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Zenimax Online Studios founder and game director Matt Firor talks the changing systems of The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited, the evolution of downloadable content and bringing back the lauded land of Morrowind
OPM: Morrowind is such a big part of The Elder Scrolls’ history – do you feel added pressure now you’re bringing it back? Matt Firor: There’s always a lot of pressure when making any new content in any Elder Scrolls game. We’ve been dealing with this ever since we launched TESO: we have Cyrodiil in the game and we have areas that haven’t been in Elder Scrolls games since 1994. That it’s set 700-1000 years in the past gives us some leeway, but it also lets us do cool nostalgic things because we can go back and revisit areas that people are familiar with but then tell slightly different stories. That distance makes us able to do our own thing but have it still be a homecoming for players.
OPM: Many PlayStation players might not have had a chance to play Morrowind – and, terrifyingly, many gamers might be too young to remember it! So how are you ensuring nostalgia factors don’t dominate? MF: It has to stand on its own as a great game and as the next story chapter to tell in TESO. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how nostalgic it is, but what it’ll do is that those younger players who aren’t familiar with Elder Scrolls III will either Google it, or they’ll ask their older friends or their older siblings, and discover Morrowind set the gold standard for Elder Scrolls games. It’s a conversation starter for those guys, because they’re then going to see how revered the game is and I think that’ll pique their curiosity.
OPM: The Elder Scrolls Online has changed drastically over the course of development and since release – how has your vision changed alongside this natural evolution? MF: The studio was founded almost ten years ago and the game’s development really started at around 2009. If you just look at how the industry has changed in terms of online, of technology, and with PS4… We couldn’t have run this game on PS3, it just wouldn’t have worked! When we were first designing the game we were thinking that this is an Elder Scrolls MMO, but over time the term MMO got really diluted. It doesn’t necessarily mean game systems that have been tried and true since Everquest and World Of Warcraft; it’s now more just players are in one place and they’re all clamouring for content and they don’t have the preconceived notions of what an MMO is. They just want to have a fun game experience. That’s the biggest thing that’s changed since we started.
The technology’s better and we’re a little smarter about how to design content to let people of disparate levels, playstyles, ages and free time have a good game experience. About 18 months before we launched, Skyrim launched. And Skyrim changed everything. Before that, Oblivion was our standard, but Skyrim was so big that it changed people’s perceptions of what an Elder Scrolls game is and so we had to change a lot of stuff to make sure that we were hitting some of those marks. We didn’t have time to do it before we first launched, but then after launch we sat down and made some changes, got part of the way there and asked: “How do we get the rest of the way there?”
That was the conversation with the designers that embarked us on a year-anda-half-long quest to get more systems in: the Champion system, the Justice system, removing the subscription, adding virtual currency… It made our team constantly challenge assumptions, and that continues even to this day, with 2016’s One Tamriel [update] and now with Morrowind, which is a new way to deliver content to players.
OPM: Dropping the subscription model involved a dramatic shift in business plan. This is a large project with a big team and the base game isn’t slight – so how do you sustain the project long-term? MF: I’m an old-school MMO guy and so this has been an education for me, but players are very much used to now, with mobile games and free-to-play games and MOBAs, spending money on games that they want to spend money on, and to buy things that they want to buy. That’s always the rub with the subscription model – there’s a group of players who love the subscription model and will always play it and they appreciate it, but there are others who just want to log into the game when they want to log into it, and they don’t feel like they want to pay for the rest of the month. But if you loosen it and let them pay when they want to and give them cool things like costumes… we’re very much into visuals and our virtual currency system, because we don’t want to sell power directly.
So we give people the opportunity to get things in the game via virtual currency that they want. Not that they need, but that they want. There’s a big difference there, and that’s how it’s sustainable, just like in any free-to-play mobile game. If a player is in the game in the big sense, and they play every day and are part of a community, they have no problems spending money.
OPM: We know of players who willingly bought Horse Armour not because it was good but to thank Bethesda for Oblivion… MF: Hey, that was the first DLC sold on a console, like, ever – and it was an Elder Scrolls game. Yeah, we’ve evolved a little bit since then! They were completely in the dark there – it was completely new, virgin territory, and they had no idea how much that should cost. Nobody knew. But now players really have an idea of how much things should cost and they buy things or don’t buy things based on their perception of value.
OPM: And is it that perception that’s led to Morrowind being the first add-on content that isn’t available with virtual currency? MF: Yeah. That decision also represents a lot of work to do with the new class and the new world – it’s really a next step for TESO rather than an add-on. After Orsinium, which was our last big zone, went over so well, we knew we wanted to do another big piece of content. The problem is that it takes a long time! With our set 12-week DLC cadence we couldn’t find the time to do it unless we came up with another way to give it to users.
“OBLIVION WAS OUR STANDARD. BUT SKYRIM CHANGED EVERYTHING.”