Q: The Elder Scrolls Online launched to lukewarm reviews, but since then it has quietly grown into a popular powerhouse of an MMO. How did you and the team manage that?
Matt Firor: Oh man, we could talk for hours! I think when ESO launched on PC in 2014, yeah you're right it was received okay, but it was obvious that it wasn't being received by Elder Scrolls fans super well. And that's because it needed a little more of that Elder Scrolls freedom is how I guess you'd put it. We had put a lot of time into making the game very deep, so it had lots of content – lots of quests, dungeons and all the things you expect – but it didn't have that sense of 'I leave the tutorial and I can do whatever I want' that Elder Scrolls games are known for.
Over the time between PC launch and console launch – there was about a year there – we really spent putting together things that made the game broader not deeper, things like the justice system. So if you log in and you don't wanna do quests, you just wanna run around and steal things from NPCs and loot their homes and sell to a fence and make money, you can do that. The game doesn't encourage it, it doesn't discourage it – it's just something else you can do. That's kinda the hallmark of what makes an Elder Scrolls game an Elder Scrolls game.