The Elder Scrolls Online – Rich Lambert Interview

With the Blackwood chapter of The Elder Scrolls Online launching on June 1, 2021, the game’s creative director Rich Lambert sat down with Game Informer to talk about TESO’s less than ideal launch, his team’s attempts to find an identity for the MMORPG, the game’s passionate community, and more.

Here’s a couple of sample questions:

GI: It’s honestly amazing to see the collaboration, especially with the line between the gaming community and the devs being smaller than ever before. You’ve got Discord, Reddit, Twitter; it seems like collaborations with these large communities are almost inevitable.

RL: Yeah, it definitely is. I think the big thing out of all of this is that gaming isn’t just a hardcore thing now. For the longest time, it was only geared towards hardcore MMO players. A little bit of pain here and there to play was kind of okay. But now that it’s more mainstream, accessibility is a huge part of playing games. And what the mod community is able to do is provide that accessibility for games that haven’t necessarily been able to deliver that up to this point. I think you’ll see that as things progress further into the future, more and more games will be more accessible. Just watch.

GI: Right now, a lot of World of Warcraft players feel like Blizzard has stopped listening to the community a little bit. Lore cohesion is something that’s often talked about. Is that something your team is concerned with?

RL: It terrifies me. It terrifies me to think about losing the pulse of the community and feel like they might think we’re not paying attention. You know, as I said earlier, one of the biggest reasons why we’re in the position we are in today is because we listen to them. And we’re a part of the community, as well. And so the game got better because of that. You know, I think if you don’t play your own game, you’re not going to be in tune with the game; you’re going to not be in tune with your community. That’s just going to be harder to make the game better. So yes, it’s something that sometimes keeps me up at night. Luckily, we play the game a lot. We have obviously been playing other things, too. I just finished plaything through Outriders and I had a blast.