Elder Scrolls Online set to shake things up

The Elder Scrolls Online’s creative director says that the upcoming Necrom expansion is doing things the series has never done before.

Bethesda and ZeniMax recently revealed a new, upcoming expansion for its hit online multiplayer game The Elder Scrolls Online, and the game’s creative director says that the team wanted to do something it hasn’t done before.

A surprise game release headlined a recent Xbox presentation, but fans of The Elder Scrolls series were focused more on what was coming to the series’ MMO, as Bethesda announced a spooky new expansion called Necrom.

Following the fantasy-focused High Isle expansion that released last year, Necrom is a much darker, much more twisted adventure in the Elder Scrolls universe. The expansion takes place in the titular city of Necrom in the province of Morrowind, known by characters in-game as the City of the Dead, where great warriors are laid to rest.

Much of the expansion’s imagery appears to be based on Lovecraftian horror, with all-seeing eyes and terrifying tentacles adorning the world, the characters, and even the expansion’s logo. It’s a departure for the series and the game, which has traditionally stuck to high fantasy imagery, but it’s not without a basis in the series’ lore.

Speaking to GLHF following the announcement, creative director Rich Lambert said that the team wanted to do something different with the new expansion, and revisiting an area that was last seen in 1994’s The Elder Scrolls: Arena was a good way to tell a new, but familiar, story.

“One of the things we do every time we finish a chapter, and start talking about where we want to go next, is we look back on what we’ve done,” Lambert told us, “We always want the next thing to feel fresh, to feel different.”

Lambert says that the team settled on telling a story about one of the series’ twisted gods, Hermaeus Mora, an Eldritch horror that’s made a few appearances throughout the history of the series, but hasn’t really been explored too deeply until now.

That decision led to the team leaning into the cosmic horror angle, which is how they ended up with the visual aesthetic of Necrom. To expand on this initial idea, Lambert and his team poured through the finest details of the series’ history to find interesting things to talk about.

“A lot of fun can be head teasing out these obscure details from lore books and from previous games like Arena that can really lend to building upon the world, but also bring that sense of nostalgia back for players that have played other games,” Lambert said.

“The Elder Scrolls has been around for 25 years now, so it’s this huge world full of all kinds of really cool lore that’s been written over the years,” Lambert continued, “We have definitely branched out and done our own thing, you got to see a lot of that with High Isle and some other zones that we’ve built”.

Elder Scrolls Online’s Necrom expansion is darker and more fantastic than previous chapters in the game. Picture: Bethesda

The Necrom expansion also introduces a new class, the Arcanist, which is somewhat of a rarity for the game. Despite Elder Scrolls Online being released over eight years ago, only three new classes have been added to the game.

The new class was designed specifically to tie into the story of the upcoming expansion, by creating a type of character that thrives on exploring knowledge of the unknown. The Arcanist is a magic-casting class that summons cosmic horrors using forbidden tomes, which Lambert says fits perfectly into the overall story arc and themes the expansion is trying to tell.

Players waiting for a chance to change classes on their existing characters won’t find any solace in the launch of the Arcanist class in Necrom, though. Lambert says that there aren’t any plans for allowing players to change their class, citing past issues with alliance changing that presented technical challenges.

“There’s a lot of technical challenges associated with [class changes],” Lambert said, “I don’t want to repeat some of the mistakes we’ve made with the alliance change stuff. We’ve been chasing a lot of issues with that over the years”.

Players wanting more player-versus-player (PVP) content will have to wait a little longer too, as technical issues plague that side of the game. Lambert was very candid in saying that PVP in the game wasn’t where the team wanted it to be, but that they were working on improving it little by little.

“It doesn’t make any sense to add more PVP content when PVP isn’t performant,” Lambert said, “You get into a big battle and the server lags or your client lags, and we still have those problems we’re trying to solve.”

“We’ve done a lot of work on the client and the server to try and improve that,” Lambert continued, “We still have a ways to go. Then we can start working on adding more types of PVP. It’s not that we’re ignoring it at all, but it has to run well, because if it doesn’t then it doesn’t matter what we add, it’s just going to be a crappy experience”.

The new Arcanist class is set to focus on magical tentacles and cosmic horror. Picture: Bethesda

As for what keeps players coming back to The Elder Scrolls Online in an increasingly competitive space, Lambert thinks that update cadence is the most important thing. ESO has four major updates every year, each one adding new content for players to experience, keeping the game always feeling fresh for both newcomers and veterans alike.

Removing the barrier for entry was important too, by allowing players at high levels to team up with lower level players without any restrictions on content, with Lambert saying that the beauty of ESO as it currently stands is that players can “just jump right in and play”.

It hasn’t always been this way, though. The launch of The Elder Scrolls Online in 2014 was met with mixed reviews, with many saying that it was stuck halfway between being an Elder Scrolls game and being an MMO, but doing neither of them particularly well.

Lambert says that the initial response was an eye opener, and really helped the team find a new direction for the game to bring it up to players’ expectations. He says that players were very vocal about what they did and didn’t like, which made it easy to hone in on what was working and what needed to go.

“We had to think really hard about what we wanted to be. Did we want to be an MMO, did we want to be an Elder Scrolls game?” Lambert said of reworking the game following its release, “We chose to make [Elder Scrolls Online] an Elder Scrolls game first and foremost, and then a good multiplayer game second, so a lot of the decisions that we made from then on were really framed around that”.

The Elder Scrolls Online’s Necrom expansion is set to release on PC on June 5, followed by a console release shortly after on June 20.

Quality assurance testers at Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax recently voted to create the first Microsoft union, working with the Communications Workers of America to create ZeniMax Workers United. Microsoft voluntarily recognised the union following the 300-person vote.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.