The Elder Scrolls Online Interview

The online edition of EDGE is offering an article-style interview with ZeniMax Online’s director Matt Firor on the upcoming MMO The Elder Scrolls Online. “Streamlining the MMOG” is the tagline:

Public dungeons are part of Firor’s personal quest to have players meeting each other (in the world, rather than in menus), an element in a wider trend that sees the design team taking standard MMOG ideas and stripping them of unnecessary friction and complexity. (We’re re-examining why there’s complexity in the first place,) admits creative director Paul Sage. (We’re not dumbing down; we’re streamlining. The rest of the game is going to be compelling; we don’t need to put barriers up so people don’t get to that. I play so many other games that when you come to MMOGs, you can quite clearly spot the things you don’t need. It’s important to challenge the prevailing mentality.)

Look closely, and you can see this idea at work. For example, it’s there in a UI that fades away when it’s not in use ((There’s nothing more intimidating than a new player logging into an MMOG and seeing a UI that’s 100 buttons,) says Firor. (I describe [our] UI philosophy as, ‘˜Our world is beautiful don’t put UI all over it.’)). It’s also there in the content structure, which allows you to ignore quest hubs in favour of pure exploration. (In the older generations of MMOG when you’re exploring a new area and you see a cool ruin and then a town, the game tells me I need to go to the town and not the cool ruin,) complains Firor, (so I can find a quest giver who will tell me to explore the ruin. We’re skipping that. Just go explore the ruin, and the quest will start. The world is set up with little pockets of content around each zone, which you can explore in any order. Each pocket lasts about 30 to 40 minutes, gives out a reward, and ties into the main story.)

It’s a fundamental tweak to the genre norms, and it came out of internal playtesting. (Our original model was still exploration-based, but not as much as it is now,) admits Firor. (We didn’t have quest hubs, but we had NPCs in strategic locations, and we left it to you to find them. Then we had people in the office who were not MMOG players, and they said, ‘˜I can’t find the content.’ We realised somebody had already solved this problem for us, and it was Skyrim with the compass. That compass is very important to this game, as it’s come to us straight from the IP. I walk across this world, and the compass points out stuff to do. The world itself will push items and push quests to me. I can go to a city and take quests, and they’ll lead me to some of these things, but there are some things you can only find when you walk around. Everywhere you go, there’s something to do, and you can do that stuff the moment you find it.)