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Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast
Skyrim Saved (and Delayed) The Elder Scrolls Online - A Kinda Funny Gamescast Limited Series
01:08:17
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- [00:11]
Greg Miller
What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Elder Scrolls Online podcast, a kind of funny games cast limited series. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller, alongside the master of hype, Snowbike, Mike.
- [00:22]
Snowbike Mike
Hi, Greggy.
- [00:23]
Greg Miller
How are you, Mike?
- [00:24]
Rich Lambert
Really good.
- [00:24]
Snowbike Mike
We got a special one today, a great intro as well. That'll get you hyped and excited.
- [00:29]
Greg Miller
It sure will. Sure. Well, of course, lots to talk about, lots about what's going, but as always, hold on when I gotta bust out the big titles. All right, next to you, Mike just happens to be Rich Lambert, game director, the Elder Scrolls Online. Hello, Rich.
- [00:42]
Rich Lambert
Hello.
- [00:42]
Greg Miller
How are you?
- [00:43]
Rich Lambert
I am fantastic.
- [00:44]
Greg Miller
Are you ready for the hard questions? Are you ready for the hard questions?
- [00:45]
Rich Lambert
Yeah, let's do this.
- [00:46]
Greg Miller
It's gonna be fun. And then, of course, joining us he is studio director, Zenimax Online Studios. It's Matt Fyror. Hey, Matt.
- [00:54]
Matt Fyror
Don't you forget it.
- [00:55]
Greg Miller
Oh, sorry, I'm sorry. Do you need to bring your chair up higher again?
- [00:59]
Matt Fyror
I tried, it didn't work.
- [01:01]
Greg Miller
Ladies, gentlemen and enbies, we are very, very excited for this. This, of course, is something very special for us, Mike, A true partnership here with the Elder Scrolls Online to celebrate, of course, the elder Scrolls Online's 10th anniversary. Our 10th anniversary. We were approached by ESO and they said, hey, you make really good podcasts and we think we have a really good story to tell, Mike.
- [01:22]
Snowbike Mike
They have a great story. You have a great story celebrating 10 years and why not get both together and let's tell a great story about Elder Scrolls Online.
- [01:30]
Greg Miller
So we are doing a four episode limited series here on the Gamescast and of course on elder Scrolls Online's YouTube channel over there, talking about everything that's happened here. Of course it's happening right now. You got episode one. Episode two is going to be Friday, April 25th. Episode three is Friday, May 9th. And then Friday, May 23rd is our fourth and final episode. I can't thank you guys enough for doing this, Rich. Matt, you know, I'm lucky enough to be celebrating 18 years of doing video game journalism, whatever you want to call this enthusiast press, yelling at people on podcasts as my career. And the thing I love the most isn't playing the games, it honestly is talking to developers about the things they've created, the passion they get to put into it and the stories behind it. And so when ESO came a call in and asked and wanted to talk this opportunity wanted us to pitch, I was like, you don't understand. Like, you know, I enjoy, of course, the old days of the E3 interview stage at IGN. I enjoy talking to people at SGF. I enjoyed the GDC stream we did not so recently, not so long ago, that was 30 minutes with a dev. Right. But the idea of 45, four 45 minute podcasts that can go anywhere and talk about all the warts, how this came to be, I think that's incredibly special, Matt. So thank you for that.
- [02:43]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, I mean, it's our pleasure. I mean, we work a lot in an office or remotely with not much human interaction besides ourselves. So it's really, really a treat for us to come out and actually talk about what we do. Because we don't do it enough. Right. We've been doing this a long time and yes. So celebrating its 10th anniversary, which was last year. So the joke is we're about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of our 10th anniversary. But seriously, we love to do this because what we do matters on a lot of levels. Right. And we want to make sure that we get to talk about what we do and the effort that we put into it and kind of the ideas behind what we do. So it's not just a game, but it's also like it's a virtual world. You can meet other people. And we did that all very super intentionally, which of course during the pandemic took a big explosive growth spurt because many people were looking for those kind of connections, of course.
- [03:43]
Greg Miller
And I think, you know, for me, I was so warmed in the heart by you. Kinda Funny Best friends. Of course, when we announced this show on Games Daily Mic, I won't lie, I expected pushback from some Kind of Funny fans. Well, I mean, like, I expected the normal thing of like, well, wait a second. Kinda Funny's not the biggest ESO fans, like why? Why are they doing the show? Or oh, I don't wanna get the way the game's cast. And I was ready to make the pitch, but the audience really got behind it was so excited for the crossover and I was shocked to see how many Elder Scrolls Online players there are in the Kinda Funny community. But then how many knew the message I was going to give of like the idea of coming in here. Mike, you know, you've played a ton at launch. You've been playing a lot recently. I played at launch and I'm a Laps fan and I'm ready to come back with all the stuff we're going to talk about that you've done. But it's the idea that to get in here and have this kind of access, we talk all the time about on games daily on gamescast, we make our best educated guess on why decisions get made and what's happening in the industry, but we aren't those people. So to have four episodes to really get granular with you and talk about this game and talk about game development is so special. And that's access we really don't get. So I'm really looking forward to getting into this, talking about how y'all found your way to Zos, which I love saying, by the way. I didn't know that was how we pronounce it. I didn't know people were boiling down to zenimax on the Zos. And I was watching the direct the other day. I was like, yes, all right, I'm in.
- [05:00]
Snowbike Mike
Now I'm talking about it.
- [05:02]
Greg Miller
But anyways, talking about, you know, your journey there, the journey to making this game, to the journey, all these different things. It's just really incredible stuff. And I hope you guys, you know, obviously, we've been getting a lot of Praise for our 10th anniversary. I hope you know, and I hope you've gotten that on your 10th anniversary tour here. Rich of people really telling you how awesome it is.
- [05:18]
Rich Lambert
It's. It's pretty cool to be able to say we've been working on this game for as long as we have. You know, we started in 2007.
- [05:25]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [05:26]
Rich Lambert
So it's what, 17, 18 years now.
- [05:28]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [05:28]
Matt Fyror
I don't want to.
- [05:30]
Rich Lambert
And yeah, we get, you know, we get to go to these shows. We get to go talk to the people and the fans and whatnot. And they're like, this helped me through a really tough time. This is how I connect with people. Right. It's. It's. It's amazing.
- [05:42]
Greg Miller
And I really think, Matt, that's one of the reasons this relationship makes so much sense, is that you have those stories. But then I also truly, truly appreciate how you and ESO and the community are like, very much kind of funny. We don't want assholes. We don't want toxicity. We don't need that. That's not what this is about. And sure, that means that your audience is this smaller group, perhaps, but it is this fact that, no, they're there for the right reasons. And I. I'm so happy that you guys championing that the same way we do it at kind of funny.
- [06:11]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of crossover. And our community is amazing. In eso, we're new players, come in and post all the time on social media and Reddit. Wow. I can't believe I asked a question of someone in global chat in the zone. I was able to tell you got the right answer and it was even the right answer. Yeah, but yeah, you want to go somewhere in your virtual world, other life, you want to go somewhere where, you know, you can be comfortable and you can, you can live the kind of, you know, Elder Scrolls fantasy life that you've always wanted. And we give them that and. But we give them the tools to do it. But the people are the ones, the community are the ones that actually bring it and, and actually make it what it is.
- [06:53]
Greg Miller
And also, you know, coming off the heels of as we're recording or this is posting yesterday's direct. Right. Really doubling down on that message. Right. That was something you guys were talking about. This is about you. This were. This is you. I love that.
- [07:04]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. In fact, many things we talked about in the direct yesterday were because of community feedback. And as we go over the course of these four podcasts, you're going to hear this a lot. But we take community feedback very seriously and have made many, many major changes to game systems based on community feedback. Not only community feedback, but a huge indicator of what we're going to do is seeing how players react to the things that we put into the game, whether they're talking about it or whether they're doing it in game. Sometimes two different things. People like to complain about things that they do a lot, but you know, where there's smoke, there's fire usually. And yeah, so we're making some changes to the way that we're delivering content in eso and we announced that in.
- [07:45]
Greg Miller
The direct and we're get to that. You're giving me too much. There's so much I want to jump in. I want to talk about the switch to one Tamrail, but we'll get to it. That's a good story.
- [07:53]
Rich Lambert
That's a really good story.
- [07:54]
Greg Miller
We're going to start with some recap of what happened yesterday, of course, then I want to start from literally the origins and then start really going for these four episodes. But first I'll remind you, of course, that this is the Elder Scrolls Online podcast, a kind of funny gamescast special. Wherever you are getting it or consuming it, please, like subscribe, share. Of course, leave a comment, tell your friends about it and make sure you mark your calendar for the future episodes. As we keep coming back about every two weeks to hang out and talk more Elder Scrolls Online, of course, we couldn't do without you. Both kind of funny. And the Elder Scrolls Online so please go support whoever you want to support, however you got here, maybe on their YouTube, maybe you're on ours, maybe your podcast, it doesn't matter. Wherever it is, I'm excited about it. We have so much to talk about. But again, I love that I can take my. Take a breath and take. We have so much time, so much time to talk about it. That's exciting. We would be fools not to talk about what just happened at the Direct. So, Matt, cue me up for you. I want to talk about the origins and how this all started, but in terms of where we are in the timeline, in reality, what was the big stuff yesterday? What's. What's speaking to you?
- [08:57]
Matt Fyror
So we've been giving the community a heads up that this is going to happen for a year and a half now. But basically we'll talk about how the game launched. But in 2017, we introduced this concept of chapters and it's where we package up a zone, a new major system, like a new class or companions or a card game, just something major and put it out in retail, either digital or there was actually retail in 2017.
- [09:25]
Greg Miller
So there were boxes for you children watching. There used to be brick and mortar stores you'd go to.
- [09:30]
Matt Fyror
But so, you know, we had a new logo like we called the ESO chapter in 2017, Morwind. So we had a box that said ESO Morwind with a Morwin symbol and everything. And then in 2018 we came out with Somerset and then elsewhere. But these were kind of major moments, but based around the idea that you would go somewhere and buy something, even if it's going to Steam and, and, and, and, and buying it. And it was hugely successful. Right? We were Bethesda at the time. I mean, we're still Bethesda, but we were, we were, we were solo at the time. And Bethesda had an amazingly good retail sales marketing team and so they were very good at brand stuff like that. And so we were leveraging the power of them to go out and actually get the word out that, hey, ESO has a big drop coming. It's called a chapter, right. Kind of like an expansion. But you get to go to Morrowind. Right. And then it resonates. And then the next year was you get to go to Somerset. No one's been to Somerset, where the High Elves are.
- [10:27]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [10:28]
Matt Fyror
In Elder scrolls world, since 1994. Right. So there's always a hook. Hugely successful. But it's been eight years and in those eight years, the way people consume content in games like this has Just changed. Right?
- [10:43]
Greg Miller
Dramatically, yes.
- [10:44]
Matt Fyror
And if you look at behind the scenes, how we do the packaging of the stuff, we had about an 18 month Runway. 18 months. 18 month Runway to do each of these chapters. So we had two teams kind of leapfrogging over each other a little bit, working on these and crossing up at certain points and working on the same thing together. But what it meant was 18 months before, we had to look forward and see what people would want to do in a year and a half. Right. And think about the pandemic happening and thinking about all these. All these things happening. But the biggest thing it did is it gave players much of the year's content in one day.
- [11:23]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [11:23]
Matt Fyror
And they could go consume it all. And. And so now what, what players. Which is fine. Like we had a bunch of. We had a huge cadre of players that would just play through the chapter or go away, come back next June for the next chapter. Totally fine.
- [11:37]
Greg Miller
I was listening. I think you talked to Price about this or Maybe it was McCaffrey and you were talking about. Yeah, you know, this player who shows up and then they're gone for 11 months and then they're back.
- [11:44]
Matt Fyror
And that's great.
- [11:45]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [11:46]
Matt Fyror
But now it. Now players are giving us the very clear message this is a little unsatisfying. They love the content, but they want more things to happen over the course of the year. And so to do that, we have to change the way that we deliver content, to kind of unspool some of the stuff from the giant June release and do it more evenly across. Across the year. We're calling that concept Seasons with a small S. Right. It's like it's just every three months we're going to deliver something and it could be a new zone with some quests, it could be a new class, it could be. Right. It doesn't have to be all tied together for sure. And it makes us more flexible so we can actually react faster and give players what they want without needing to look forward so far.
- [12:30]
Greg Miller
And I'll stop you right there then. So, Rich game director, does this make the job easier or harder? I mean, you have to, I guess you don't have to anticipate what people are going to want as much. But now you need to turn things quicker, right?
- [12:42]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. I mean, it's. It's still, at its core, it's still. They were building new things. It's just really what it comes down to is how we're packaging it and how many teams and how far out we are in order to do does give us a lot more flexibility. It lets us be a lot more reactive, which is good. You know, a lot of times, as Matt said, especially when it comes to building zones, it takes about 18 months to do that. And so when players gave us feedback on the last zone, we've already been hard at work on the next one.
- [13:10]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [13:11]
Rich Lambert
So it's really the next one that players start to see some of that feedback. So we want to be able to be more agile on that regard.
- [13:18]
Greg Miller
I'm assuming you were seeing this feedback from players, right? Oh, yeah.
- [13:21]
Rich Lambert
And within the team as well, in the studio as well. Right. There's, there's. When you have to be so far out, you know, in terms of your planning and whatnot, that's. That's really hard because the team is heads down working on stuff and then another team who's later on or earlier on in the. In the process is like, hey, we need to know these things for this future thing. When are you going to get it to us? We're like, we're, we're doing this thing and this thing and this thing.
- [13:44]
Matt Fyror
Right.
- [13:44]
Rich Lambert
So this, this helps alleviate some of those.
- [13:47]
Greg Miller
Okay, where are we going then with this first season?
- [13:52]
Matt Fyror
So we're announcing on. Rich can go into the details on this? It's called. It's a, it's a little different because we're, we're halfway between transitioning models. So. So it's going to be a little different than it'll be going forward, but it's called. Actually I'll let Rich give all the details, but we're basically spreading out the content over a few more months and not just one day in June. And that's what we announced. And it's really cool content. It comes with a lot of cool stuff. It'll just won't happen all at once.
- [14:20]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. So we are going to Solstice, which is a small island kind of on the south corner of the map. And the story is broken up over two major releases. So the first part comes in June. There is a giant wall that kind of separates the island which players get to take down together in like this big server wide event which will be really, really cool. And that opens access to the second half of the island. And so it's our take on this first step of being able to spread the content out a little bit more and give players what they're asking for, which is more repeatable, more content at.
- [14:57]
Matt Fyror
A regular cadence and multiclassing and.
- [15:01]
Rich Lambert
And a million other things as well.
- [15:03]
Greg Miller
Yeah, the starter Realms all these things are going on. Yeah, yeah.
- [15:07]
Rich Lambert
But, yeah, like, there's. There's all kinds of cool stuff, and, you know, the subclassing stuff is really, really cool. Right. It's going to allow players to continue the characters that they've started, but able to use skill lines from other classes, so you're not kind of locked into things. So that it went from. I think Carrie, who's the systems designer that's been working on this system, it went from something. I think there's now over 3,000 possibilities in terms of your class now instead of seven. So it's pretty crazy now what you can do with your class.
- [15:40]
Greg Miller
Class, like, I see.
- [15:42]
Snowbike Mike
That's the part that gets me very excited. There's so much in this announcement that I can't wait to dive a little bit deeper. But the subclasses does give me really excited because as someone who has played mainly Tank as a Dragon Knight the whole entire career of eso, I want to try other classes. I want to be at higher levels and see those cool skills. And so it's exciting to me to be able to jump into that. What does it look like from a player's perspective? Is it all unlocked and I can just pick and choose? Do I have to go out and unlock them and play as other classes?
- [16:09]
Rich Lambert
So there's multiple ways that you can do this. So if you are a person that, like a veteran player who's basically leveled every class to 50 and whatnot, you're going to get access to a lot of that stuff right off the bat. You know, the requirement is you have to be. You have to have a class at level 50 in order to use the class set or skills. But we also looked at our player population and kind of looked at what they do, and there are a significant number of people that really only have one character, so we wanted to make sure they could still participate in the system without having to start all over again. And so there are ways that you can train and learn the skills on that one particular class. It takes some time, but so does leveling classes to 50. So.
- [16:50]
Greg Miller
Yeah, but people are used to putting the time in.
- [16:52]
Snowbike Mike
That's the whole point about living and being in the world and learning.
- [16:56]
Greg Miller
I mean, you know, you're. You played it down, I feel like. But that was one of the things that spoke to me so much, even as a novice writer, an outsider, is the fact that the story you're telling this season is a sequel, right to.
- [17:08]
Matt Fyror
I was about to go, like, so incredible.
- [17:09]
Greg Miller
Like, what a great idea of Course to bring it back to these worms.
- [17:13]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, yeah. So. So the season is actually called Seasons of the Worm Cult, and that's a name that is immediately known by everyone that's played Eso, because the main story in the launch version of the game, the very first story that we told, was the story of the worm cult in Mannimarco and Molag Bal's invading Tamriel. And so because we're at the tail end of our 10th anniversary, right, we wanted to actually cap it off with a story that actually took off from the first story that we had. And so this story very much takes place after the main story in the base game takes place. And so, which is a departure for us because the way the continuity works in the game, which frankly requires a physics degree at this point.
- [17:58]
Rich Lambert
Time is a construct of the player, right? Whatever order you do stuff in is.
- [18:03]
Greg Miller
Whatever order, and that's easy to design around.
- [18:07]
Matt Fyror
So basically, if you play Eso, everything happens in the game at the same time. So. And it just makes things easier to explain story wise. And like Rich said, your character experiences things in the order they experience it in. Not necessarily true for every character. However, this new story that we're telling actually does take place after the first story, so that we can actually extend the story, bring back beloved characters that you might remember from the. From the main story, which we do a lot. If you played a lot of Eso, you'll notice we bring back characters that, that our community loves and demands that they have more interaction with. And we're definitely doing that. And it's going to be nostalgic for, For. For older players that, that have been around. But it's. It's a great story.
- [18:48]
Greg Miller
I want to start segueing because I still have so many questions, but we'll get to the new stuff as we continue on our journey here. I don't have to get it all out in one podcast. All right. I don't have to do it all. I want to start segueing to how this game came to be. But before then, there's something you said at the top that I thought was interesting. We're talking about Zos. We're talking about Zenimax Online Studios, right? And you said we're not Bethesda, but we are. But talk to me about how you boy, right now.
- [19:14]
Matt Fyror
I know, right?
- [19:14]
Greg Miller
The big question. I'm coming out swinging right now. How do you see the studio? How do you define the studio? What is that relationship? Because I think that is something that's lost a lot you'll see us even watching it doing a direct reacting to the Xbox developer direct something you come up. It's about it. Well, it's not. But it is. But it isn't.
- [19:30]
Matt Fyror
But I need a whiteboard about 20 minutes. All right. So the easiest way to explain is explained how we evolved. So. So in 2007 I was hired to start ZeniMax Online Studios. ZeniMax was the parent company. It still is in many ways a parent company under which was Bethesda Softworks, Bethesda Game Studios in machine games. They came after 2007. ZeniMax Online was. Is in that family. So Bethesda Softworks was our publisher. Right. So we're all studios that then Bethesda Softworks publish. So people get hung up a lot even now, even today, over Bethesda Game Studios vs Bethesda Softworks vs ZeniMax Media vs ZeniMax Online. So the easiest way to remember it is ZOS ZeniMax Online is the are we're developed to be kind of the MMO online group group at Bethesda.
- [20:24]
Greg Miller
Of course.
- [20:27]
Rich Lambert
Five minutes.
- [20:28]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, five minutes. So yeah, if you go back to Dice 2011, Todd Howard gave a key to the Skyrim keynote there and he actually had a slide that tried to explain it and it's. What was that 15 years ago? And it's still dead on relevant today as it was back then. So highly recommend. I think you could stream it. But it was very funny. But yeah, so they hired me. I'm an old M guy. I worked at a company. I'm yes, very old. Stone Age. So I. I was a founder of Mythic Entertainment. We did Dark Age of Camelot, which is a big MMO 2001 ish on. And so I left Mythic in 2006 and then consulted for a while and then I got the call from. From Bethesda that they were looking to start an MMO studio to leverage their IP into the online space. And so that worked out and I went and worked for the first three months.
- [21:25]
Greg Miller
They went, all right, I guess you're jumping really quickly. You're jumping way too fast for everything that's going on. Right. Cause what I need to know, I think more than anything is then like, you've talked enough. Matt Rich, Zos, what you're doing with Elder Scrolls. How do you define Zos? What's the identity of it to you in terms of what separates it? And I don't even want to bring in Bethesda games too. But for you, like what is Zos because the direct yesterday, it was awesome. Kind of funny, you know, we are Monday morning quarterbacks for directs and for presentations. And this move that has happened recently from the Xbox Studios Bethesda, you guys are the ones you did of. Hey, you know what? We have developers who are passionate about their games. Let's get them on camera talking about that and having the one woman, her name escapes me. I'm sorry, but she was talking about like going back and touching up the starter areas that she remembers so well from being a fan and now to come, like, what a beautiful story. What an amazing thing. But I think it gives such a great glimpse into what Zos is. What? How do you define Zos, Rich?
- [22:33]
Rich Lambert
Word? I mean, I think you summed it up pretty well. We're just a bunch of people that are really passionate about making games and that's, that's what we care about.
- [22:39]
Matt Fyror
Right?
- [22:40]
Rich Lambert
And we can all work together. You know, titles generally don't mean a thing. It's just you get a bunch of people in a room and you make magic and that's kind of what we do. And we've always done and we've never really been out there, you know, kind of trumpeting ourselves and talking about how good we are.
- [22:55]
Greg Miller
Which is why people say Bethesda makes Elder Scrolls Online. That's why we're changing with this show, everybody.
- [23:00]
Rich Lambert
But you know, it's just a bunch of humble people that just are more concerned about making something cool than they are, you know, kind of propping themselves up. So.
- [23:08]
Matt Fyror
And pro tip, name your game something other than the IP name if you want people to understand.
- [23:13]
Greg Miller
Fair enough. Yeah. I can see, I can see, I can see, I can see.
- [23:16]
Matt Fyror
And also, a corporate name for your studio is also not always the best way to get your name out there. But, you know, but, but, but as Rich said, yeah, we're kind of under the radar. We don't get out and do this, this kind of thing a whole lot. People do confuse us a lot with the all the other Bethesda Xana Maxes that are, that are out there. But. Yeah, but we're the studio that makes Elder Scrolls Online, right? And we've always, we've evolved over the years, which we'll go into. But we started out like, especially with Rich and my background being hardcore old school MMO players. We started, we started making an mmo, we ended up making an Elder Scrolls virtual world, basically.
- [23:49]
Greg Miller
Yeah, right.
- [23:50]
Matt Fyror
And it just. Well said, it evolved over time. We didn't. These games always evolve over time. Always. Like you could have the whole GDC presentation on that. Like the developers that launch these games, including us, don't know where we're going to be in 10 years. We go where the community and the market and the IP takes you.
- [24:06]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [24:06]
Matt Fyror
And yeah. But we ended up kind of just because we followed the Elder Scrolls North Star and the community North Star, we ended up making a kind of a very cool virtual world that has a ton of things to do in it that aren't necessarily Elder Scrolls. It's very much community based. Right. But you know, like people make in our housing system, you know, we have a whole group of people that do nothing but stream their housing. You know how they build out their houses. They do, you know, Machinima types type stuff in their houses and it's awesome. We didn't plan that in 2007. Right, right. That. That's just the way these things go. And that digression explains kind of who we are, right?
- [24:44]
Greg Miller
Well, I think it does. And I think one of the things you touched on that I think so powerful for this is you say you're under the radar, right. In terms of just getting your work and doing, getting it done, but I think you're under the radar maybe to the mainstream. Everybody's going to kind of funny to watch a thing or IGN or GameSpot. Right. It's a little you, but like your community knows, y'all.
- [25:04]
Matt Fyror
Oh yeah.
- [25:04]
Greg Miller
Because you're responding to them and going this. And it's always been that thing of I couldn't even, I mean, again, 10 years. So let's say I don't even know five years ago. But I remember when we'd watch whatever direct is going on and oh, here comes a new trailer for Elder Scrolls online. That's still going. That's you know what I mean? And it's like, well, not only is it still going, it's so successful that they're doubling down and make more content putting it in here and trying to get in front of you and doing all these different things.
- [25:27]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. And our community travels extremely well.
- [25:29]
Greg Miller
Right.
- [25:30]
Rich Lambert
Like wherever we go, whatever we do, there's always a huge contingent there.
- [25:35]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [25:35]
Rich Lambert
You know, every direct, when we do things, you know, on Twitch or whatnot, like they're there and they always show up.
- [25:40]
Greg Miller
So another big question then. Why. Why are they so dedicated to you? Is it just the game? Is that good?
- [25:47]
Rich Lambert
I think, I think some of it is that. Right. We give them the tools, but I think it's just the community in and of itself.
- [25:52]
Matt Fyror
Right.
- [25:52]
Rich Lambert
They've and that's the magic of the MMOs and the online games in general is you develop those social ties and then once you have those, you're there for those people. Like, the game is always secondary at that point and it's. You're logging in to play with your friends.
- [26:07]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. I'll describe it a little differently, although that's very much 100% correct. Even in the days when, after PC launch, when we weren't doing so well before console launch, our numbers weren't fantastic, but we had like a population that was probably 30% of what we thought it was going to be. But that 30% logged in every day and played obsessively. And much of what we learned from that point going forward is look at what they're doing, don't tell them what to do, just sit back, watch what they're doing and do more of that and facilitate them to do more of, more of what they want to do. And I think that philosophy, which came early on because frankly, launch is now early on in the game's development, right. That philosophy comes through and I think players respond to that, that like, oh, I can do this. Oh, they're letting me do this now. I like doing that. And I'm oversimplifying it, but not every developer works that way. Right. Because we were, I'm not going to say desperate because it wasn't that bad, but we needed to make changes and we very much looked at that cadre of players and made a lot of decisions based on that.
- [27:19]
Greg Miller
All right, hold on now. We said this was a no holds barred interview. Were you really not desperate? Keep in mind, we're on the outside. I don't know anything. Review scores, PC not doing hot, it's subscription only. You're saying you had 30%. Is there not a gigantic anime sweat drop on your head of like, what about zenimax being like, what are we doing?
- [27:36]
Matt Fyror
It's not an anime sweat drop. It was real. No, but, but I mean, our review scores for the launch game, we had 90s and we had 40s.
- [27:46]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [27:46]
Matt Fyror
Like, and it's like our, you know, our, our, you know, our Robert Allman, right. The CEO was like, I don't know what to make of this. You know, he's like, well, clearly the.
- [27:55]
Greg Miller
Low ones are wrong.
- [27:57]
Matt Fyror
That was my, that certainly was my reaction was what we seriously had had scores that were all over the place, that you couldn't look at media feedback because it was just all over the board. Some people got it, some people didn't. We had Problems. I mean, no question. So we were given a very strong mandate to, to make the game better by console launch. And I know we're going to talk about this in a, in a future podcast.
- [28:22]
Greg Miller
Yeah, of course. But, but I couldn't, I couldn't let you slide on that.
- [28:26]
Matt Fyror
No, no, no, no.
- [28:26]
Greg Miller
We weren't desperate.
- [28:30]
Matt Fyror
There was pressure. There was a ton of pressure. The company had invested a lot of money in this game and a lot of money in us and wanted it to pay off right in the basic business terms. And we were a long way from that. And I think the fact that we had a split PC console launch actually saved us because it gave us the time to make things better.
- [28:51]
Greg Miller
Interesting.
- [28:52]
Matt Fyror
Because most of the people that played Skyrim back in 2014 played on console.
- [28:57]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [28:58]
Matt Fyror
And so the console market for Elder Scrolls back then was much bigger than the PC market. And so it gave us, that year, 12 months, whatever it was, 14, 14 months to actually react and do more of what I, what I just said, where we look at what players are doing and make sure we do more of that. And that hit before console launch and that's when it blew up.
- [29:16]
Greg Miller
Okay, so now let's do it. Let's actually wind the clock.
- [29:19]
Matt Fyror
Semi desperate.
- [29:22]
Greg Miller
This episode is brought to you by the Elder Scrolls Online. Every legend starts somewhere. And in eso, it starts with you. Join the millions of players in the award winning online fantasy rpg. Write your story into a vibrant chapter of Tamriel's distant past and discover a world steeped in adventure and possibility. ESO is more than a game. It's a virtual world where you belong. This year, ESO is breaking the mold and introducing the content pass. Complete with two new dungeon packs, two part story content, a brand new zone to explore, and a world changing in game event, all released throughout the year. And Talking about story 2025 brings us the seasons of the Worm Cult, a direct sequel to ESO's main story. Travel to the never before explored island of Solstice, where Worm Cult activity is surging. It's up to you to unite the three alliances against this old foe that has mysteriously returned. Pick up the Elder Scrolls Online now on PlayStation, Xbox and PC.
- [30:19]
E
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- [31:27]
Greg Miller
You already started giving your elevator pitch, but this is a long form podcast, Ron, so I need more than this. All right. Because the story goes that you say, I've heard you and read your interviews. Like, oh, I basically retired you. You basically. You. You left Mythic. You basically retired from games.
- [31:42]
Matt Fyror
You said this was before eso.
- [31:44]
Greg Miller
Exactly.
- [31:46]
Matt Fyror
I did not retire.
- [31:47]
Greg Miller
I'm sorry.
- [31:49]
Rich Lambert
I see the headlines. Oh, no.
- [31:51]
Greg Miller
God. Good news, everybody. Bring out the retirement cake. It's over. It's over, Matt. See you later. What? Like, were you. Were you just bored as hell at home and inevitably went back, or was this meant to be a.
- [32:04]
Matt Fyror
All right, the. The. I've the funniest story here, if you want to go into all the details. I spent much of the time after leaving Mythic trying to develop a Fallout mmo. And this is before Bethesda had the rights. Right. And I was working with Interplay and I was negotiating and I had a publisher lined up.
- [32:19]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [32:19]
Matt Fyror
And. And then Interplay stopped taking my calls and stopped returning my emails and like, two weeks later, Bethesda acquires rights to Fallout. Right.
- [32:26]
Greg Miller
Nice.
- [32:27]
Matt Fyror
No wonder. So then they called me and said, hey, we want you to. We want to talk to you about. About setting up an MMO studio. And it's not Fallout. Right. They made a right up front, but I was like, I got these docs, though. I got stuff ready to go. I did try. I did try to pitch it, but. But really they. They saw what success Blizzard had turning Warcraft from a single player franchise to a multiplayer franchise and Elder Scrolls wrote fantasy and they wanted to do that. And that was the pitch to me, was we Want you to come and take this amazing ip, which was Oblivion at the time.
- [33:02]
Greg Miller
Right.
- [33:02]
Matt Fyror
Long before Skyrim and.
- [33:04]
Greg Miller
Yeah. This is 2007.
- [33:05]
Matt Fyror
2007.
- [33:06]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [33:06]
Matt Fyror
I. Fallout 3 hadn't even launched. It was a long time ago.
- [33:08]
Greg Miller
Yeah, I remember.
- [33:09]
Matt Fyror
And so they wanted. They wanted Sauce to start a studio to turn Oblivion into the next big mmo. And that was. That was the pitch. Right. But I was already. Already on the hook because I just wanted to go where. Where. Where Fallout was and Elder Scrolls. I played the hell out of Daggerfall was one of my favorite games in the late 90s. And of course, I played more Wind and Oblivion, but. So it didn't take much convincing. So I was retired, but I was trying to get.
- [33:37]
Greg Miller
You're trying. Back in and get something.
- [33:39]
Matt Fyror
I was trying to get something rolling, and then it turns out it just rolled in a slightly different direction than.
- [33:43]
Snowbike Mike
He took the debate.
- [33:44]
Greg Miller
Yeah, exactly. And so you said. We joked about this earlier, but you were saying you've actually been there even longer, Rich.
- [33:52]
Rich Lambert
Yeah.
- [33:52]
Greg Miller
So you founded the studio, but somehow you've been there longer.
- [33:55]
Rich Lambert
I worked on Oblivion.
- [33:56]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [33:56]
Rich Lambert
And I was also a producer on Fallout 3 as well. And so I used to bug Todd a lot when I first started there. You know, hey, this would make a really good mmo. And he's like, launch this first.
- [34:07]
Greg Miller
They're never gonna work, kid. Get out of my house.
- [34:08]
Rich Lambert
Launch this first. Right. And then one day he called me and said, you need to come down and have a chat with me. I was like, oh, what'd I do? And I walked into Todd's office, and there was Matt, and he introduced us, and he was like, please take Rich. All he talks about is making online games. And Matt did.
- [34:25]
Matt Fyror
Please take him off my head. All he talks about is EverQuest and.
- [34:29]
Rich Lambert
Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [34:31]
Greg Miller
So then I can't imagine Mike tackling something this large.
- [34:36]
Matt Fyror
Yeah.
- [34:37]
Greg Miller
A blank piece of paper and go make a Elder Scrolls mmo. What are the first steps? How does that. I don't. You know what I mean? Like, what do we do? It's just you two in a room. That's how it starts.
- [34:49]
Matt Fyror
So this is the part where we get to talk about Bethesda Game Studios, because Todd actually invited us in. I sat with his team for, like, three, three or four months in the early days, just to see how they did things, how they. How they. How they worked with the ip. And it gave Rich and I a chance to sketch out what we wanted for the world. And we were right there with the people, even though they were very much trying to get Fallout out the door. They did.
- [35:16]
Greg Miller
But what about Elder Scrolls?
- [35:18]
Matt Fyror
Exactly. But it was more like what eras the game set in was the timeline. How are we going to share ip? Because you can't work on a game like this and not create new IP in the ip. And so we needed a conduit to make sure that there was a way for two way communications. When is the game set? How are the alliances set up? Because we wanted PvP to be an integral component and we whiteboarded out all that stuff and showed it to Todd and I think it was all thumbs up. There was some discussion.
- [35:47]
Rich Lambert
There's always. There's still discussion now.
- [35:50]
Matt Fyror
How did we end up with the second era?
- [35:51]
Rich Lambert
There was a. So it's in the interregnum, which is this 400 year period where it was just total constant war. So there's no really records of anything. So they're burning the bush. Was like this is perfect. Right. Go and do whatever nothing's known.
- [36:08]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. And an important part of the pitch for ESO is that you could become emperor, which is in our PvP system. So yeah. We needed a time when there were no emperors on the throne before Tiber Septim came. And I'm getting really geeky into other Scrolls now.
- [36:20]
Snowbike Mike
Super deep into it.
- [36:21]
Matt Fyror
There we go. This is before the empire. The type of symptoms that empire was founded. And so we needed a time when it was unknown and there was lots of chaos.
- [36:30]
Snowbike Mike
You say PvP kind of at the forefront of your mind there. Were there some inspirations that you saw in other MMOs or was it just the combat of Oblivion where you're like, we gotta have PvP in this.
- [36:41]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. So my background at Dark Age Camelot, we were the PvP MMO. Okay. So. So the pitch for ESO to ZeniMax, to Robert and all the executives. There was dark age Camelot's PvP system plus World of Warcraft's PvE system plus Oblivion's IP. And so dollar signs. And that was the kit which in 2007 was as much a sure bad idea as you could get. Right?
- [37:12]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [37:12]
Matt Fyror
It resulted in very much a World of Warcraft style game with a great PvP system based on Oblivion IP. And we'll get into where that led in a bit. But remember the original content style we had?
- [37:27]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. I mean it was. I still have a map. I was going through my desk and I found a map from 2008 that had the whole world planned out with all the dungeons and all the other stuff.
- [37:37]
Greg Miller
Wow.
- [37:38]
Rich Lambert
And it was very different than what we have today. We learned a lot while we were building this game for you.
- [37:47]
Greg Miller
Rich, give me a little bit of your background, because obviously, Matt Camelot, we know all this stuff. I. I was hearing about muds. You were playing muds way back.
- [37:56]
Matt Fyror
I've been making them.
- [37:56]
Greg Miller
He was making them. Well, yeah, because you. You were so obsessed with one, you're paying about, what was it, $3 an hour. And then you ended up like, well, it'd be cheaper to license it. So you just licensed it.
- [38:06]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, to make our own game out of. But just a quick diversion there. There was no Internet then, so we didn't know muds existed. And what the game that I was.
- [38:14]
Greg Miller
Playing was multi user dungeon, by the way.
- [38:16]
Matt Fyror
Thank you. Multi user dungeon. Nice. Yeah.
- [38:18]
Snowbike Mike
I was wondering what that was.
- [38:19]
Matt Fyror
Text mmos from the 80s and 90s. But, yeah, I play. I was obsessed with this modem game where you could have five players online at the same time because there were five modems. And. And. But it wasn't a MUD. It was a different offshoot. And we didn't know MUDs existed. There was no Internet. You couldn't go ask people, hey, what's your multiplayer text game?
- [38:38]
Greg Miller
Walking around Babbages. Yeah, we know what modes.
- [38:40]
Matt Fyror
You got a mode.
- [38:40]
Greg Miller
You got a modem.
- [38:41]
Matt Fyror
They're like, what's a modem? And so, yeah, so some friends and I decided to just license the game. And that was in 1986 or 87. And then my first game kind of rolled out of that.
- [38:50]
Greg Miller
Amazing.
- [38:50]
Matt Fyror
It's been a while, so.
- [38:52]
Greg Miller
But Rich, for you, you're working at Bethesda, you work on Oblivion, you're working on Fallout 3, but you're pitching all this MMO or multiplayer stuff. Are you going home and playing MMOs like mad. Okay.
- [39:04]
Rich Lambert
Yeah, like, that was. I'm a huge gaming nerd. I always have been. And I accidentally got into this industry in the late 90s. Testing.
- [39:12]
Greg Miller
Oh.
- [39:13]
Rich Lambert
So I had no idea it was a real job. I thought I was going to be a teaching pro for golf. Like, that was my. That was my thing.
- [39:19]
Greg Miller
Wait, really?
- [39:19]
Rich Lambert
That was my thing.
- [39:20]
Matt Fyror
Rich is a really, really good golfer.
- [39:23]
Rich Lambert
That was my thing.
- [39:23]
Matt Fyror
Right.
- [39:24]
Rich Lambert
And I still like playing.
- [39:25]
Greg Miller
Mike likes to hit the links.
- [39:26]
Snowbike Mike
I was gonna say we'll go out. Yeah, yeah.
- [39:27]
Rich Lambert
Anytime.
- [39:28]
Matt Fyror
What's your handicap, Rich?
- [39:30]
Rich Lambert
Last year I finished at a 4. The year before that, it was 1.7.
- [39:34]
Matt Fyror
Yeah.
- [39:35]
Greg Miller
He might be better than you and Andy.
- [39:37]
Snowbike Mike
I'm golfing, he's golfing.
- [39:39]
Rich Lambert
But yeah, so I. It was just A summer job that my buddy got. And I said, there's no way. That's bs. And that summer job I ended up getting and it turned into this 30 year career now making games and whatnot. But yeah, games has always been a thing. Online games in particular. I actually met my wife playing Everquest.
- [39:58]
Greg Miller
That's amazing.
- [39:59]
Rich Lambert
We've been married 23 years now because of that. That's incredible. So it's always been a huge.
- [40:03]
Matt Fyror
Oh, you got to tell that story.
- [40:04]
Rich Lambert
Story.
- [40:05]
Matt Fyror
Which one?
- [40:06]
Rich Lambert
The how I met her. Yeah, I was playing with her son at the time.
- [40:10]
Matt Fyror
What?
- [40:11]
Greg Miller
And a quick sidebar. Come here real quick. How old is Rich? Rich looks really young.
- [40:19]
Rich Lambert
I'm 48. I'm. I'm happy to say that.
- [40:21]
Greg Miller
Okay, good, good.
- [40:22]
Rich Lambert
But yeah, so I, I met her son, right. We were in the same guild, this really high end guild, and he was like 12, right. And we started, she came on calm.
- [40:33]
Greg Miller
And she's like, why are you talking about 12 years?
- [40:36]
Rich Lambert
Actually she ended up joining the guild and then we started kind of hanging out and, and all that other stuff. And as a joke I made to, you know, Jim at the time, I was like, dude, I want your mom. Turns out it was, it was real, right? Like, and we got married, so. And we've been married ever since.
- [40:50]
Greg Miller
That's incredible. Yeah, that's incredible.
- [40:52]
Snowbike Mike
That's a beautiful story.
- [40:53]
Greg Miller
You don't hear that story? Well, I mean, I guess actually, you know, for you guys, you probably hear that story a lot. Don't we?
- [40:58]
Rich Lambert
We do. And it's a really cool part. And why I'm so interested in that online space.
- [41:03]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [41:03]
Rich Lambert
Is you get to meet people you wouldn't normally get to meet. And you get to, you know, chat with people who are thousands of miles away, you know, in Australia and Japan and just everywhere. Right. And they're all playing this game. It's awesome.
- [41:17]
Snowbike Mike
That's really great. Yeah, it's. I'm blown away when you talk about they came to you and said, let's build this online world because I always play Skyrim and Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I look at my friends go, man, it would be so cool if we shared this experience together. I would love to have multiplayer in this. And everybody go, no, no, no. It's a single player game. I don't want you ruining the moment. And was there any push back is. It's interesting, like we want you to do it. But like in my mind it's like I was like the only person in my friend group ever running around going, let's all play together. This would be so amazing.
- [41:47]
Greg Miller
I like this idea that Todd's in there. Like, Eric, love it. You walk out daggers from everyone. Like, what are you, rude?
- [41:53]
Matt Fyror
I have shocking news for you. The Internet can be a little harsh on new ideas.
- [41:57]
Rich Lambert
Yeah.
- [41:58]
Matt Fyror
Like. Yeah, yeah. The whole concept obviously took the IP to places we weren't the first multiplayer Elder Scrolls game. There was one in 1998. The. Can't remember the name of it now. Battlespire.
- [42:11]
Rich Lambert
Yes.
- [42:13]
Matt Fyror
See, See, we weren't even the first one, but we were the first big one. And so, yeah, it's. It took a while to get everything in place so that people were like, okay, that's how you're gonna do it. Like internally. And then. And then, you know, obviously when we announced we had it, we had a whole nother Internet sure. Issue to deal with. But it was fine. People were passionate about Elder Scrolls. Skyrim was one of. Literally one of the best games of all time. And you know, so it's. We had a very firm base to stand on to start. To start working on this game.
- [42:41]
Greg Miller
But I think the interesting thing that I don't want to get lost to the Listener viewer right now is that we keep talking about 2007. You guys are doing this thing, blah, blah. They're working on Fallout 3. Skyrim isn't even a thing yet.
- [42:51]
Matt Fyror
No.
- [42:52]
Greg Miller
You're making an Elder Scrolls. That's more like, wow.
- [42:54]
Matt Fyror
Yeah.
- [42:55]
Greg Miller
Which is far different than Elder Scrolls Online as we know it now. So at what point do they show you Skyrim? You go, oh, fuck no.
- [43:03]
Rich Lambert
I think.
- [43:07]
Matt Fyror
I mean, Rich and I both live through this and I think we probably have the same, same idea about it. But everybody knew it was a good game before it launched. Nobody really thought it was going to blow up like it did.
- [43:21]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [43:21]
Matt Fyror
And so when Todd showed it to us, he was like, this is pretty good. Like, he was. It was. It was pretty cool. And, and so. But yeah, after it launched in November 2011, it took the IP in a completely different direction than it was. It was now mass market console. I mean, obviously Oblivion was. But it just. It, you know, it blew every. Anything Oblivion did out.
- [43:45]
Rich Lambert
It was next level.
- [43:46]
Matt Fyror
It was next level in every sense. And you could not make the next big Elder Scrolls game and not take that into account.
- [43:53]
Greg Miller
So was it just. So it's interesting to talk about like internal pushback to, hey, we're doing an online rpg and this. That the other then Skyrim kind of changes everything. Was there conversations anybody? Maybe we just cancel this. We get out of it.
- [44:06]
Matt Fyror
No, it was. It was. It was all us. We had to cancel a lot of things internally and reorient the team towards making. There was the 2012. The March 2012 team meeting where we went over that.
- [44:21]
Greg Miller
Oh, no. If they know the date, it was a big moment.
- [44:25]
Matt Fyror
March 2012 would be right after the first sales report for the November launch of Skyrim. Yeah, it was probably about the time the team stopped playing Skyrim obsessively.
- [44:33]
Greg Miller
Yeah. Right.
- [44:33]
Matt Fyror
Yeah.
- [44:34]
Rich Lambert
But, yeah, I mean, I remember that we all piled into that other building.
- [44:38]
Greg Miller
And how big is the team around this time? Ballpark. I know it's 500. Okay, maybe.
- [44:44]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. So remember when you're talking about making games like this and you talk about numbers of people like these, this is the most difficult entertainment product ever created to make, like, any. Any game like this. So, yes, you have to make a great game. It has to resonate. It has to be a great Elder Scrolls game. It also has to run around the world on the Internet with.
- [45:03]
Greg Miller
Let's get the tech team in here.
- [45:04]
Matt Fyror
The server population with Bethesda's first direct consumer billing system with credit card processing and customer support. And we did all of that. Like, all of that was happening at the same time. So, yeah, it was, it was. So there are a lot of people worked on this.
- [45:18]
Greg Miller
Got it, got it, got it.
- [45:19]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. And it was just like the mood, right? We were like, this is what we're going to do. This is what we need to focus on. I remember Paul and I having arguments about, like, is it fully cinematic? Is it fully vo'd? And he was very much in the. This is the right thing to do. And I was always more focused on the power gaming side of things. So I was like, oh, I just click through it. That's all right.
- [45:40]
Greg Miller
Like, oh, God, no, don't, don't, Rich. Don't encourage Mike. I can't get this kid to watch a cinematic.
- [45:46]
Rich Lambert
He was totally right. Like, focusing in on that and. And telling those stories and getting different type of emotion into the storytelling, into the quests, made a massive difference.
- [45:57]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. The Paul he's talking about is Paul Sage, who was a creative director at the time. Rich, from the inception of the game in 2007, to write about just after launch, was the head of content. So all the questing, the way zones were developed. That was all Rich. Paul was the creative director then and also added systems and stuff. So I made it Paul's job to figure out how to respond to Skyrim. Right. To be the point person.
- [46:21]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [46:22]
Matt Fyror
I did a Whole GDC presentation on it last year. Exactly what we had to do to go through. And I think 27 systems got added to the game. First person view, all of that stuff. The fact you could free swing your weapons and shoot your bow without having anyone targeted. So no more tab targeting. It got fully voiced.
- [46:40]
Rich Lambert
That was a huge thing.
- [46:41]
Matt Fyror
Every quest and ESO is voiced.
- [46:43]
Rich Lambert
We had to figure out a pipeline to go that we didn't build initially because it was just all text. Figure out how to take that text, put it into a usable script so that an actor could read it and then put it back into the game and have. Was insane.
- [46:59]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. Because when you write quests for reading, they are much different than when you write quests for speaking.
- [47:04]
Rich Lambert
And we have to change the team around.
- [47:07]
Matt Fyror
Also. French and German at lunch also.
- [47:09]
Greg Miller
Right.
- [47:10]
Matt Fyror
It's. It just. It's. You see, you get the sense.
- [47:12]
Rich Lambert
Yeah.
- [47:12]
Greg Miller
For an uneducated person like me, verse reading versus speaking. Is it you what the syntax and the words or is it just.
- [47:19]
Rich Lambert
And how you use the words? And in general, you get away with bigger, flowery words if it's just text, but those words are generally harder for somebody to speak.
- [47:31]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [47:31]
Rich Lambert
So you have to think about speech patterns and all the other fun stuff that goes along with it. So the team changed. You know, that was when we decided to go and have a writing team that focused on just writing the dialogue.
- [47:44]
Matt Fyror
Which is led by one of the original Dungeons and Dragons guys.
- [47:48]
Greg Miller
The pedigree on this team.
- [47:49]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. It's insane.
- [47:50]
Greg Miller
Question. Another one I would have. Again, you were talking about a side of game development that we don't see. Right. When something drastically changes or there's bad news. And we're talking about this March, what year? What meeting was it?
- [48:00]
Matt Fyror
Sorry, March 2012. Right after November's.
- [48:02]
Greg Miller
March 2012. Right. So what you've. This has been just saying for five years at this point, when this happens, is it demoralizing to the team? Is it inspiring? Do you see people leave the project over this? I wonder. I can't wrap my head around working on something that long and then having something happen like that.
- [48:25]
Matt Fyror
I think most people on the project at that point, I don't want to speak for everyone, but most people knew that we had to change. Like, you looked at Skyrim and you looked at what we were working on and there was. They did not connect at all. Like, I mean, it was a good game. It just wasn't that game.
- [48:40]
Greg Miller
Sure. And so the people are going to pick this up. Are going to. The reason I'M excited for it because I like Skyrim so much.
- [48:45]
Matt Fyror
They're going to expect a small button bar, first person, solo, friendly, not hardcore experience. And translating that from the game that we had to. That was then Rich and Paul's problem.
- [48:57]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. And I remember, I remember there were obviously some people that were just like, no, I'm invested in this thing. We should do this. But I remember almost like a sense of relief from people going, oh, thank goodness. Like, we're not going to release something that doesn't meet the standards of. Sure, fair, fair, fair. And so that actually reinvigorated the team and we got a ridiculous amount of stuff done in those, what, two years?
- [49:24]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. 2012 to 2014. Yeah, almost exactly two years.
- [49:27]
Rich Lambert
Yep.
- [49:29]
Matt Fyror
Wow.
- [49:29]
Snowbike Mike
That is a small window to turn it around like that.
- [49:31]
Matt Fyror
It was a game that large, especially with the voice acting, because we had to. We had to get actors in the studio in. In. In recording booths almost immediately just to start testing things and. And get moving. And we had, what, a million lines of. It was crazy. Like, there's so much texture.
- [49:48]
Rich Lambert
I was trying to think back and I think it was 700,000.
- [49:51]
Matt Fyror
I don't know.
- [49:52]
Rich Lambert
Well, across all three languages. Yeah, I think it was close to 700,000 lines of dialogue that we had to record across three languages.
- [49:59]
Greg Miller
Geez Louise.
- [50:00]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. If you look at the ESO credits, let them scroll to the end and then look at the voice actors. And they brought life to the game. Like before John Cleese.
- [50:10]
Greg Miller
You kidding me? Like, that was always the thing.
- [50:11]
Matt Fyror
Pete Beckinsu.
- [50:13]
Rich Lambert
Yeah, there's lots. We could start name dropping like crazy. Yeah. But it's amazing to see the text and read it and hear it in your brain and then have somebody else read it. And just like I said earlier, the emotion that comes out, it just completely changes the dynamic of the storytelling.
- [50:29]
Matt Fyror
And the pipeline that took of, like recording, like, the size of the client grew by orders of magnitude. Orders of magnitude, which led to problems with downloading and. Right. It's just. It was a problem that had to be solved. Scale. The scale just got bigger and bigger.
- [50:44]
Rich Lambert
That's. That's a good way to think about it. Economies of scale in this.
- [50:47]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [50:47]
Rich Lambert
Like you do it in a smaller game, a single player game or something like that. Sure. It's just for that person. So when you do it in this, it's multiplied by about however many people.
- [50:57]
Greg Miller
You have when you're working on a more. Wow. Like eso, which I like your Thomas.
- [51:02]
Matt Fyror
You can call it that.
- [51:04]
Greg Miller
The big bar where you Know, third person. We're doing this kind of thing. You move, you make decision. You have to go after Skyrim. What happened to your release date? Were people that were. I mean, were you already targeting something like, well, that's done, like, yeah, there were two things.
- [51:19]
Matt Fyror
First, the success of Skyrim made our release date a little less necessary.
- [51:25]
Greg Miller
So we're gonna ride this one. Don't worry.
- [51:27]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, it gave us some time. And nobody, I mean, nobody wants to release a game that's not ready or not. Right. Like, nobody does.
- [51:34]
Greg Miller
So.
- [51:34]
Matt Fyror
So we were fortunately working for the company that we were that was willing to let us go. So we had a lot of work to do to convince them this is what we're going to do to get there. Right. And Todd stepped in and helped us there, too. Like, okay, this is talking to people and making sure that we were on the right path to get there for how the IP and game systems were represented. But it was. Yeah, we were given the time. We weren't given all the time because we weren't quite done all the changes by the time the game launched, which then goes into, what do we do after launch?
- [52:06]
Greg Miller
But sure, again, yeah, rough PC launch.
- [52:07]
Matt Fyror
But it got it to the point where you could see where it should have been.
- [52:11]
Greg Miller
Yeah.
- [52:11]
Matt Fyror
At launch.
- [52:12]
Greg Miller
Yeah. Okay, fair enough on that one. What was the biggest. Was it the vo? What was the biggest hurdle? What was the biggest thing in terms of, like, okay, we're going to make the switch and. Oh, man, we didn't see this. And we didn't see that. I can't believe this is taking so long to fix.
- [52:25]
Rich Lambert
Combat model was a big one.
- [52:27]
Matt Fyror
The combat change, like, when you go from, I'll say, Dark Age, Camelot style, but it's also wow style. Right. Tab targeting, modifiable modded, modded UI where you can have 85 buttons and you're just play. You just click the buttons instead of changing from that to. Paul's mantra at the time was, I don't want you looking at the button bar. I want you look the word. You're playing the world, you're not playing the bar. Right. And that's when we put the red circles under monsters that were enemies that were attacking you or when you were about to get AOE'd, or when they were doing a massive attack, they have that effect that comes out. All of that happened then so that you wouldn't have to look at the button bar to see it was happening.
- [53:05]
Greg Miller
Gotcha.
- [53:06]
Matt Fyror
And so the ramifications of that were huge across the effects. Teams the way monster. The monster.
- [53:11]
Rich Lambert
All the animation stuff.
- [53:12]
Matt Fyror
Animations, yeah.
- [53:13]
Rich Lambert
It was a lot of work.
- [53:15]
Snowbike Mike
You guys did an incredible job on that. How did you nail down how many skills would be at play? I mean, we talk about controller later on when we get to console, but, like, when we look at PC and yeah, wow. Has 20 moves that I can choose from. How did you kind of scale that down? Say, this is the number we want.
- [53:31]
Rich Lambert
To be at, from what I remember. And it's a little hazy, but we started talking about deck builders and deck building. Right. And so the theme was you choose your deck and then you'd go into combat, and that's all. So you're making decisions outside before you went in so that you couldn't react to everything. So you had to build your deck in a way that you could be survivable in any scenario. And that was kind of the initial. I remember those discussions. And then I don't remember how we landed on five plus an Ultimate.
- [54:00]
Matt Fyror
But yeah. The funny thing is that the Internet rumor is, of course, that we were already thinking about console when we made that change. We were not. We didn't know we were going to make a console version until, frankly, shockingly close before console launch. But we did that to make it more Skyrim, like, not more console, like. And it just happened that by doing that now it would map to a controller, although with some additional tweaking. But yeah, it just made it so your character couldn't do everything at once. You had to chew, pick and choose what deck you were playing when you went out, and you could change it if you wanted, but you couldn't do it in combat.
- [54:39]
Snowbike Mike
Was there ever discussion after Skyrim of having so much freedom in the player, of choosing what they want to be at any moment? Was there that move of, hey, you know, MMOs are usually tank, healer, DPS. Let's move away from that. We're kind of seeing that with subclasses now, which is very exciting. But back then, was there a moment of, like, hold up. Maybe we give the player all the freedom in the world to do whatever they want?
- [55:01]
Rich Lambert
Yeah, yeah, we talked a lot about that.
- [55:04]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. And we're skipping over so many massive things that are involved in that. In that question, which was, how do we forget this? Like, you can pick up any weapon or armor in the world and use it, right? What MMO could you pick up any weapon or armor and use it no matter what class you were, Right?
- [55:17]
Greg Miller
Sure.
- [55:17]
Matt Fyror
That came from Skyrim. Right. And being able to loot everything in the World, like, you can go. We had. We had. We hired a team of interns who we then ended up.
- [55:25]
Greg Miller
The Click turns.
- [55:26]
Rich Lambert
That's what we call them.
- [55:26]
Greg Miller
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:27]
Rich Lambert
The.
- [55:27]
Matt Fyror
We ended up hiring almost all of them full time after they were interns. But yeah, they basically went through every container in the world and made them lootable. Like. Yeah, yeah, like. Yeah, it's. It was. It's.
- [55:39]
Greg Miller
It is ridiculous that you were able to do this so quickly because it sounds like just making a completely different game.
- [55:45]
Matt Fyror
Well, we had the space. The space didn't change. Right. We had the zones, we had the trees, we had the water, we had the. Right. So a lot of questions get answered when those things are done. Like, how fast do you move? How do animations work? How do the monsters navigate across the terrain? That's a whole other set of things that have to be. We didn't have to change that. All we had to change were your systems, the character systems for interacting with those things, which is kind of half of the equation.
- [56:13]
Greg Miller
No big deal.
- [56:14]
Rich Lambert
Half. We had to rewrite a lot of quests, but that was more from the. How do you turn just great walls of text, pages of text into spoken dialog that is interesting and easy to digest?
- [56:28]
Snowbike Mike
How did you nail the zones? We talk about the other half now. Boy, how did we, you know, throw the dart and say, that's the scope of the game right there. This is how many zones this is?
- [56:37]
Rich Lambert
So remember that map that I was talking about earlier? Yeah, that was part of it. But a lot of it was really trial and error. We must have. What was it? Glenumbra.
- [56:45]
Matt Fyror
We did so many awful zones eight times.
- [56:47]
Rich Lambert
So many Rivenspire. We did five full times.
- [56:50]
Matt Fyror
Yeah. So there's a zone called Stormhaven where anyone, any player of ESO knows Stormhaven. If you go into Stormhaven, it's actually. If you look at it closely, it's a lot different than most of the other zones. And it's because it was the zone. It's the zone that we tried to make all the content model work. And we must have redone that thing, I swear, seven times or more. Yeah. The affectionate nickname for the game was Warrior and Warrior and Stormhaven, because we only had the Warrior and we only had Stormhaven. And we were trying to prove that the game was fun and interesting with that. So, yes, we did that work early on in that one zone and then we applied that concept from that zone out to all the others, which made it much easier to replicate than actually redo it every Time. The first version of all the zones, we actually made the mistake of having five teams do five different zones. We ended up with five different games.
- [57:38]
Greg Miller
Yeah. These zones, there's nothing connected.
- [57:41]
Rich Lambert
Yeah. We learned a lot, lot. Right. In doing all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of it was us just playing and going, this doesn't work. Bulldoze it. Start again. Well, this doesn't work. Try another model. And it was not necessarily like the quests themselves because storytelling is kind of storytelling. It was how players ran into those. So some of the first iterations were kind of the traditional hub and spoke. Right. You're in a hub, you pick up all the quests and then you go out in the world and do your thing. And that works and that's fine. But it didn't feel Elder Scrolls. And it took us a number of iterations before we got to the. Just pick a direction and go and you will find something.
- [58:19]
Matt Fyror
If you don't have an NPC chasing you down right in your face, it's not an Elder Scrolls game.
- [58:23]
Rich Lambert
We fixed Stuga.
- [58:27]
Matt Fyror
But yeah. There's a POI quest in Stormhaven called Pariah Abbey, which was our. That's where we came up with our POI quest system. And the hallmark of that quest is you walk near it and an NPC spawns out of view and runs towards you and demands help. And that took a lot to get right because it's like, what area around the thing does the thing spawn and how fast does it come to get you? Does it look unnatural as it's like sprinting at you? And what if you don't notice? Does it just stand there forever?
- [58:59]
Rich Lambert
And the player can come in from any angle, any direction. So how do you account for that? We have to learn all that.
- [59:05]
Matt Fyror
Yeah.
- [59:05]
Rich Lambert
Figure it all out.
- [59:06]
Snowbike Mike
I'm so thankful we have a lot of time. I was gonna say fascinated by zones and how the player moves and.
- [59:12]
Greg Miller
Yeah, we're coming up on an hour. I promised them 45 minutes, so. But I spent too.
- [59:16]
Matt Fyror
Good.
- [59:16]
Greg Miller
I do. So I want to land. Because the next episode is going to be more about these early days. Right. Both. I think the lead up to launch. Launch. Then what happens afterwards. But here as we talk, I think the big question I would have is, like, from this switch, from this iteration from Skyrim, changing the game literally on what it needed to be. What was the biggest lesson for you? What's the piece of advice you've taken on then for these next decade? And I'm being loose with years.
- [59:44]
Rich Lambert
I think for me is don't be afraid of change. Right. Like, it's. You see it a lot in kind of this industry in general, where people really glom onto their. And hold sacred their initial ideas. Like, it's gotta be this, because that's the way I designed it. And game design isn't a perfect science. Right. It's a lot of trial and error. It's making mistakes. It's learning. And so if something's not working, sometimes you just gotta bulldoze it and try something different. And that's a really hard lesson to learn and a really hard thing to do. So for me, that was the kind of. The reinforcement.
- [60:23]
Matt Fyror
Yeah, I'll say. What I really learned in that time was addition by subtraction. Like, don't be afraid to remove stuff that doesn't work and nuke it. Don't ever go back. Like, we have zones that we. There are whole zones in the game that we developed and we just deleted because they just weren't good enough. And by doing that, it gave us the time to focus on the things that did work. And then we launched with fewer zones. Rich keeps talking about his map. He hasn't gotten to the point where he told you we still haven't done that map that he found in his desk 10 years ago.
- [60:56]
Greg Miller
How close are we?
- [60:57]
Rich Lambert
Not even.
- [60:59]
Matt Fyror
And that map was for launch?
- [61:00]
Greg Miller
Yeah, yeah.
- [61:01]
Matt Fyror
It wasn't for ten years after, so. But we did the right thing. We focused on. On a great experience and not on quantity.
- [61:08]
Rich Lambert
Yeah, I think that map was like 57, something ridiculous like that. And we shipped with 17.
- [61:17]
Greg Miller
Okay, okay, okay. Not too shabby.
- [61:19]
Rich Lambert
Yeah, it's pretty good.
- [61:20]
Greg Miller
I want to talk about that ship. I want to talk about that launch. I want to talk about the period before, the period after, and a little bit more than that. And we will hear on the Elder Scrolls Online podcast, a kind of funny Gamescast limited series. Ladies, gentlemen, and be. If you are enjoying this, thank you so much. Remember to, like, subscribe, share, and remember that we're doing four episodes every two weeks. So we're back. I gotta check my notes. April 25th. Friday, April 25th, we'll be back with episode two to continue our conversation about this amazing game and where it's going. But for now, we remind you, we couldn't do without you. So, like, subscribe, share. Thank you. Of course, Matt, Rich, Mike. And until next time, no, it's been our pleasure to serve you.
- [62:03]
Matt Fyror
Podcasting was a revolution until big tech and big money started rewriting the rules. What's a podcast? The Revolution. Redefined is an urgent new docu series featuring exclusive insights from industry experts like AJ Feliciano, general manager of the Root.
- [62:19]
Greg Miller
I still want to kill the word.
- [62:20]
Matt Fyror
Podcast, plus pioneers like Ira Glass, Adam Carolla, Leo laporte, Guy Raz and more. If you care about the future of podcasting, listen now to what's a Podcast? Wherever you get your podcasts.