THE BIG INTERVIEW
The Elder Scrolls Online takes place way before Skyrim, and about 800 years before Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and IV: OblivionWhich is your favourite location to explore
within the game?
There is a canyon that runs through the
middle of the new zone, which internally
we call the Grand Canyon, but it had a
different name of course, and that’s really
cool. It’s deep when you go down to the
bottom and look up. There’s rope bridges that
cross it and there’s a series of quests that
take place there.
How does it feel to have ESO be as successful
as it has been?
It took a while to sink in that we’re killing
it right now, because we went through the
whole phase where we were responding to
the PC-launch Elder Scrolls criticism, and then
console was huge, but it was so huge that it
broke a bunch of stuff at the beginning. Like,
we weren’t expecting it to be so big, which is
a great problem to have, but it was a problem.
And then after that it was like, ‘We have this
huge audience, how do we make enough
content to keep everyone engaged?’ And
that led to the realisation that you can’t, and
that led to the One Tamriel [update] which
opened up the world so anyone can play with
anyone and can do anything at any time. And
that led to, ‘Okay, now we have to do this
chapter thing every year to kind of give out a
message to the community that this is what
to expect from us.’ Like every June, check out
what we’re doing because it’s going to be big.
Now it’s, ‘Check out what we’re doing, and,
oh, by the way, the rest of the year is telling
LEFT The
Frostvault
dungeon is home
to many fearsome
automatons.
RIGHT Be sure
not to let the
Weeping Woman
take the
Wrathstone away
from you.
BELOW RIGHT The
Elsweyr Chapter
contains some of
ESO’s best-
looking
locations.
the same story.’ You know, we’re constantly
evolving. I think it probably wasn’t until after
the Morrowind launch that we were like,
‘Yeah, wow, we’ve had three good years,’ you
know? Because we’re working on everything
behind the scenes not getting out of the
office a whole lot. And it takes a while to sink
in some times.There may be a day that ESO is no more. Is
there something else in your mind that you’d
like to work on in the future?
Yeah. Not a lot of people have picked up on
this, but if you look on our job site you’ll see
that we are accepting applications for people
to work on a new engine for a new triple-A
game. So yes, we have ideas, but we’re
committed to ESO for as long as it takes. QThe latest huge expansion for The Elder
Scrolls Online, the Elsweyr Chapter, is
available 4 June.“I sat in a chair
in the middle of
Daggerfall and
just watched
players run past”
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