and that kind of led us in the direction to
where the game is today.Do any of the people you tracked know that
you were tracking them?
No. Some of them still play to this day. And
some of them, at least from six months ago
from when I last checked, still log in every
single say since the game launched.As the first online game for Bethesda, were
there discussions with the Fallout 76 teams
and were there some valuable things that you
think they took away from them? When we
first heard about Fallout 76 we immediately
thought it should be like ESO, though it
seems it’s a very different kind of game.
I mean I’ll let the Fallout 76 team speak for
themselves, but I will say in general there
are six studios within the Bethesda universe,
you know MachineGames, Tango, Arcane,
Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, and
us. We all talk to each other all the time.
We talk to the MachineGames guys about
animation systems because they do it really
well. And Arkane has that crazy Arkane art
style that everybody knows and loves, and
we were the online people so we’ve talked to
all of them about the issues that we came
up with and fixed. It’s pretty open, it’s a great
relationship between the studios. There are
lessons from Elder Scrolls Online’s launch
that any online game can learn from when
they look at it. Absolutely.Was there anything from your previous games
that you wanted to ensure didn’t make its
way to The Elder Scrolls Online?
[Laughs.] Many! I mean we all make mistakes,
right? I think the one thing I learned from
Dark Age Of Camelot was don’t add too many
classes in a PvP game. With Camelot – and
I may mess up this exact number – but within 2019, but back then it wasn’t really seen
that way. It was more seen that you can only
do multiplayer games if you do multiplayer
games. So I brought a lot of, ‘We could this,
and we could that,’ because I just thought
differently. Monster-spawning for example.
This is a big thing in online games, like
MMO types, especially in 2001 in games like
Camelot, monsters spawn behind you all
the time. In Elder Scrolls games they always
spawned in front of you. Just the concept of
things happening when you can’t see them,
in game design, it’s different.
What was the biggest thing that you learnt
from the initial development of The Elder
Scrolls Online.
There are many lessons. Making a huge game
based on a well-known IP is a blessing, but
it had its down sides: which is people have
expectations coming into it, and you have
to make sure you meet those expectations.
I mean we’ve been pretty clear and honest
[about] that when we launched in 2014 on PC.
It was a good game, but it wasn’t necessarily
a good Elder Scrolls game, because it didn’t
have a couple of features that Elder Scrolls
fans really thought was essential, like being
able to move around the world and have fun
without taking quests, such as going around
stealing things and selling them. So we had
about a year of learning our lesson of people
giving us lots, and I mean lots, of feedback
about what should be in there. We kind of
sifted through it and came up with a plan
and said, ‘Alright this is what we’re going to
do, we’re going to hold console launch until
we do these things so we can actually get all
these things in.’ It took up to about a year,
and when we got them all in, we changed
the revenue model so that it was more virtual
currency and subscription-based, or at least
optional subscription, and we released on
console and it was a huge success.
How do you know what is the right kind
of feedback? Some people jump on the
bandwagon of an ‘idea’, and that isn’t really
what people want in the game, just that a lot
of people are shouting about it.
[Laughs]. We could have a whole GDC panel
about this. What people ask for is not
“What people
ask for is not
often what they
need, just what
they want”
THE BIG INTERVIEW
often what they need, just what they want.
However, I will say that when we looked at the
feedback we looked at three things and it was
very important. We don’t just read the boards
and do what people say, that would be silly,
but what we did all throughout the launch of
Elder Scrolls Online on PC was we had a core
group of people – it was pretty substantial –
not a big as it could have been, but a pretty
substantial group of people who played
the game every day. So we knew we had
something. We knew there was a kernel of
something really good there. So we followed
that group of people and tracked what they
did and how they did them. Then we tracked
the play styles of people that didn’t play so
long, and we kind of compared the two – so
we took that kernel of information and took
the direct feedback from message boards –
and the third thing was our own playing of the
game. So we triangulated those three things064064 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE