The Elder Scrolls Online heads on the aftermath of Microsoft’s cuts and the future of the long-running MMO

There have been some tumultuous times recently at ZeniMax Online Studios, makers of The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO).

As part of Microsoft’s sweeping cuts in early July, a long-in-development MMO codenamed Blackbird was cancelled. Shortly afterwards, ZeniMax president Matt Firor announced his departure after 18 years as head of the studio.

Replacing him – or at least part of his role – is Rich Lambert, who was formerly game director on ESO. Lambert’s new title is studio game director, while Jo Burba has taken on the title of studio head. “He’s focused on the operational side of things,” explains Lambert, “and I’m focused on a lot of studio-level things and future planning.”

It perhaps says something about Firor’s importance to the studio that it has taken two people to fill his vacant seat. “He wore a lot of different hats,” acknowledges Lambert.

Stepping up into Lambert’s old role is Nick Giacomini, who started off as a senior product manager at ZeniMax in 2019. “Am I nervous? Absolutely,” says Giacomini. “But I’m very excited.”

“This wasn’t something that I was seeking out,” he adds. But he says he is “incredibly honoured” to take on the role, and judging by his all-encompassing enthusiasm for MMOs, he’s the perfect person to steer the future of ESO.

“I’ve been playing [MMOs] for about 20 years, almost every single day,” he gushes. “I can count on my own two hands the number of days I haven’t logged into an MMO, so that’s thousands of hours in multiple games.”

Securing a job at ZeniMax in 2019 was like a dream for him. “I remember jumping up and down with my wife, [going] ‘I can’t believe this is happening!'”

But Lambert has warned his successor that being the public face of a popular MMO also has a negative side. It means dealing with a lot of criticism from players, some of it personal. “You have to have really thick skin for that stuff,” he says.

“Nick and I were actually talking about this the other day, where he asked me, ‘How do you deal with all of the hate? […] How do you not let that get to you?’

“Because it’s a personal attack, right? They’re personally attacking you, and it’s really hard to deal with that and work through that. And I just told him, people generally don’t complain unless they’re passionate. And so try to find that nugget.

“And if there’s no nugget and it’s just pure vitriol, then just kind of push it away and try to focus on the positives.”

Saying goodbye

But the more immediate concern has been dealing with the aftermath of Microsoft’s cuts, which reportedly saw ZeniMax employees being locked out of Slack and left in limbo.

“It was super emotional, it was awful,” recalls Lambert, who says that he had personally worked with some of the people affected for 10 or 15 years.

“But then after, you pick yourself up off the floor and […] you realize that we have this responsibility to our community, to the game, to everybody else that is still there to move forward. That’s really hard, but that’s the goal, to continue to move forward and keep ESO going.”

Giacomini emphasises the point: “We have a commitment to our players to try to deliver the best product and experiences that we can for them. And so yes, it’s been challenging, but we’re facing forward.”

There was also the sudden departure of studio founder Matt Firor to process. “I’ve been working with Matt for almost 20 years, and it was a shock to all of us,” says Lambert. “But he’s his own man. He’s his own person. He gets to do that, and you respect him, right? He’s been in the industry a long, long, long time.”

Still, the show must go on. “I think the thing that you kind of rally around as a team, especially on something like ESO, is we’re more than one person. The game is more than one person. Yes, Matt is the founder of the studio, and I was the number two person on there, but I don’t build everything. Nick doesn’t build [everything], Matt doesn’t build everything.

“We have this village of super-talented, super-passionate people, and we get to represent them, but we don’t do it all.”

Fast forward

In terms of where ESO is going, Lambert says it’s in “a bit of a transition year.”

Historically, the game has issued updates as ‘chapters’ – big swathes of content that take around 18 months to build. The trouble with that, says Lambert, is that “most of the team’s efforts are focused on building the chapter,” which means that any issues raised by players in the meantime get pushed back in the schedule until the team has time to address them.

Now, ESO is switching over to a ‘season’ model, where the goal is to have “smaller, more bite-sized things out quicker,” explains Lambert. And rather than players waiting perhaps 18 or 24 months for requested features to be implemented, the hope is to get that down to six or nine months, he says.

The ultimate goal with the season model is to put out more frequent, meaningful updates to players, Lambert says, adding that the chapter model had started to feel a little too formulaic. “We’re kind of too predictable, and we want to shake that up and be a little bit more reactive.”

It also, perhaps, ties in to the industry-wide ambition to make things a bit more quickly: a response to the lead times for ever-more-detailed modern games becoming ever longer. But Lambert emphasises that games, by their nature, are just “really hard” to make.

“It takes a long time to build art, because you’ve got to model it out and you’ve got to rig it and skin it, all these things. It takes time to code things out. It takes time when we’re building stories: you’re writing words on a paper and then you put that in-engine, and then you have to send it out to be voiceovered and localized.” In short, he says, it’s “really, really complicated.”

What about AI, that purported saviour? What kinds of uses is ZeniMax finding for that?

“I mean, obviously we’ve looked into it. Microsoft has got their big push for AI. But we don’t really use a lot of it right now. I use a lot of it for meeting summaries and whatnot, because it just makes my life easier. It helps organise my inbox and stuff like that. But we don’t have a ton of it right now.”

Ambitions

In terms of the future of ZeniMax Online Studios, Lambert has lofty goals.

“I want us to be the most successful studio in our entire organization,” he says. “That’s a big thing to say because we’ve got Bethesda Game Studios, we’ve got MachineGames, and id – the list goes on. But I want us to be that group that everybody looks at, like we do with [Bethesda Game Studios].

“You look at Todd Howard’s group and […] it’s, like, five Game of the Years in a row, and this massive legacy and all that. That’s what I want us to do.”

Presumably, does that mean Lambert has ambitions for the studio beyond just ESO, then? “I want to make more games,” he replies. “I’m not done yet, and the team continues to want to make more games as well.

“I have lots of ideas. Hopefully we’ll be able to share those at some point.”

So it certainly seems like ZeniMax Online Studios won’t always be a single-game studio – and Lambert definitely doesn’t want to pin everything on a single game.

“I don’t think you can ride one thing into forever. I mean, obviously we want ESO to be successful, we want it to be that 30-year MMO, and commit to it,” he says. “But if you put all your eggs in one basket, there’s issues.”

Still, there’s that perennial problem for studios with long-running live-service games – the worry that any new release will only end up competing with and potentially taking players from your existing title. But Lambert points out that this is something ZeniMax Media deals with all the time.

“When you look at our entire portfolio, we have that across the board, right?” he says. “There’s Fallout 76 and ESO, and they coexist, right? We’re also under the entire Microsoft portfolio, so World of Warcraft is [being made by] a sister studio now.”

Amid all the drama of the long-running Microsoft/Activision Blizzard acquisition saga, when much of the attention was on what would happen to Call of Duty, it’s easy to forget that it also resulted in two rival fantasy MMORPGs being united under the same parent.

Giacomini says ZeniMax now works together with Blizzard – “We communicate with each other, we learn from each other” – and he adds that internal competition is something they need to be aware of for any new game, giving the example of Bethesda releasing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered earlier this year.

“We looked at it, and we’re like, ‘Ooh, what’s that going to do for us? Does that have the potential to hurt us?’ But in fact, it resulted in a lot of new players trying ESO for the first time, and a lot of players who have lapsed coming back to the game.”

Innovation versus inertia

ESO came out in 2014 and recently celebrated its first decade. But being the steward of such a long-running game poses all sorts of problems.

For a start, there are the technical aspects. “We used to be cutting edge in 2014,” says Giacomini. “Maybe less so now. And so that’s something that we’re constantly evaluating.”

He points out that the studio recently reworked the game’s starter zones, home to some of ESO’s oldest content, as well as adding new onboarding for lapsed players, “because as we’ve continued to add to the game, it’s introduced a tremendous amount of complexity as well.”

Lambert adds that ESO’s water tech has gone through four iterations since the game’s debut, and there have been a whole host of other technical improvements over the past decade, too. “When we started building the game in 2007, cross play wasn’t a thing,” he points out.

But if ZeniMax has ambitions to keep ESO going for 30 years or more, there’s also the inescapable issue of the human aging process. As ESO’s loyal, long-term audience gets older, and perhaps has less time to play games, how does ZeniMax plan to persuade a younger audience to come in?

“There’s no solution, exactly,” says Giacomini. “A lot of it comes down to the players in the community, of course, and doing right by them, trying to give them what they want and need from us.”

He notes that player expectations change, just as technology changes, “and so staying on top of that while staying true to the roots is also a big part of it. Games need to be willing to change and evolve.”

But of course, any changes to suit new players or emerging trends could also risk alienating veteran players who want to keep things as they are.

“One hundred percent,” agrees Lambert. “And we’ve gone through this over the years. At the launch, we tried to walk this line between MMO and Elder Scrolls, and we were in this weird spot where we didn’t do either one particularly well.

“And so when we decided that we were going to do Elder Scrolls first and then do MMO kind of second, that upset some folks. But it just made everything better overall.” He adds that the game has changed considerably from launch, notably dropping the subscription model early on.

“I think the other really important part in all of this is respecting players,” he continues.

“That’s the most valuable thing that players can give us, is their time”

Rich Lambert, ZeniMax Online Studios

It’s a tall order: a balance between making sure there’s enough content and mechanics to ensure dedicated, daily players can be satisfied engaging in marathon game bouts, yet also ensuring that players who can only engage for a handful of hours here and there still come away satisfied at having made meaningful progress, without being bamboozled by complexity.

“That’s the most valuable thing that players can give us, is their time. And as you say, as you start to get older, you start to have less of that.”

In other words, time comes for us all, in the end. “I used to be able to stay up for 30 hours straight and play games,” remembers Lambert. “Now? Five hours, I’m exhausted, I’m ready to go to bed.”