CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE

Few online RPGs have transformed as much in the past decade as The Elder Scrolls Online. First debuting in April of 2014 as a confused, awkward thing, loved by few. Today, it proudly stands alongside its single-player peers. Here’s how TESO escaped Oblivion’s grasp and reconnected with Elder Scrolls fans.

- Dominic Tarason

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve made a return tour around TESO’s world, wrapped up the main story arc, and got to have a talk with two of the game’s production leads—game director Matt Firor (previously of classic PvP MMO Dark Age of Camelot) and creative director Rich Lambert. Both were eager to share their stories of the highs and lows of development, and how the game found a new identity through one of the most comprehensive overhauls of an online game to date.

TESO’s story begins 17 years ago, an eternity by videogame standards. Oblivion was only 18 months old, and Fallout 3 was an up-and-coming hit. “Our North Star at the time was Oblivion,” reminisces Firor. “The very first version of ESO we worked on—for the first two or three years—was very much a mid-2000s MMO with Oblivion’s IP. And then Skyrim launched, and everything changed.”

This prompted a fundamental redesign of the game, including massive systems and visual overhauls, according to Matt. “Skyrim was like a social phenomenon, and we knew that our original concept just wouldn’t fly in a post-Skyrim world. We were the next Elder Scrolls game to launch, so we had to make the game more Skyrim-like and we only had like a year and a half to do it.”

Among the features that had to be rushed into place were a first-person mode,