ahead as we have the brain power to think, at least right now, but as long as players want to continue playing the game, we’re going to continue to support and update Elder Scrolls Online.
Thank you for your time.
