ESO’s Creative Director says listening to the community made the game better

Ahead of the Elder Scrolls Online global reveal the game’s Creative Director, Richard Lambert, took some time to talk about the game’s changes over the past ten years, crediting the community with making many of them happen.

The Elder Scrolls Online didn’t have the smoothest of launches. There were problems with phasing between areas, trouble with sub payments before the subscription model got dropped. And an entire in-game economic crisis.

However now, in the game’s tenth year, it’s a very different player experience. Multiple combat overhauls, the addition of deep dungeon content like the Infinite Archives, PvP content, and loads of cosmetic options. ESO today is almost a completely different game to when it launched.

According to ESO’s Creative Director, Rich Lambert, a lot of these changes happened because the dev team “listened to the community.”

Describing the first decade of ESO, Lambert characterized the period as trying to “figure out what the hell it is we’re trying to build,” as well as working out what it was players wanted from the game.

Lambert credits the sweeping changes and improvements ESO has seen since its launch to the game’s community.

“ESO is very different than what it was in 2014,” he said. “A lot of that happened because we listened to what the community wanted and focused on it.”

And that’s something that he stresses the team at ZeniMax Online Studios want to continue to do.

Speaking about the next ten years of ESO, Lambert acknowledged how much the team has learned.

“I think now we kind of know… we get it, and our focus is technology, accessibility, and continuing to build content for players to immersive themselves in the world.”