I made this statement in a meeting that I wanted the ESO to be more like Grand Theft Auto. My comment was, Does anybody care what level they are in Grand Theft Auto? No, they just log in and play.

Just briefly, for the audience, this one, what do you both do? What do your roles entail?

Xanamax Online has been around since 2007, and it was founded to start the elder scrolls online. Rich was pretty much the first employee back then. He and I have been working together for a very long time. For years, my job was the head of elder scrolls online, and Rich was the creative and content head. But now that Xanomix Online is a little larger, and we have some unannounced projects in the works. I am now the of the studio, and I have people to lead both projects. But I have been working on the elder scrolls online since 2007.

For me, my role is I handle basically all the day to day on the elder scrolls online. Working with all the teams, making sure that everything we do fits within the world, the types of stories we tell, the types of systems that we put in the game for players to play with. So that's my role.

How did the elder scrolls online come to be? What came before it?

The elder scrolls is a video game series that's been around since the early 1990s. And your listeners will probably know two of the biggest franchise hits, which were Skyrim, which came out in 2011, and then Oblivion, which came out in 2005, 2006. So there were other series. So there have been five mainline elder scrolls games and a whole bunch of smaller ones. And elder scrolls online was started in 2007 to be the online version, hence the name, of the IP. So it was the first time that players could actually get in and adventure through the elder scrolls fantasy world together with friends. So that was the concept for the game and why the game was started and why the studio was founded.

Skipping ahead to the release of elder scrolls online, there's obviously a lot of anticipation around it because, as you say, the games that inspired it were from a successful and beloved series. And how did that initial launch go?

Part of our jobs, frankly, the two of us, part of our jobs was ensuring that the game, when it launched, appealed to two disparate audiences. And one was the single player mainline elder scrolls games, where you don't see other players in your game. And the other is fans of what were known at that point as It's MMO-RPGs, which is a crazy term, which means Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. But your listeners will know, like World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot or EverQuest were big MMO-RPGs. And so since And so elder scrolls online is a massively multi-player game. We knew at launch that we had to appeal to both audiences. And when we launched for various reasons, we had systems in the game which turned off the elder scrolls game, elder scrolls players. And then we also had systems which our massively multi-player fans didn't like either. So we had work to do at launch, which I'm sure Rich will go into excruciating detail on because he was in charge of doing them to make sure that the game would then appeal to both camps.

A hundred %, right? We didn't really pick a lane, right? Matt and I talked about this a lot. What was our identity then? We tried to appeal to both, and we didn't particularly meet either of their needs as much as those groups wanted. So we went back almost to the drawing board and had this heart-to-heart. What is this game supposed to be? Is it supposed to be an elder is it an elder scrolls game or is it supposed to be an online game? When we decided on its elder scrolls first and foremost, that helped solve a lot of those kinds of problems. Things like separating players from playing with each other, things like a lot of those types of things where in single player games, you don't really have to worry about them. You go into an area, you clear out all the bad guys, and then it's just a town that gets to go off and be free. In an online game, that's much, much harder to do because there's so many other people in the world. If one person has done that quest, but another person hasn't done that quest, whenever you go into that area, you can't actually play together.

That causes this friction, this this really painful thing for you and your friends where you have to always be in lockstep, and that makes it really hard. That's really not what elder scrolls is about. We spent six months fixing all of those types of things, and then that led further into things like one Tamreol, which was a huge turning point for us in 2016. I think that's when that came out, where we got rid of the arbitrary level gates that prevented for you from exploring because elder scrolls is all about exploring the world, just picking a direction and going, and also removed all the barriers to actually playing with your friends. And so now in elder scrolls online, it doesn't matter what level you are, it doesn't matter what alliance you chose, It doesn't matter how long you've been playing the game, you can always play with your friends regardless. That makes playing in the online world feel really good.

When you first got the game out and As you say, the reception was a little bit mixed and you needed to pick a lane. I could imagine that being quite disheartening for a time. What kept you going through that period? And was there a moment where you thought, Right, this is it. We've got it. We've cracked it. This is the path we need to follow now.

Well, even when things were at their worst, it was still a successful game. It just wasn't as successful as everybody wanted it to be. And we had, even at EC launch, we had a hard core group of players that logged in every day and played the game. And that gave us a lot of heart and frankly, momentum, because we really looked at what those players were doing through metrics and analysis. And it showed the parts of the games that they were doing that they loved. And it also showed the parts of the games that weren't being utilized so much. And part of the job then was when we were making the changes to make the game more elder scrolls, and I'm doing air quotes for the radio listeners, we did more of what the players in the game were doing. We did a lot more systems like that. And those were things that, looking back on it, were apparent. Yes, they were questing and exploring, but they also did lots of things that I call virtual world activities. They got together and chatted. They danced and played drums and musical instruments around our way shrines.

Our players, even back then, spent a lot of time doing just living in the game with the virtual character. And so if you look at the systems we've done since then over time, many of them have been focused on non-killing, non-leveling, just fun, housing and a card game and an antiquity system where you can travel around the world and dig up lost artifacts and things like that. Those are a direct result of us looking at what those players were doing back in 2014 and figuring out what players really wanted was an elder scrolls virtual world where they could actually establish a house and an identity and go from there.

In all of that as well is we had the community, that core community that Matt said, but we also had the support of Robert Altman, who passed away a few years ago, who saw the magic in the game and gave us the support and the time we needed to do what we thought was right to improve on the game. And that was a huge confidence boost for the entire team. I don't know that we would be here today if it wasn't for Robert being like, no, this is a good game. Go and do all these things. So that was a really a big part, too.

Yeah, he was the CEO of XanaMax, of course, back then and up until the Microsoft acquisition. But he was very much a realist. He was like, I see what you've done There are people playing the game, not as many as you thought. Now, figure out what to do and then do it. And so that's what we did. And that was a vote of confidence. It was a very direct and clear message that we hadn't quite hit the mark. But it was also the freedom to go and do what we thought was right to make it better. And not a lot of game companies get that opportunity.

No, indeed. And I suppose Was it ever hard? Because in a sense, a lot of that virtual world stuff at first almost must have felt rule-breaking. And I guess as devs, you have a vision of how you want things to be and how you want people to play the game. Did that take a bit of wrestling with or Was it quite a quick realization that we need to go where the players are going with this?

It was pretty apparent to Rich and I and other senior members of the team, but there were lots of very heated conversations with even our own developers on whether to go that path because not a lot of games have gone down that road. Usually, the way you would react is to make it more MMO-like and more grindy and go right to the hard core players and ensure that you're catering to them. But looking back on it, it was the right decision, but it wasn't an easy decision. We talked about it a lot, but making sure that the game was first and foremost a fun world for elder scrolls players made the road very apparent, but it was not without a lot of controversy internally. Externally, I think it was the right thing because there was not so much controversy about that. But internally, with a bunch of old-school MMO developers, there was a lot of meetings and a lot of whiteboards.

Yeah. And honestly, it wasn't up until people actually got to play it that they started to really understand where the magic was. But yeah, those first few months were challenges within the studio for sure, because we weren't sure. Half the studio was, Yes, this is great. The other half was like, Oh, my God, what are we doing? So yeah, it was interesting.

Yeah, I made this statement in a meeting That I wanted the ESO to be more like Grand Theft Auto. And my comment was, does anybody care what level they are in Grand Theft Auto? No, they just log in and play. And we need to copy that feeling. Obviously, we can't be quite that open and free. But if you think about it that way, I log into the game, I can just group with anyone, I can just go to have do fun things and not worry about, have I gotten high enough level to go into this area? All All of that, it comes from the idea of more modern virtual world type games.

Yeah, and it's a barrier to entry for new players as well. I guess that probably makes it feel a little bit friendlier. How do you make it enticing for new players? I guess that's a big part of it because I think probably all live service MMOs, the big hurdle to jumping in is just the idea that you're going to be underlevel or you're not going to be able to keep up with people who've been playing it for many years? How do you address that within Elders Crawls Online?

I'll do the short answer here. I think Rich could do the long one. But the short answer is most of our competition have the opposite problem that we do. And since their content is level gated, if you're a new player, 15 years after launch, it's daunting because you have 15 years of content to go through to get to the good stuff, the new stuff. We have the opposite problem where a new player can do anything. They can go right to the new stories, they can do the old stories, they can do something in between. And it's almost like it's an overwhelming amount of choice. And So that is a problem that we have, especially as the game gets older and gets more and more content. That is a problem that we have been starting to address more. Rich, you want to add to that?

Yeah, I think you nailed it, right? Where we have We have to teach players that our game is different. You can come in at any point. You can play any story you want. If you want to play the newest stuff, you don't have to grind through 10 years of older content to get to it. So getting that message out and making sure players understand that has been a challenge. Then the other part is the game's 10 years old at this point, and there is a metric ton of stuff that you can do in the game, not just questing and killing. So arguably, we don't do a great job at surfacing all of those things, and that's something that we need to work on and are definitely going to focus on over the next few years is to make that easier for new players to come in and understand just how big and how deep elder scrolls online is.

Awesome. Thank you. And just to talk about the subcultures that you've got in the game, you mentioned things like housing. I think that's probably one of the big ones, isn't it? I think to maybe someone who's image of MMOs is just the leveling up questing that is quite surprising to hear about if they're not so familiar with elder scrolls online. I just wondered if you'd be able to Can you talk us through a little bit of that and if there's any examples that really stand out to you of just mad creations that you've seen, anything like that.

I think every time I talk about ESO in this setting where it's talking generally about the I make the following statement, and it was true five years ago, and it's still true today. And that is that if you ask five elder scrolls online players to describe the game that they're playing, you will get five different games described to you. And That's on purpose. To directly answer your question, we have players that do nothing but housing. They don't do anything else. They only do housing. In fact, we have players that other players hire to decorate their houses. We have a whole in-game economy of players that just are home decorators, and they go and decorate other people's houses. And we have a whole another housing subset that does crazy stuff, awesome stuff in-game, and have YouTube channels and social media channels to show off what they did. Just yesterday, somebody created the strip from fallout New Vegas in our housing system. It's got the Lucky 38, it's got at least two of the other casinos, right? And it's someone else did a Japanese traditional tea garden ceremony area. I mean, it goes on and on. And there are players that do nothing but quest and go out and kill monsters.

We have players that just do co-op Dungeons, four-player Dungeons. They can run together with their friends that are harder content. And as designed, that is what we want to hear, that players can just find their own niche and do things that we didn't even think were possible with the game. And that's the magic of making a game like this. Go ahead, Rich.

There's literally players that never leave Seridil, which is one of our PvP zones, where all they do is just PvP. It's a very conscious decision. One of the things that we told the team, basically right after we did Somerset, which was our third chapter, second chapter, was we've got lots of questing and killing in-game. What are some other activities that we can give to players that aren't necessarily that? That's where we started getting things like digging into the lore with Antiquities and started getting more things with housing and housing features. Fashion is another huge part of the end game. A lot of players say high FPS is really important, and FPS in the elder scrolls term is fashion per second. How do you look your best? We really doubled down on that. There's lots of different ways to customize your character and your armors with dying and so forth. So, yeah, it really is a virtual world.

Awesome. I guess going forward, you've hit this 10-year milestone, which from that point we were talking about earlier, I'm sure at one point maybe felt like something that you might not make. And ASO is in a really strong place now. What's the big challenge for you for the next 5, 10 years? And how are you thinking you might go about meeting it?

I think the big thing is not to get complacent. If you look back over the 10 years, and even for us as developers, really the last 12 or 13 years, we haven't been afraid to make changes when we thought we needed to make changes. We've done a lot of things to shake up the game. We added the chapter system like Rich said, in 2017 with more wind, and that was a new thing. And we did one to Emre in 2016, and we're always adding new things and making changes. So I think our job is to keep in touch with the community, keep in touch with what we think the game should be, and don't be afraid to make hard decisions and don't get complacent.

When you mentioned being allowed by Rob Altman the space to develop the game and take that seed of those players that were sticking with the game and building it out into what you've got today, it might have been true at the time, but it feels like be possibly even less true now. Do you think you would be able to do that today? It feels like so many studios are chasing a big MMO or a live service game as the dream product, and we've seen lots of things falling by the wayside. Do you think If you were starting from scratch again today, you could repeat what you did over the last 10 years?

Making games of this scale is hard and it's really expensive. There's a lot of risk in that. In today's world, maybe. I think having Robert at the helm really helped us because Robert knew exactly what he wanted and trusted us. Working at other companies before, I don't know that we would have been afforded the the luxuries of that. But if we were to start all over again and try to build this and recreate this, yeah, I think we could do definitely a really good job on that. I always say we're smarter now than we were back then. I think Matt is more of the, we were always smart back then. It's just we didn't know what we didn't know. And so we're more seasoned now. But yeah, you learn. Every time you do something, you learn. And we're still learning when we're building zones and we're building systems. And that's the fun part of game development. It's not an exact science.