Elder Scrolls Online - Interview @ Venturebeat

Venturebeat has a inteview with Elder Scrolls Online’s Game Director on lore, combat, giant demon anchors, and dragons,

GamesBeat: What’s the vital element you had to get in to really make it an Elder Scrolls game?

Firor: For every Elder Scrolls fan, there’s a different answer to that, which is great. The guys who have been around since the beginning will tell you it’s the lore. There are no specific quest vectors. If something looks cool, you don’t have to find an NPC to tell you to go explore it, like in other MMOs. You just go and explore and get credit for it. That’s what people have come to expect from Elder Scrolls.

GamesBeat: What’s going to get someone to walk away from, say, World of Warcraft and come over to Elder Scrolls?

Firor: Elder Scrolls is an IP that brings a lot of other things with it. You can tell that it’s not using a conventional MMO combat system in any way. It’s very much an Elder Scrolls combat system. This is very much an online-RPG.

GamesBeat: Was that the goal? To take the Elder Scrolls experience we know and put it online?

Firor: It was really to come up with an online role-playing game that uses the best features of MMOs. What MMOs do well, they do really well. Things like social systems or player trading, all of that is awesome. It also comes with a lot of baggage. We wanted to make sure that we got the right elements from both genres — single-player RPGs and MMOs – and bring them together.

GamesBeat: When did you know you were getting that right?

Firor: We built our own engine — any game developers reading this will immediately start laughing, because it’s painful to play on an engine in an early state of development. It doesn’t have any of the cool shaders or effects. You have to put yourself past all that and get to the gameplay. But yeah, there was a version probably about a year and a half ago where I could say, “Okay, I see it. I see the world. There’s weather. There are cool effects and cool animations.” That’s when it really started rolling.