With the announcement of an Elder Scrolls MMO, citizens of the Internet immediately started wondering how the series’ universe could cater to the MMO style of gameplay. Well, the quick answer is that it won’t. Well, not entirely. Matt Firor, Game Director for The Elder Scrolls Online, sat down with Game Informer for a video interview, where he gave a bit of insight on how the project is coming along.
“In the Elder Scrolls games you’re always the hero, whether you want to be or not,” Firor said. “You go out there and you kill the dragons. You kill Mehrunes Dagon in Oblivion. In Morrowind, you’re up there fighting the Tribunal – those are huge, global, epic things that you don’t want to stand in line to do in an MMO. The last thing you want to do is have the final confrontation with Mehrunes Dagon as he’s stomping across the Imperial City, and you see like 15 guys behind you waiting to kill him because they’re on the same quest.”
Firor then went on to say;
“We have a whole part of the game that is 100 per cent solo, which is the main story, where the world focuses on you. You are the hero, everything you do is solo and the world reacts to you that way.”
As expected, not all fans are happy with the new direction the series is being taken in with this release, but Firor seems to be just fine with that.
“The worst situation for a game community to be in is where no one posts on the boards because they don’t care,” he said. “If they post on the boards, they care, even if they’re not being so polite about it. But that’s a fact of life: You’re an Internet game, you’re on the Internet, you have an Internet community. And the Internet community is always very vocal.”
“So, what you do is learn from it. You make sure you do the best job to deliver the best game that you can and they you go from there.”
You can find the full Game Informer interview here.