The Elder Scrolls Online Interview

German website PC Games Hardware is offering up a quick interview with ZeniMax Online’s Matt Firor about the recently released The Elder Scrolls Online, with the questions expectedly treading into technology-oriented territory. A couple of examples:

PCGH: Our first tests of the ESO Beta show that the engine does a very good job in regards to scaling up and down on high-end as well as more dated hardware. Can you describe the efforts you took to configure the engine so well that it now seems to work with many different hardware components?

Matt Firor: If you start with scalability in mind, it makes it much easier to develop a tolerant graphics engine. We do have a min spec, and the game looks very different on it than it does on a top-of-the-line rig. I love this, as I can play the game on my home or work PC at high-res, but can play when I’m on the road on my Macbook Air as well – it’s a slightly different graphical game experience, but the basics are all there.

PCGH: Gamers like to compare ESO’s graphics-wise with Skyrim a lot. Do you think that’s fair given the fact that ESO is an MMORPG and Skyrim is a singleplayer-RPG?

Matt Firor: There’s art style comparisons and there’s engine comparisons. Our art style was created to be reminiscent of all the (modern) Elder Scrolls games, so players of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim felt at home. That is mostly independent of engine requirements. But yes, you can tell that Skyrim was developed for the purpose of giving one player a really awesome graphical experience. With ESO, we have to be mindful that hundreds of players will have to be on screen at some point and the engine had to be built with that as a foundation, which led to the highly optimized engine we have today.