Summary
At Gamescom, I sat down with ZeniMax Online Studios creative director Rich Lambert to chat aboutThe Elder Scrolls Onlineand how far the game has come. Earlier this year in April, ESO turned ten, and in that time, it has received eight expansions.
“Oh, you’re asking me to pick my favorite child,” Lambert laughs when I ask him which chapter is his favourite so far. “Orcinium is probably the one that bubbles to the top for a number of reasons. It was my first as creative director, but also we learned a lot building that.
It was kind of the test bed for One Tamriel as well. That was the very first kind of zone we did where we were like, ‘What happens if we allow everybody to come in here?’ Not just veterans, like everybody. How does that work? What happens? It was a rousing success. And the orcs are really good.”
I ask Lambert whether, with hindsight, there’s anything he thinks the team would do differently looking back over the past decade of ESO. “There are probably some things, but also I really think that we wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t make mistakes along the way and try to change and iterate. That’s how humans learn.”
He goes on to tell me that if the game had launched and become a “rousing success”, he doesn’t believe they would have ever done One Tamriel, a major update that allowed anyone of any alliance to go anywhere in the world, completely opening up the map and breathing much-needed new life into ESO. After reflecting on this, he concludes, “No, I don’t think we would do anything different,” because if they’d changed how they had approached things, the game wouldn’t look as it does today. “The game is where it’s at because of all the learnings we’ve had over the years.”
Rich Lambert Loves To Troll Other Devs
We go onto to discuss Scribing, a new spell crafting-like system which was added in the latest expansion Gold Road, with Lambert telling me he particularly loves the trample Scribing skills as it shoots whichever mount you have at your selected target, including silly mounts like the novelty stick horse.
Lambert admits he’s a bit of a troll when it comes to gaming, and so when the team are doing internal tests, he and others like to play pranks on other devs. “I’ve internally created abilities and some of the people on my team have created abilities where we can turn other devs into objects and weird things. Then you come back, and then they’re like, what’s going on here?
“Jeremy, my content director, he has an ability that he runs around that turns everybody into a 50 foot tall chicken. If you suddenly come back from being AFK and you’re a 50 foot tall chicken, it’s because Jeremy was around.”
Will The Rest Of Tamriel Ever Be Playable In ESO?
After many years, a huge chunk of Tamriel is now playable in ESO, but what about the rest of it? “We’re working towards that,” Lambert says. “You’ve kind of seen that over the last ten years, right? It’s slowly piecing together things. We’ve done some things off of Tamriel, islands, we’ve obviously gone to a bunch of the Plains of Oblivion. I think at some point it makes sense, given what we’ve done.”
In terms of where ESO might go once the team has achieved making the whole of Tamriel playable, Lambert points me back to the Oblivion Plains as a possibility. “It’s this limitless space where each of the Daedric Princes can kind of morph it and change it at their whim, so there’s lots and lots of opportunities to go to other places in the Oblivion Plains.”
They could even take us to the homeland of the Sea Elves, or the far-flung reaches of Akavir where the snake-like Tsaesci hail from. There’s a lot to Nirn beyond Tamriel.
What Lore Is Off Limits?
When it comes to the rich 30-year history of The Elder Scrolls, there is so much lore that I can’t help but wonder if any of it is off-limits to the ESO team. Lambert confirms there are “sort of” areas that they can’t touch as “lore is really, really important in The Elder Scrolls”.
“The best example I can give is Dragons,” Lambert elaborates. “In Elsweyr in 2019, we released an entire chapter around dragons, but there are no dragons in the Second Era. Or at least according to all known lore, right? We worked with Bethesda Game Studios really hard on how could we do this. Is there a logical reason why this would happen? We came up with a really great one, and the players are actually the source of—spoilers—the dragons. When it comes to that kind of stuff, there’s certainly sacred cows.
“We will never tell anybody what happened with the Dwemer and where they went, but outside of that, it’s this conversation. Does it make sense? Can we go here? Can we go there? What are those things? What are those types of sacred cows, if you will? That’s how we kind of do it.”
Despite there being some areas the team can’t explore, Lambert tells me, “We get a lot of freedom to do kind of whatever we want,” explaining that the team chose the Second Era precisely for that reason as “there’s almost nothing known about this 400-year period in the lore”. However, when they are dabbling in things that are very iconic, like the Dark Brotherhood, they check to ensure it’s fitting with the pre-established lore.
A big point of contention among fans when ESO launched was that Cyrodiil is supposed to be covered in a jungle during the Second Era. After ten years,the new expansion finally addressed that long-standing continuity error.
Lambert says that for the Dark Brotherhood, the team sent a three page pitch to Emil Pagliarulo, the design director who originally wrote the Dark Brotherhood storyline in Morrowind: Bloodmoon. “He came back with seven pages of feedback. He’s like, ‘This is what you got right. This is what you got wrong.’ It’s that kind of collaboration. Most of the time, we get it right.” With 30 years worth of lore, it’s not surprising that any one person or team would remember every fine detail, especially when some of it is open to interpretation.
Lambert returns to the dragons as a good example of the ESO team collaborating with Bethesda, “When we pitched it originally, they were like, ‘No, there’s no dragons here.’ And we’re like, ‘Well, what about this, right? How does this work? Can we work it like this?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, maybe.’ Then the two teams start riffing off each other and we came up with something cool.”
I ask Lambert whether we’ll get other playable races, like the long-requested Sea Elves, and he tells me, “We hear that feedback all the time. That’s one of the things that we’re constantly talking about with Bethesda. Does it make sense? Is that the right thing to do? Is it the wrong thing to do? There’s lots of conversations going on.”
The Elder Scrolls 6-Shaped Elephant In The Room
One day, in the far flung future when we’re living in flying cities with hover cars and 3D printed food, The Elder Scrolls 6 will finally launch. The single player games up until now, from Redguard to Oblivion to Skyrim, have helped shape ESO into what it is today, and in turn, ESO will help shape the next generation of single-player games.
“Todd [Howard] has said many, many times that we’ve been carrying the torch for The Elder Scrolls and we are canon,” Lambert says. “All of the stuff we have done, they absolutely have to think about when they go and build their next thing. How they do that and what they’re doing, I don’t know. But, you know, we’re absolutely part of the world of Tamriel in the end.”
“I think that’d be brilliant,” Lambert says when I bring up the possibility of seeing something they’ve created make its way into the singleplayer series. “Just to be able to have, you know, something that we were able to work on and do and whatnot and then that gets incorporated somehow, I think that would be absolutely amazing.
The Elder Scrolls Online Crossovers And Potential TV Show
ESO has featured the Doom mudcrab in the past, but when asked what other Bethesda crossovers he’d like to see happen, Lambert immediately tells me, “I’m a huge fan of Fallout. If there was a way to do that, that would be kind of really cool.” That led us to the Fallout TV show and whether Lambert would love to see ESO adapted the same way. Lambert tells me it’s something fans have asked for, with many lauding their cinematic trailers and asking for those to be converted into movies.
“I personally would love it,” Lambert says about the idea of an ESO TV or movie adaptation, but admits he wouldn’t be the only voice in the conversation. “There’s a lot of work that goes into it. You’d need to find the right group [of people to work on it].”
However, when I ask Lambert whether he’d opt for the live action route like Fallout, or something closer to the cinematic trailers, he can’t decide which would be best. “That’s a good question. I think there’s pros and cons for both. Doing live action makes it a little harder to do magic, but magic is also something that isn’t really in the forefront of The Elder Scrolls. Todd’s always said, if magic disappeared in Tamriel overnight, nobody would really notice. I have to think about that some more.”
Later this year, we have a PvP and story update to look forward to, and I note that it’s great to see them providing for all types of players, whether it’s casuals who just want to play through the story, or those more inclined to spend their days fighting on the frontlines of the Alliance War in Cyrodiil.
Lambert confirms that’s always their aim, “We’ve got our cohorts of players, the groupings of players. We attempt to ensure over the course of the year that we address needs for each of those groups.” He goes on to say he’s so thankful of the community over the past ten years, laughing that he doesn’t think anyone believes the team when they thank the community, but emphasising, “The community is the reason we are here, right?They have turned the game into a beast.”
We’re ten years into ESO and the game has already evolved and changed so much. It’s interesting to think about where it will go over the course of thenextten years. Will we finally get playable Sea Elves? Will we get a TV show? And will we ever get to play a 637 hour game of Oblivion Bop with Cadwell?
