10-Years of The Elder Scrolls Online: Matt Firor & Rich Lambert Explain Past, Current & Future Development

Just before the anticipated console release of The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road , I was able to pick the minds of the director duo of Zenimax Studios’ Matt Firor and Rich Lambert about everything regarding The Elder Scrolls Online. The directors gave fans a look behind the curtain on what it’s like being on the development team of ESO for the past 10 years , the challenges the development team faced while making new content, and how the new Gold Road content will affect the game moving forward.

I’ve been a fan of The Elder Scrolls Online for 10 years, which is longer than I’ve been writing for video games. After 10 years of working on ESO, did you think the game would make it this far?

Matt Firor : You go into a project like this with the assumption it will because that’s what you know games like this [ MMOs ] do when they catch on. I don’t know if we were quite prepared for the level of success that we’ve had, but we certainly worked hard for it in the years right before and right after the launch. I don’t think we expected it. We knew if we did our jobs right, we would be here.

There have been a lot of quality-of-life implementations in The Elder Scrolls Online. Such as being able to join different factions and play additional races, my personal favourite; is being able to run at blazing speeds without having to wait for your stamina to recharge. There are also additions like riding trainer time cool-down reductions and reduced research times. Are you planning on adding more to cater to the new player?

Rich Lambert : That’s one of the things that we always try to do. We’ve got a giant list of things we would love to address in the future. Quality of life is a big part of that. There’s a lot with The Elder Scrolls Online that we’ve added over 10 years. It’s time for us to look at that and how it all coalesces and make sure that new players coming in understand all the aspects of ESO . I think that’s probably a good way to summarize our focus moving forward.

In the past 10 years, you have touched upon it in previous developer diaries about prior expansions. But which one expansion from The Elder Scrolls Online is both of your favourites?

Rich Lambert : Making us choose between our favourite kids?

(Haha) Yeah!

Matt Firor : Rich and I can both answer this. But I always have two answers for this, one is, my favourite story in the game, Murkmire . This is a smaller DLC that we don’t talk about enough, but in terms of my favourite overall chapter/post-launch content is probably Orsinium . Because that became our idea of what a chapter would be. Then we tried to hit that every year from 2017 on. Orsinium is great if you go there. It’s a little game encapsulated in one zone. It’s got a little bit of everything, and it’s awesome. But Rich, what’s your favourite?

Rich Lambert : I 100% agree with Orsinium. That is one of my favourites for lots of different reasons. We learned so much about building that area, and it set the foundation for many developments going forward. I will say that one of my favourite stories we have done is (a part) of Gold Road, specifically the scribing quest line. That entire arc is exceptionally well done. The team did a really good job. I have had a blast playing that.

Matt Frior : That was a lot of fun too, the characters in Gold Road are great. The personalities involved make it a lot of fun.

Speaking of characters, when you write storylines, you always hit the nail on the head with excellent personification of characters. Two that come to mind are Razum-dar from the original questlines and Sharp-as-Night from Necrom . Do you have to follow a certain playbook when developing these characters? Does Bethesda tell you ‘no, you can’t do this’?

Rich Lambert : Yes, it’s Elder Scrolls , right? There are certain kinds of lore that you have to follow. But when it comes down to individual characters, no. We can do whatever we want and tell the stories in the way we want, which is great. We don’t have a ‘playbook’ for characters. There are certain ones, main story-wise when we want to bring them back, obviously, Razum-dar still has to be Razum-dar in the new area. He can have some quirks and whatnot. But a lot of the characters outside of the main story happen organically.

Rich Lambert : As the team starts getting in there and start pitching ideas for stories they want to tell — especially in some of the side objectives — some of those characters turn out to be more interesting than the ones we had planned on building from the outset. So, it’s just this really interesting, iterative process when it comes to you telling stories and creating characters.

Over the past 10 years, there have been a lot of challenges that have come with constantly developing an online game. What would you say is the biggest challenge that you faced with The Elder Scrolls Online ? How do you know that something can plug in and play?

Rich Lambert : Wow, that’s a good question.

Matt Frior : Rich, you can take that one. I’ll add stuff, too!

Rich Lambert: In general, balance, as scary as it sounds, is probably the easiest because now we’ve got to this point where we have these various calculators that help us better balance things and whatnot. Getting to that point was the hard part. But I think that a lot of times, where the challenges come into play is, where do we go next? How can we make this work in the engine?

We started building this game in 2007, and some of the decisions we made back then, we probably might not have made the same decisions today. And we have to be careful, it’s 10 years of stuff and the game is massive, and adding to it gets harder every year. You know, there are a lot of performance things, lots of metrics, and a lot of technology challenges that we have to try to solve.

Matt Firor : I’ll add that over the years, we haven’t just added zones. We’ve also added tons and TONS of what we call ‘horizontal activities’ like the Tales of Tribune card game, antiquities, housing, and things that you do that aren’t necessarily part of the story or the strict questing. I think the biggest challenge we have now is the care and feeding of all of those systems. Every update, players will expect a new card deck, new houses, new furniture and lighting for the houses, assassinations [Dark Brotherhood quests], Thieves Guild quests, etc.

Richard Lambert : Yeah, the game doesn’t get any smaller, that’s for sure.

Matt Firor : Every year, we add more stuff. That means next year, we have to add even MORE stuff. So, I think the challenge is what to focus on for this update or chapter. That’s where a lot of the discussion is on the team, ‘What are we focusing on this year?’ and ‘What are we going to do about this?’ It’s making sure the other [previously implemented] systems are fed and focusing on a few of those systems so that they shine.

That’s a good point! You did briefly speak about housing. By logging in three times straight in May, you gave players a free house. Are fans going to get more of that?

Matt Firor : We gave away the free house, but then we launched Gold Road right afterwards. The [new] house in Gold Road is even better than the one we gave away! (Laughs). But you know, this is the 10th year, and the house that we gave away was part of the daily login rewards. In celebrating the 10th anniversary, we upped the ante on all of the daily login rewards players can get to thank the community for being there. It was part of the 10th-anniversary celebration, and we probably won’t make a habit of that, but never say never! You never know what will happen in the future.

That’s a great addition! To move to the main event, The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road DLC. Why did you choose the West Weald as your location were you just ‘we need to go back to Skingrad?’

Richard Lambert : It’s a little more nuanced than that. But yeah, when we’re looking at where we want to go, the two big things are number one – what’s left on the map, and number two – how is this space different from the thing we just did? So, with Necrom , and the Telvanni Peninsula, it was very alien. It was very cosmic horror-type vibe and feel.

The West Weald and the story we wanted to tell in the West Weald was very different. It allowed us to revisit a fan-favourite place from Oblivion and put our spin on it. But also, show fans something that we’ve never done before, a forest in Autumn. The art team blew it out of the water visually.

Matt Firor : Yeah, it also gave us the chance — since it borders Valenwood, and we haven’t explored Bosmer lore at all since launch just because of where our chapters have been — and so it gave us the chance to have a nice long border with Valenwood and tell some stories about Imperial versus Bosmer friction over the years. This allowed us to revive the ‘who are the Bosmer and where did they come from?’ Debate a little bit, and it gave us a chance to go back and explore that, which was definitely a factor in us choosing that area.

How important was it to the development team to retain the Oblivion feel from The Elder Scrolls IV ? The theme song came back and it’s fantastic, but were you aiming for nostalgia? Or did you want to bring the West Weald as it appeared before the whole Oblivion Crisis? What exactly was the aim for the West Weald?

Richard Lambert : Nostalgia was definitely a big part, it’s a fan-favourite. Skingrad, that whole section over there is something that longtime players fondly remember. So going in there doing that area justice, but like I said a little bit earlier, putting our spin on it, and showing what it was like 800 to 1000 years in the past is always something we really have fun doing.

Matt Firor : It’s not just Skingrad. The ruins in the West Weald are in the same place and have the same name [as Oblivion ]. If you run around that world in Oblivion and come back and head right into West Weald, the enemies will be a little different, the names [of enemies] will be different, and the lighting will be a little different. The terrain and what you’ll find is pretty similar, and we did that on purpose.

When you mentioned that the West Weald borders the Bosmer region, it made me wonder, are you ever going to explore the Falmer?

Richard Lambert : We’ve had little bits and pieces of that, like when we did Greymoor . I don’t know what we’ll do in the future, but there are definitely some bits and pieces of them appearing already.

Matt Firor : It was pretty clear in Skyrim , that when you found the Falmer there, that that was the first time anyone had realized that they existed in the last 2000 years. Since we’re set before Skyrim , it puts us in a box where we can’t talk about the Falmer that much because they were, by lore, locked away in the ruins there.

If fans play some of our Skyrim dungeon content, you’ll see places where, if you did the same dungeon in Skyrim , our layout of the dungeon is a little different. So you can’t get to the door that gets to the part where the Falmer are. We had players trying to do that, too, and then commenting on it. So, it’s like there are some things we have to leave to the other games because they told that story, and they did it well. We don’t want to get in the way of that.

Backtracking a bit on my previous question, the lore aspect of building on ESO , you developed a brand new Daedric Prince which meddles with things, especially one that’s referred to as ‘the Prince of Paths’. Did you run into any issues or retcons that you had to deploy? Or something that you had to just ignore completely when creating a new Daedric Prince? And if so, how did you get around them?

Richard Lambert : Yes to all those! (Laughs) We could talk for hours about what we had to do and whatnot. I think the best way to summarize it is we work closely with BGS [Bethesda Game Studios]. They have a great group down there that loves chatting with us whenever we have hare-brained ideas about the lore. They worked with us when we initially went to them; they were like, “You want to do WHAT!?”

It’s the same reaction they [BGS] had when we told them we wanted to put dragons in the game. “You want to do what, WHAT? There’s no dragons in this time period!” And once they got over that initial shock, they worked with us to make it fit within the lore. And that’s a good thing to have. Because obviously, they’re the IP holders, and we want to do the lore justice. You know, it’s 30 years old now at this point, The Elder Scrolls .

I was able to try Scribery with The Elder Scrolls Online : Gold Road preview. The options make it feel like there are 12 classes in the game now instead of seven, and it feels like the class pool tripled. Was that the intention? Is ESO going to get something along the lines of ‘total spell crafting’?

Richard Lambert : Well, Spell crafting the way it was in Oblivion , probably not ever because that’s a balancing challenge, right? With Scribing, we have over 4000 unique combinations of abilities that we have to balance already, and that’s just a ton of work. The biggest thing in an online game is balance, and in a single-player game, you don’t really have to worry about if players break combat. Who cares?

In an online space, you have to worry a little bit more about balance, and so that is why we developed Scribing the way it was, where it was individual components that you put together, and there’s some semblance of balance in there, I’m sure players will find holes and poke holes in what we’ve done. But that’s ultimately why the system is the way it is.

Matt Firor : I was going to remind everyone that in Oblivion , it was possible to cast a spell that did near-infinite damage (laughs). If you can one-shot anything in the world, anytime, the game becomes not fun fast. So we need to make sure it’s balanced, especially in a game that has a central PvP system, much less levelling balance and so forth. We can’t go all the way, but we can make a fun system and as Rich says, it’s 4000 different combinations.

I was going to ask, ‘Was it hard trying to not break the game with Scribery?’ But you hit that already.

Matt Firor : So far, most of the design discussions around Scribing were spread-sheeting out the different combinations and assuring things weren’t overpowered.

I’m going to guess that’s why you made that key choice to make an ability do healing or damage and not both .

Richard Lambert : Yeah! We talked a lot about the rules and why we wanted to have things the way they were. Some were self-explanatory. We didn’t want players to damage themselves. In other cases, like ‘I do damage to you and then heal myself.’ We had to go through all of those painstakingly, piece by piece.

I noticed that you mentioned Scribing will affect class abilities eventually [in a previous announcement]. How are you planning on implementing Scribery to abilities on potential classes that haven’t been released yet?

Richard Lambert : There’s A LOT to unpack in that one. (Laughs) Lots of ‘what ifs’ in there. The best way to answer that question is we have a solid framework for what we’ve built. We’ve built a bunch of different pieces and components that all balance nicely with one another right now. It is, I won’t say trivial, but it is fairly easy to add new things as we go.

What we add and in the order that we add them in is still up for debate. We want to see how Scribing is landing with players right now. Look at that data, see what players are doing, what they like, what they don’t like, and we’ll continue to add to the system like we have with all the other systems that players enjoy. But the order that we do it is uncertain at this point.

With Scribing abilities, I noticed, say you’re playing as an Argonian, fans can use a healing [Scribery] ability and the Argonians race skill translates to that ability. How hard was it to find all those pieces to adjust to the Scribing system? How BROAD stretching is this new system?

Richard Lambert : It touches every component, every piece of the ability system. We can hang anything off it that we want to for the most part, including styling, which is the other part of that where we’re letting you change the visuals of the actual ability itself, which is cool, and we’ve never done that before.

In Q&A, did you face any things that were overtly broken that you had to go straight back to the drawing board with

Richard Lambert : All the time. That’s part of game development, right? (Laughs) What sounds great on paper sometimes it’s terrible in the game, or sometimes it’s just completely broken. You should never ever do that, right? I think Vault is a good example of that. Vault has this really cool [Scribe] ability that you backflip [when casting], and when you test any vulnerability, or when you cast.

There were lots of things early on where you could climb walls you weren’t supposed to, Vault over walls that you weren’t supposed to, or get to locations that we didn’t expect players to be able to get to. So, we had to dial that back a little bit and think about how the tech would interact with some of our other movement tech and to follow the same rules as those abilities. So yeah, there’s tons of challenges when we’re coming up with crazy ideas.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road has a bunch of little biomes inside of it. You mentioned the forest, and I’m wondering, were you married to the idea of throwing the forest in the middle of the West Weald since the beginning?

Richard Lambert : Well, some of that happens in early ideation. Some of that happens as you’re iterating. One of the things we always try to do is make sure there’s visual uniqueness across the zone. So, it doesn’t all feel the same.

Coldharbour is a good example of that. It’s all blue. It looks gorgeous, but after you’re in there for 15 hours, you’re like, ‘I would like some visual differences.’ One of the many things we learned from launch, and so, we went into this, talking about ‘how do we split up the biome to make it visually different?’ and make it interesting. Somebody had the brilliant idea of ‘let’s do this giant forest!’ and In the lore, there are conflicting accounts of ‘this was a forest’ or ‘this wasn’t a forest.’

Matt Firor : And so we go there!

Richard Lambert : (Laughs) We just thought it would be a good nod to that lore, and we thought it was brilliant. Like, there you go. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t happen, but in this particular case, we got to show some of it and pay some of that off, which was exciting.

Matt Firor : The lore of The Elder Scrolls is all based on unreliable narrators. So, like Rich is saying, there is clear evidence that somebody at one point said that Cyrodiil was covered in jungle, and then others conflicted with that, so we leaned into that unreliability a little bit.

On the border in a very minimal part of Cyrodiil, there was ‘definitely’ a jungle at this at this time point in history. Which is, like Rich said, seven or 800 years before the other Elder Scrolls games, and it looks great. It gave us a chance to update our deep jungle visuals because, MAN, does it look good when you go through that area!

If you could do your own magic and put anything in Elder Scrolls Online from Elder Scrolls lore, what would you do?

Richard Lambert : I’m afraid to answer that because I might get to do that one day! (Laughs) Yeah, that’s the fun part of what we get to do now. Right? We get to make those decisions and try to find ways to make those things happen.

Matt Firor : Think about the last three years. We added a new part of Morrowind that had never been seen before, and the year before that, we explored islands off the west coast of High Rock that had never been explored in an Elder Scrolls game.

This year, we’re back to a Cyrodiilic province. But it’s in a way that is also new, with the encompassing jungle and all of the other stuff that’s happening with the new Daedric Prince. With Gold Road , we added two new territories and a new Daedric Prince.

Richard Lambert : Yeah, and Scribing! Which is a precursor to spell crafting? We’ve got dragons, all these things that we always wanted to do, we were able to do. So, I wouldn’t want to answer that question in case we actually get to do it one day.

Two more simple ‘yes or no’ questions: will The Elder Scrolls Online ever feature cross-play?

Matt Firor : Good question . Never say never. But it is for a game designed in 2009, with tech from 2007. It is not for the faint of heart. So it is something that we’re constantly looking into, but it’s complicated. So I’ll leave it at that. If you were making a new game today, it would be much different. But remember, we started work on this game 16 years ago.

Richard Lambert : Yeah, not as simple as a yes or no question.

Last one, is The Elder Scrolls Online: Classic really a thing?

Richard Lambert : Oh my God. I’m going to get in trouble if I answer it the way I did that one time (laughs). But no, it’s not serious. Our launch wasn’t fabulous. Everybody knows that. It’s been the hard work of a team for the last eight years that has turned ESO into what it is today. Undoing all of that… I don’t know if it’s the right thing for us to focus our time and efforts on.

Fans can find more information about The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road by heading over to the official Zenimax Studios website for more information.