The Elder Scrolls Online Interview

Paul Sage, creative director at Zenimax Online, currently busy on the company’s debut title, The Elder Scrolls Online, has answered to a bevy of questions related to the title from RPGSite.

Here’s a snip:

RPG Site: In a creative role, I imagine you played a part in figuring out where you’d end up in the lore and whatnot. With so much to draw on, how did you land where you did?

Sage: It’s a great time – the Interregnum. It’s a period in the past where there’s not a lot of history. Something happened, but there just simply isn’t a lot of history as to what went on. That’s already established in the Elder Scrolls lore, so getting this period. There also isn’t an emperor yet, so people want to become Emperor and restart the empire – it felt like a perfect place and the perfect fit for us in all of The Elder Scrolls.

Plus, the nice thing is when you’re developing this you get to draw on that lore. We get to go back to some things that maybe people have learned about and heard about. Maybe they’ve heard about certain battles or areas – we get to go back to those places, or places you’ve never heard of before, and touch on them. One of the coolest things is recreating things people are familiar with.

RPG Site: The game really does feel different to other RPGs; specifically in how closely the gameplay and controls mimic the action-based single player experience. Do you feel that’s more action and less turn based combat is the next generational shift for the genre?

Sage: It’s like a puzzle piece that locks in properly to form a wider picture. [Pauses] I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that.

Combat was something we knew we had to get right, but it started with a really simple concept – we want you looking at the world. We want you engaged with the game, not a massive UI and a lot of hot bars. We tried a lot of different things and iterated on a lot of different systems for combat.

We had this brilliant coder who said ‘I have this idea – I want to use the left and right mouse button like an action game.’ We were all pretty big on that anyway, but we also asked ourselves – this is different to the regular MMO market… so we have to make it feel right.

It was a risk at first, but once we played it, we said that this is definitely the right thing to do. We locked it in.

I don’t know if this is a generational shift for the MMO genre, but I know that it makes our game feel natural. It’s what makes it feel good to me when I’m playing it. Instead of going around and sometimes avoiding combat to explore, I find myself ready, throwing myself into it, engaged in it.