Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Elder Scrolls Online's Rough Launch, Second Chances - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

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What's up everybody? Welcome to the Elder Scrolls online podcast, a kind of funny games cast limited series. I'm one of your host, Greg, Greg, we're back on the nice set with a nice intro and these incredible guys. Of course, you know these incredible guys because of course this is episode two of our podcast. Let's introduce, of course, the game director, Rich Lambert. Hello, hello. Hello, how are you? Fantastic. Good. I love the t-shirt. I, yeah, I pulled it out of my closet. It's a little old. Classic. I gotta represent.

It's classic. Great logo. Yeah. Elder Scrolls. Great logo for being honest. Uh-huh. Okay. Just making sure we're on the same page. I don't trust you, Mike.

You're up to something. And of course, he is Studio Director, ZenaMax Online Studios. It's Matt Firoor. Hello. Hello. My shirt's cool, too. It is.

No, you guys got good branding. You know what I mean? That's the good thing when you talk about this. We need more branding. We just got the wiener dog all the time. You don't even wearing kind of funny stuff. You have a tattoo on your arm. arm.

Pretty dope. Nice. You know what I mean? There it is. No big deal. Ten years of us. That's my leg. My leg too.

Yeah, I was going to say, get him up there. Show the games. Get it off. Come on. It's a laid back podcast. Get up there. Got to stand up. I know.

You got to show them. When we film things back at home, they don't like me wearing shorts. We don't care. What do you mean? Put your foot right up on that. Step right up on that. You do this. You're up there.

What do we got? What do we got? Bear's working on. Bear's working. Here we go. this. It's 10 years of stories of hell in the game and it's full sleeve and it's

I don't know that it was a lesson learned but don't challenge your community anything to anything you're not willing to do. Oh we know that very well. Dive in, dive in, dive in. So I don't know this story. Oh, you know that? No, no, no. I think it was it was elsewhere, right? Yeah. We were talking about ways

to kind of hype up what, you know, our global reveal and all that other stuff and people started throwing things around and they're like, oh, maybe it was Ryan or Jordan or somebody, you know, one of our brand guys. And they were like, what if somebody got a tattoo? And I'm like, I've always wanted one. Sure, I'll do that. But it's got to be like a ridiculous number.

Yeah, ridiculous number. We want over 100, I think it was like 100,000 viewers. Yeah, it was like simultaneous viewers on the stream or something. And it was, and we got it before we even started. And so the opening of the thing, you know, of the global reveal was, Rich, I hate to tell you this. You haven't even started yet, but you're getting that tattoo. like, wow, okay, well, let's do this. That's incredible. I love that.

And then we kind of documented it, you know. Yeah, there's a whole, whole video of him getting it, and the artist who's fantastic in Baltimore, where we are. Yeah, so it's a good watch. Yep. I appreciate that. Yeah, we filmed it all and did it all. And yeah, it was, it was fun.

You only put the most important things on your calves, on your legs, you know what I mean? There is a maple leaf on there, too. Watch out. Here it comes. Stripping. Garfield. Look at that. Yeah, yeah. I'm impressed. You are limber.

It's more of the camera angles. Look at my butt. It's more the stupidity that I can't angle my leg to the camera. No matter how hard I tried that. I'm going further away. Yep, yeah. Oh, there you go. Holy cow, look at that.

He's found it. Oh, Barrett's amazing a B-roll. Wow. God, look at that. You still have an age of today. Yeah. Just coming. How long did this take?

It was 30 hours. Holy. Oh, man. We got after it. We did it over a number of sessions. But Lydia there, when I first met her. her, she pulled out the art book from the launch. Yeah, she had it. It's like, this is my favorite thing I've ever gotten. Can I do more of this?

And I'm like, you're the one. Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. That's amazing. Wow, that's cool. Very cool. Yeah. But so is this whole story in this partnership. Of course, this is episode two of the Elder Scrolls online podcast. A Kind of Funny Games Cast limited series. If you enjoyed the first one, thanks for coming back for a second one. If you've never caught the first one, go back and catch it. Remember, every two weeks we're here with a brand new episode. That means there's two more coming, May 9th, and of course, Friday, May 23rd as we get ready for the big push here of the new ESO content. Of course, there was a direct in April. It is still April. Yeah, it's April right now when this is airing. Of course, you can go check that out and be part of it. And continue this conversation.

We talked a little bit, obviously, last episode about the April direct, seasons, subclasses, so much more. And then, of course, we had Matt and Rich start us through the journey of getting here, starting in 2007, starting the whole thing. then Skyrim coming in and changing everything, which is kind of where we left off. And I feel robbed. Because we ended that episode and we walked off. And Matt immediately goes, oh, we didn't even bring up the fact

that Skyrim changed the name of the game. That's right. I didn't know this either. Talking about this. What were you calling it before Skyrim? Yeah. And that's not just a saying. We literally had to change the name of the game.

So throughout the early part of ESO's development up until Skyrim launched, the ESO was going to be called Elder Scrolls Origins. Because, of course, we take place second era, 700 years before all the others made sense. But after Skyrim literally launched and literally became one of the best games of all time, we were really concerned that by calling it origins,

by calling ESO, Elder Scrolls origins, people would think it was a prequel to Skyrim because it's the next Elder Scrolls game that comes out. It would come out two years, two and a half years after, right? So just to make sure no one was confused and knew it was the multiplayer Elder Scrolls game, we changed it to Elder Scrolls online. So still ESO, we didn't have to change

executable name, which was good. The engineers, they were very happy. They didn't have to go through all the code and change what ESO meant, right? He's trying to desperately come up. All right, Elder Scrolls online. Elder Scrolls, Abruvian, no, Elder Scrolls, Octopus, what can we put in here? It makes it make sense. I love that you got there in the end.

And I think that's, you know, jumping off of the end of episode one and where we were. The one thing we talked about was Skyrim changing everything. Okay, you need to do that. as the juggernaut that was and is Skyrim continues to tumble down that hill, what does that do for you leading up to this launch in 2014? Is it just immense pressure? Is it this idea of, oh man, we're not going to live up to expectations of what people want from that? Well, we were working so hard.

I don't know if we had time to feel emotions on that level. But what it did do, yeah, it set the bar, right? It's like we wanted to do the right thing for the brand. But what it really did is it made when we opened up our beta website for beta applicants, it made it really popular. This is 2012, right? When Obamacare thing just got announced, I don't know if you remember back so far ago, but the government website collapsed under the weight of all the people.

And we had like eight times the traffic of that website. and so we got like 5 million beta signups in like two days or so. It was ridiculous, which of course added to the pressure, but... Is that excitement though, or is that an... No, no, that's like, okay, there's a market. People want to play this. And then it's, oh, shit, now we got it. There's going to be expectations, and we have to make sure that we're going to meet them.

Look at the 1,000 yards stare. I'm just thinking of that. We put it into a dark place. I was just thinking that. I was literally just thinking that. going back through and just thinking about it and going, yeah, like the thing that, that, and I can't remember when this was, but I remember a Robert talk, which was, don't F it up. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Robert Alman, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it was like, basically it was a meeting where like, okay, you know, we just launched the best game of all time on the IP. You have five million beta signups. You're now fully funded to get to launch. Don't fuck up. Yep. Right. And it's like, but it wasn't. It was like a, it was a good thing.

It was like, you are set up for success, right? You know, we have given you all the support that you need, which is totally true. And in that time, we'd already had started the turnaround. We knew launch date was going to be in 2014 and not 2013. Right. So it wasn't like, you know, you're in trouble. It was more like, we now think even more that this game is going to be big. And it's up to us.

Yeah. we talked a bit about launch in the first episode and how, okay, it's what was it, we weren't in trouble or we, you had a great way of saying. The anime sweat?

Yeah, the anime sweat, yeah, yeah, but there was one of the very beginning, right, there wasn't a failure, it wasn't, it wasn't, oh, it doesn't matter, but it was, I can't remember back then. You don't say, I don't, two weeks ago. How were we were asking? No, but you were talking about the fact of like, you know, you didn't get all of it, right?

Right. This was, at what point in the lead-up to launch. I've always wondered this for you as video game developers, right? Video game developers at large. Obviously, I've heard so many times that when you're in it, you can no longer see the forest for the trees, right? You're so lost in it. You don't know if everybody is I've ever talked to as a developer is always like, we don't know what we're launching is it good as bad. It's up to the players. In that run-up to launch and you're seeing you're not hitting the things you necessarily wanted to, not as many zones, not as many of this, is there an internal thing for either of you, not even in the team as a whole of, man, we didn't

get this, man, this isn't going to be good. Man, this is going to be received poorly. That moment for me was when the reviews came out, which were before launch, but not long. I forget it was, but sometime, and it's a little hazy. We were working a lot. But there was, again, like, some people loved it, some people hated it. So it was hard to draw a conclusion from the reviews. I think we had previews.

We had a preview day. That's what it was. And everyone was like, the idea is great. the game looks really good, you know, not sure if it's going to add whatever pet peeve that they had. Whatever that one specific person

wanted from them. But the thing is we knew on some level we weren't quite there, but we also knew we had to launch. It was time, right? It was, we just had to get the game out there. So stop there. Again, please explain that to me as a layman. How do you know when it's just we got to go? It's good enough, right? Like, and that's

a really awful thing to say when you really think about it. But at some point you got to ship the thing and then see what people think and then start to make because you're right you are so head down deep into this and focused on just getting it done that you start to lose a little bit of perspective when you're when you're kind of going through it it's something that to this day you know when when I'm reviewing stuff that the team is building I'm not in the everyday day-to-day stuff and so I'm in there and I'm like you forgot to tell this part of the story like the player doesn't have all the information they need to

make a decision or a choice or whatnot, right? It's that fresh eyes type thing, and that's what launch was for us. Gotcha. It was awesome. Like, it was really eye-opening. And again, not a failure. It just wasn't as a success, right? It was kind of that gray area in between.

Yeah. And obviously, by business standards, not being a success means you're a failure. But it really wasn't because the game worked. Like, we'll go into a couple. I think we're going to go into a couple of specific things that were that were terribly wrong. Here's where it didn't work. But the servers mostly

were up. You know, obviously every game like this that launches, you go from zero to millions of players and like, you know, like that. And modern technology doesn't really ramp like that. Do you remember like, what was it? what was like that peak concurrent when you started? Like, was it literally?

I remember what it was in console launch, which was 500,000. PC was obviously a lot smaller. But it was more, so, So, yeah, we did, oh, we did a pre-launch. So we did, if you had pre-ordered the game, you got in a week early. Yep. And that was rough.

Because that was a lot of players pre-ordered. That was Ed, like literally. Our CTO. Literally just mucking with the cues. No, no, that was console launch. Oh, that was console launch, right? Yeah, yeah. No, this was.

Yeah, this was, we had sales forecast. We knew how many people, how many people bought the game. We knew kind of, you know, it was an old model. We had more data than we wouldn't. now, because people can just buy and download immediately now back then. You couldn't really do that. You could, but it was just slower. But more people pre-ordered it than we thought. And so our pre-launch, you know, our early access period was launch. And we had a couple of bad problems that made us extend that pre-launch period by a couple of days because we had to take servers down and

fix things. Like, you'll hear this a lot if you talk to online game developers, but goal do, where players can figure out how to duplicate money infinitely. Was that love? You do it? It was you, wasn't it? Yeah, there were problems on that level. Like, people would log in and their inventory would be gone. And so these are things every online game runs into.

We found a lot of these things in beta, but our betas were big. We had one that, like, 150,000 people in. But it wasn't big enough to catch the day one problems. And so I would classify this as like, we knew we were going to run into problems like this. Sure. Right. And you always know the first two weeks is going to be not a lot of sleep and a lot of stress, and you'll figure it out. Our tech team, which we never talk enough about, were at that time in 2014, were people I had worked with at Mythic and beyond for years and years and years.

So we were pretty battle-hardened and we knew what needed to be done. So none of that scared us. It was just we knew we had to get through that period. And we got through the rough period on PC launch. And then we started to get the real feedback that this. this is a good game. It's just not elder scrolls enough. I think that was the key, right?

That was the key. And then Rich was in charge of making it more Elder Scrolls, because literally they were talking about content. We had hit all of the good things with combat and small button bar, and those were Elder Scrolls, but the questing didn't, and for very funny reasons. I mean, what sounds good on paper doesn't always work good in practice, work well in practice.

Like what? Well, so, you know, in a lot of single, player games and, you know, in oblivion and whatnot, there were world-changing moments, right? You go into an area, it's under attack, you clean it up, you deal with the problem, and then everything goes back to pristine and everybody's happy, right? That is exceptionally powerful in terms of storytelling and giving players this feeling of progression through it through an area. It is terrible in a multiplayer game because it separates players. So I go into the area, I'm a brand new player, you are in that area, but you've already completed it, we can't see each other.

We can't play with each other. So we had all these player separation issues. Even if you're in the same group. Yeah, even if you're in the same group. So you would see like the little arrow above, you know, and just floating in the air to designate that your group member was there, but couldn't actually play with it. Got it. Because the way the tech works is that area is actually all in the

same area. It's just, it's called layering. And you can layer in different content that some people can see and some people can't. Wow. And so we had this idea when we designed the game that, right, you were going to be able to change the world in every Elder Scrolls game. Maroons Dagon comes and storms through the Imperial

City and crushes it flat at the end of oblivion, right? It's like those are awesome moments and we wanted to capture that feeling. And so we had almost every one of the major POIs in the game, almost everyone had two or three states. And for the first two days it was great. Players

like this is awesome and then they started to invite their friends and their friends needed to catch up and they would group and then they lost their friends. Yeah, it just lost. It caused it a huge amount of problems. So a stop here for me. This is always something I'm interested in from developer side. Is this something that caught you

completely off guard? Had you thought this through? Or were you like, we're doing this? Stupidly? Yes. Yeah, right? Like it's... It's not stupid. I mean, again, you're building a game. It's a duh moment. It's like, well, duh, of course, right? But you know, we just finished talking about how you're in it, you're excited about

it, you're really interested in this thing. And it worked and it was really cool. It's just we didn't think about that extra part. We want to make it solo friendly. And we made it too solo-friendly and very group hostile. Yep. Oh, that's a great point. And that was the kind of the theme that was running through it. And it wasn't just that.

It was the game is split into three alliances. So, and then you only saw members of the opposing alliance when you were PVPing and killing them, which is a very dark age of Camelot thing, which is great in Dark Age Camelot, which was not an Elder Scrolls game. And so it worked there. You still get residuals on this? It's why you do. We know you made it. All right, Mitzik, we get it.

But the important thing is the PVP system in E. is essentially a copy of Camelot system. And so that, you only saw enemy alliances when you were in the disputed territory. And then you could, they would look like NPCs. You couldn't talk to them. Like, they literally look like NPCs. ESO started out that way. And, but again, Rich, after playing this game for two weeks, is like, I want to get my friend in. He gets his friend in. And his friend creates a character in another alliance. They can, not only can they not see each other, they can't even talk to each other. Like, there's no chatting. There's no nothing. And the game didn't do a good job of explaining separation like that.

So player separation was on the quest level, on the world level. And that was a big problem to unspool. Like, it's not complicated. It just took a lot of busy work by Rich and his team. Yeah, I mean, we had a team devoted to fixing all the layering issues for six months. Damn. Damn. While we were doing all this other stuff at the same time as well.

Like, we weren't just doing that. We were doing all the other stuff, too. What do you find from the community? this time. We talk about that first two weeks. We talk about media. We talk about, you know, when you're on the other side of two weeks, things have shaken out. This is where we're at. You've done the blog posts, the apologies and things.

You now have this, I assume, dedicated fan base, right, that is showing up and giving you true feedback. It's critical, obviously, but they're there for you. So this is, again, going to shock you, but there are people out there in internet land that love to drag

games they don't like. No. I know. Shocking. I know. They know there's better things to do, right? I would like to think so. So we had two kind of concurrent tracks of information. One was basically everyone saying this game is awful. And we hate it and we hate the people that made it. And we're going to stream 24-7 that we hate this game.

Right. Then there are people that are actually playing it. And they're giving us feedback of, we hate this game, do we love it, too? You guys need to think more about this. And so it's hard to separate as humans sometimes. of those two streams because, you know, we got a lot of stuff directed at us in that, in that time. And some of it was fair, a lot of it was not. And so we're built to take this.

But the team, you know, the newer members of the team that are younger, it was there were a lot of Yeah, soul crushing conversations with people just like, it's okay, you know, they don't hate you. They just don't. They just hate your work. They just hate your work. But so we did have to get through that. And again, in that criticism, there's always something that's valid and taking the valid stuff out of that. And eventually, the first stream kind of went away because there were new things to focus on or people weren't watching Elder Scrolls Online Sucks videos as much as they were. But then we turned really to the, hey, let's look at what players are playing in the game. We had kind of this three-sided matrix that we used of we knew we needed to make changes.

and this then turned on Rich to change. So we looked at what players are doing in the game, like literally the metrics, like what are they doing? And then what are they telling us they should do? Sometimes those two things aren't the same things. And then what do we think as developers and stewards of this world? Like what do we think we should do? And if you triangulate those three points,

usually something comes out of that that you can do with. Yeah, one of the first things that I did is I had our business intelligence group. pull a list of all of the active devs who were playing ESO, not just at Zoss, but everywhere. So, like, there were a ton that I had no clue at BGS that were lifers, like, just literally did nothing but play ESO, which was really cool. Yeah.

And I sent out a big email to them. I'm like, give me your top five pain points. And then I put them all together and mapped them out against the player feedback. And there was a lot of overlap, like, a lot of overlap there. So we're like, okay, this is what's going to lead us kind of forward. and that helped us really pick the lane, so to speak. Like, I've said a few times and heard this, you know, in some feedback where at launch, we didn't really know the game we wanted to make, right?

We tried to walk that line between MMO and Elder Scrolls game, and we had this kind of weird path in between the two, so it wasn't like exactly what everybody wanted. And when we chose, based on feedback and our feedback, when we chose to make Elder Scrolls be the first, bullet, so to speak, that helped frame a lot of conversations going forward and changed kind of the mentality. And it led to some really crazy discussions I'm at and I've had over the years. But it was always make it more Elder Scrolls. And that was, that conversation started with Skyrim for us.

And at launch, it just showed how we were down that road, but we weren't far enough down that road. And we had another list of things that we had to do to make the game more Elder Scrolls like. What does that list look like? Because again, I understand the competingness, right? out of an MMO or an Elder Scrolls game. But I guess what's an example of making more other scrolls than this is what we did? So you play Oblivion

for the first time, you come out of the dungeon, the tutorial, right? You can do it. Go anywhere. Elder Scrolls, you have to go through Zone A, Zone B, Zone C. And then if you're lucky, you'll do the quest, if you're lucky if it works.

And then you go to... Now he sounds like a player. Because the one who launched that question. was broken. But then you get to go to the other alliance and you do it's very linear, very step-based, right? Got it got to got, got, got, got. Obviously that wasn't an Elder Scrolls experience, right? People wanted to log into the game,

create a character, and just do whatever the hell they wanted. And we'd before launch, we had done the combat feel, small button bar. So, like Rich said, it felt like an Elder Scrolls game, but it didn't play like an Elder Scrolls game. And

So the next series of things were content, right? Make sure that you can go anywhere, do anything. Make sure that there are things to do in zones that aren't quests. Like we were very quest-driven, but, you know, for those who played, you know, any Elder Scrolls game, like exploration, you can go through the dungeons and figure out wacky things to do with the powers that they gave you. Right. Like, there are things you can do which just aren't questing, and we didn't have enough of those things. Is this a conversation then again with BGS talking to Todd's team?

like to get more of like what what the powers inside of a dungeon kind of idea no it was more it was more us right like I think one of the really cool things about you know Todd is he's like you got to do what works for your game like he's he's the steward of the lore and the IP and so whenever we're trying to do like really crazy things yes there's a conversation that we have about the lore and how it's going to impact things but when it comes to like classes right they were actively going away from classes and we're like we have to do classes for these reasons he's like okay sure sure sure sure there's a very

funny conversation I had with Todd early in development when it was clear that we weren't going to have enough development time to do underwater swimming which has been in every modern Elder Scrolls game and I was like Todd is it okay IP wise if we don't have underwater swimming and he's like have you ever had a meaningful experience underwater in an Elder Scrolls game

and I was like no and he's like exactly so don't worry about it so but that's that was the that was what Rich is saying. It's like it was like, what works for you, right? Don't worry so much. Just make your game your game. Yeah. Mikey?

I'm just, you know, when I go back to the launch, right, as well, it's interesting now we look at the market. It's a lot of free to play, right? You jump in and then there's micro transactions that monetize off of that. Of course, you were coming in as a subscription service back then. And was there any pushback on that? Was it, I mean, of course, when I think of World of Warcraft back in the day, It was like, that was just the normal.

Of course, I'm going to sign up for that. That was the way. Narrator voice. There was a lot of pushmen. That was, yeah. And we, yeah, I totally forgot about that. But I didn't obviously forget about it. Business model.

Yeah, we think about the game, the game, but there's the whole side of the game that is making sure the players can actually get it and pay for it. Yeah. So we had just come in at the tail end of subscriptions, right? It was like, wow was still had stupid numbers. subscribers. Star Wars the Old Republic had just launched two years before and why it wasn't great, it had a pretty good number of subscribers as well. There weren't many games out there of our AAA status, big IP, that were not subscription-based. If you look at Star Wars, you look at Warcraft, right? Those are big, big IPs and they were all

subscription-based. So the decision was made not to risk going to another model and not make any money. right the it was it was decided just just do the tried and true and uh we knew getting closer launch that probably wasn't the right thing to do but it was far too we were far too far down the down the road what were you seeing to make you say that what was the signs on the road going uh every people are every one of our everyone who ever interacted with anything with the game was like this should not be a subscription i think that has something that has something to do with it but there weren't many viable other options except for guild Wars, too, was the one that we ended up kind of going with that model.

But that big game and a great game, I spent a lot of time in that game. But that wasn't the star we were following. We were like, we're following Skyrim, right? If any game can be a subscription-based game in this, the game after Skyrim and all scrolls can, right? And it definitely proved that it wasn't. Right? And it's like, and we'll tell you, I mean, we'll get to the point in the story where

when we made the change away from that, it was explosive growth, like unbelievably explosive growth. So people wanted to play the game, but nobody charged a required subscription for a game on console, except for games that had a previously launched that already had a user base.

And we missed that. Well, I think that's what's so fascinating when you talk about your histories, what online MMOs were right, and especially starting in 2007. Like, as somebody who started at IGN in 2007, right? Like, to sit there and talk about

what gaming was like back then and like what the models were and how, I think even now, just to talk about, oh yeah, there were so many MMOs. There was, I'm a DC fan. They were working on DC Universe online. Like, this wasn't like,

it was the battle royale of a few years ago, right? Where it was, everybody's doing this and making it and it was a flourishing market and suddenly people are trying, but who's going to be the wow killer? Everybody looking for that wow killer. to try to look back and be like, well, yeah, the model was subscription, of course. And then for you guys to be developing,

working on a game, and I'm sure that was in 2007. Of course, no brain or, duh. It was greenlit as a subscription game. So then to get further down that line and see, oh, the industry's changing, but as always, like, with as much work as you put into this and what you've built and how you're going and what you need to just launch it, what you do?

Yeah, the important thing is that on the publishing finance side of this project, not being subscription, was seen as a bigger risk than being subscription. Sure. And I think that pretty much explains why we launched that way. It was like, we still made a lot of money that first year, like a lot of money. It just tailed off as players stopped subscribing. Sure.

So one thing I want to double back to. I was asking you about Forest with Trees, reviews are coming up, it's going to do this, the previews. You then said something interesting, I think, about the online hate, people being upset about it, talking to younger developers about that. what was their take on reviews? Was there in, like, you know, launch in general. Just was, outside of the angry videos and YouTube streams or whatever, was there like a, you have to sit down as a company and be like, hey, everybody, this isn't the end of the world.

We know we wanted a 90 on Medicare, just like you did, but now the work begins. Yeah. Congratulations. You got a 92 from something, but you got a 47 from something else, right? Yeah. Yeah, there were, I mean, there were team meetings. There were one-on-one discussions. no one was super psyched.

That is for sure. Yeah, I mean, it's hard when you put as much time and effort into something, right? Many people at that point had put seven years of their lives into this, and then, you know, you get this really weird mixed feedback. And it's hard to not take it personally. But as Matt said a few times, there's always nuggets, even if it's absolute vitriol, right? Even if there's always nuggets.

Like, people generally won't complain if they don't have, something to complain about, right? And if they weren't passionate and interested in the thing, like, they just want it better. So you have to dig through that and finding that nugget as hard as it can be, as soul-crushing as it can be, is super important. Yeah, and a game with hundreds of people working on it.

Like, like, the guy who's writing and editing the website is catching the same amount of emotional, you know, nuclear warfare as the combat designer, right? And it's like, it's not fair in a lot of cases. And the community team just taking,

Blow after blow after blow, right? Sure. And they're like, we can relay it, right? We don't actually fix these things. I can't tell you how many times Gina got hate messages of, Gina fixed this bug. And she's like, I don't fix bugs. I don't, right?

Like, I play the game and I talk to you. I'm a community manager, right? Like, that's, I'm supposed to foster, you know, foster feedback between EWall, right? And so, yeah, it was a very interesting time for us. But yeah, for young developers, if anyone who's listening to this, it hasn't worked on a game like this.

sadly this goes with the territory, right? You can make the best game of all time in launch it, and you're still going to get hate for something. And it's kind of a sad commentary on many things. But you can't let that get to you. You just can't. If you know that you're on the right path and you're doing the right things and you believe in the project,

then keep believing in the project. I want to ask about the beta, as I was pretty interested. And you said you had a pretty large-scale beta. Like, what is the feedback you receive? I mean, you've talked about launch. and all of this coming out you, then the beta's giving you everything on feedback-wise. What was the feedback light from the beta?

What were you looking for? What were you also testing? It's always interesting to talk about armchair quarterbacking and like, oh, well, they're doing the beta to turn on the server and just try this. Is there any other things you're testing and trying out beforehand? All right. That is a great question because I'd forgotten about a lot of this. So we had four big betas.

And then we had one smaller one that kind of ran concurrently. The four big betas where most of the people saw the game before we launched were server stability tech betas. And this is a big mistake that we made. We didn't really care what build was on it. We just wanted people to log in and test the login servers. And we wanted to literally get as many people on and then pull the plug and see and see how you have to test these things. Right?

And then see what happens. And then so there was one build especially that was just not, it just wasn't a good build. There was a combat bug in it. And there was, and that was the one we got like 120,000 people concurrent in. So more than 120,000 people participated. And to us, it was a great success. The servers were up. Everything was stable.

Everything was in the green and right. And then it's like the feedback. This sucks. This sucks. And then some guy leaked video that we had to go after and get it pulled down because it was all under NDA. For sure. Oh, wow. And just and it was, yeah, the narrative was starting to build then.

Yeah. How much does that impact you all beforehand, right? Like now the perception is starting to trend a different way than maybe where you want it. Is that a lesson learned in that situation when it comes to me? Yeah, it is, is that, you know, even though these games are really complex to make and they run on a giant IT exercise that you're also building at the same time as you're making the game, people only care about the game. Right.

That's it. Like, a great game that crashes sometimes is far better than a shitty game running on great infrastructure. So that is the lesson that we learned. Check bar. Put that down. I want to talk about where we are right now, all right? post PC launch, we're getting the ducks in the row, we're making more Elder Scrolls.

We're looking towards that console launch. But before we do that, I'll remind you, of course, that this is the Elder Scrolls online podcast, a kind of funny games cast, limited series. If you like that, make sure you like, subscribe and share this show, wherever you're getting it,

whether it be over on the ESO channels, whether it's on the kind of funny channels, no matter what, thank you. And remember, until next time, here's a word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by the Elder Scrolls Online. Every legend starts somewhere, and in ESO, it starts with you.

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Does immediately, when you sit down, you're like, we're going to make it more elders girls. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. All for console launch. You had mentioned at one point in the last episode, I think it was, Matt, that you didn't know you're doing a console until very late in the, we're getting. very close. When does console enter the picture for you? And that's when you know it. And then this and then the goal. Console entered the picture when Skyron became one of the best selling games on console.

Yes. Like end of story, right? It's like there was a market there and we had to serve it. And was that another of a, this is going to be great? Or like, oh, we didn't build a game for this at all. There were lots of those conversations. Like I remember, you know, down to are they going to be able to do dungeons? Are they going to be able to do trials? Are they going to, like, are they going to play like, mouse and keyboard players. Like we were really, really nervous about that. And it turns out gamers are just gamers and they can do anything with whatever, right? I've heard Matt Talk is trash about console gamers. He thought they weren't going to be hardcore. He thought we wouldn't be able to hang Mike, but we were there. Yeah, I mean, I used a controller on PC. One of my favorite stories, you know, of that mouse and keyboard

versus controller is, and this is quite a bit after launch. I think it was for Morrwind. We brought a number of people in to play the game and gives us feedback. back on the features and what we were doing. And we had a really good mix of console gamers and PC gamers. And the PC gamers, there was a number of PVPers, and they were all talking a lot of smack. So they had a dueling tournament. And the person that won the dueling tournament was,

her name at the time was Beware, but now she goes by Lulu. Okay. Lulu lovely. And she wiped the floor with everybody. And she had this weird claw grip on her control. on her controller and just demolished everybody. Like it was, it was amazing.

And I was like, okay, yeah. It's gonna be okay. Gamers are gamers. It's awesome. So we were saved on the console, the whole console thing. We were saved by the fact that we were developing the console version right when Xbox 1 and PlayStation 4 were not yet launched, but both Microsoft, Xbox and Sony were looking

for content. And so also both of them shared a similar architect. and both of them had similar architecture to Windows. So if we were the previous generation, it would almost never have happened because ESO is a big game. But the tech revolution in console at that time helped us immensely. Right. And so we worked with a company named Iron Galaxy that does a lot of...

Dave Lang. We hate him around here. Oh, come on. He's a great guy. But yeah, so we had Dan Coleman and Adam Boys and Chelsea Blascoe and that team. Chelsea was the head of Iron Galaxy now was the lead producer on ESO console, which we call Project Bluebird. And so we were able to give that to them and then go fix our stuff before console launch.

And so that was very much the plan was we know we need to launch console again like PC. We know we need to launch at some point relatively soon because we've got to make some money. but we're going to give you enough runway to fix the things. And number one on that list after player separation was business model. Because console gamers, if PC gamers not can pay a subscription for this game, console gamers definitely aren't. For sure. And so that was the big change that then we started working on.

And we had almost exactly a year to do all of those changes. No big deal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Rebuild the, well, not rebuild the game, but change a lot of the game, right? Yeah, Rich and I did a retro kind of this at one of the QuakeCons in 2018 or 2019, where we talked about this thing. And I went back and watched that. And I had forgotten so much stuff that we did, which is funny because when we're on stage there talking about it, we had already forgotten about it in years before. So we just called our updates, even now, update one, update two, update two. So we had update six was the one that was important because it had the change of business model. So you could, if you bought the game at any time, you could play it as much as you wanted. But if you wanted customization and convenience items, you could now have virtual currency.

Sure. And there was an optional subscription. So that went in an update six, like a bunch of combat changes. Ballpark, how far out from launch is Update 6? It is, I can tell you exactly. It is March 16th, 2015. There you go. The day before St. Patrick's Day.

There you go. Never forget. The green beer was flowing next day. Yeah. Well, and it's also literally the day when it went from red to green. because, and not just in dollars, just in terms of we saw the future that day. So console didn't launch until June,

but this was the build that was going to be the console launch bill. And so, and the fact that we made it so you could just, if you had bought the game at any time since launch, you know, no subscription anymore, so you could just log in and play. And so we ran a marketing campaign of like, just come back and check it out. What do you got to lose?

What do you got to lose? It wasn't quite, that level, but it was... You take a dragoff? What else you could do? Before say, Patrick? So, yeah, so our... There were a bunch

of other changes in their quality of life changes, a bunch of guild stuff. Facial animations are much better, and you could actually see characters articulating. Yeah, a whole guild tabberts. I just watched this video. This is the only reason why I know it. But that build went up, update 6 went up, and overnight

our concurrency doubled. And then the next night, it doubled again. And then, and then the whole narrative around the game changed. But it completely changed. And everything, our stream reviews, which were, don't ever read these reviews, territory, suddenly started to go up and up and up. And right before console launch,

they actually reached, reached positive, mostly positive. And then console launch, and then that just, then the trajectory was stratospheric. So that was the move to go to more of a free-to-play model there If you bought the game once, you could play as much as you want without any subscription, you could optionally subscribe, which is the way we do it now. ESL Plus, correct? I've been signed up to that for a while.

That crass bag is something special. I want to put a pin where we are right there because we're about to get to console, and I love that. But take me back. You said you had about a year to make all these changes in one of them being the business model. I have always found these discussions fascinating, and I've never had this level of access to one. So you launch, oh man, they hate the subscription.

Where does that conversation start? Is that going to the late great Robert Altman and being like, hey, we got to do this? Is he like, yeah, that sounds great? Or is he like, what the hell are you talking about? Make me the money. So this is probably the only part of the conversation that Rich and I weren't actually in together. Because Rich was hands deep in fixing all kinds of problems. And this was me going to the boardroom and saying, we fucked up.

we got to change the business model, showing, based on data that we got from industry, you know, publications at the time, around how virtual currency would work, what it would take to get us there. Just the fact that getting lapsed players into the game

introduced the concept of lapsed players because that concept didn't exist before in ESO or Bethesda. And so it was funny, their reference for buying things virtual currency, which the generic term obviously is DLC. But to them, that was oblivion horse armor. And so, you know, literally the CTO was like, you're just going to sell horse armor and make and make money.

And I was like, yeah. I mean, I mean, it, start grabbing the box to give you to put yourself in. But that was the concept of like, you know, we're going to introduce, you know, micro transactions, but we're going to do it for convenience and customization only. You can't buy your way to success.

You can buy your way to look better, you know, if you want. And we're going to have an optional subscription that gives you some virtual currency per month and gives you some in-game perks as well. And we did some modeling, which was good. But the best modeling was we know that more players will play the game because of it because it's less risky to them to jump in. And console launch, you only have one chance to launch on console. We want to make it as frictionless as possible.

And so many ways this is the last first, impression. Right. Yeah. You get one second chance. Yeah. And I'll blatantly name drop here. But the Xenemax board of directors back then, I don't know if you've ever gone into that, was like Jerry Bruckheimer and, you know, guys, Cal Ripkin, like really, really famous, notable people. And after PC launch, I had to go to the board and present the findings. And Jerry Bruckheimer, I actually said, unlike movies, which launched worldwide, you get a chance for a do-over, right? Because you're going to go to console

and don't, don't ever think this isn't a giant opportunity because now people know what it is and you just have to convince them that it's better and it works. Like, you know, with movies, it's one and done. You can't change them. And the whole concept to him was amazing

that you could have something on one platform and kind of massage it and make it better and then go to a bigger platform and redo it. And so, which was a great way to look at it. And that's the way that we ended up doing it. So you're looking at that model now and saying, okay, this is the findings. This is what we want to do. You're going to keep still the price tag of to get in. You have to pay X, but then you don't have to pay monthly. Is it now, hey, I got to get a creative team. We got to get a bunch of horse armor

in this game. Let's start making this right now. Yeah, so I will never say horse armor again. I just want to say that was the CTO's reference for, for what DLC was. But yes, we, so we had a designer on staff named Lee Rideout, who is actually still in this position now, who came from a game, he was a designer on the team, not a monetization designer. And we had him design the monetization system. And he approached it from a game perspective, not necessarily a financial perspective. And he's like, what do players want to buy based on this game that I just spent eight years making? Right. What would I do, basically? It's like, I want to look cooler. I want to have, I can craft potions, but I can just buy them,

and maybe that's easier for me because I don't want to get into the crafting system, right? And it came up, up with all of these things. And I think the key thing there was not an outside finance person driving the decisions.

It was an inside game designer that was driving that, which made it feel really good. And it also helped that the ethos, right, was do no harm. Yeah, that was literally, wrote that on the whiteboards. Literally, number one, do no harm, right?

Aish more people did that. It's literally just convenience as cosmetics. And we've kind of run up against that line over time, but that's always been the core is do no harm. And that helps solve a lot of conversations, right? And helped really fine-tune and focus Lee and team on what are the types of things. And now we have this huge pipeline for in-game cosmetics and all that other stuff. Yeah, so, yeah, we have a lot of artists working, a lot making costumes and dye colors.

I mean, there's so many houses. Like, there's so many parts of this system now that, are intertwined with the game design. So you can get all these things, almost all of them, without needing to go into a currency store. But if you want to save some time, you can grind for it in game.

You can buy them. And so it hit just right with the player base. Obviously, there was some concern for the player base in the early days. But it was the right thing to do at just the right time. And then we rebranded the game as went from the brown box to the white box.

And it was like Elder Scrolls Online, Tamriel unlimited, unlimited, obviously, meaning no subscription, although nobody ever made the connection, with a new video and right and a fresh marketing campaign. And then that happened right and when update six hit. And then that was our look and brand up through console launch. Yeah. Really quick, we kind of talk about like the perfect model that we kind of nailed here. What were some that were left on the floor that was not the perfect model of like, hey, that's not the right way or we don't want to do that, but it's close. I mean, it all goes back to that mantra, right, of do no harm. So, sure, there were lots of explorations of, like,

can players just buy power straight up? Can they just buy boosted characters? And, and... I think it was by time. Like, literally, you can buy your way to 50th level or something like that, which theoretically isn't buying power because you're not more powerful than a level 50 person, but that was way too close to the line for us. So it's a lot of that kind of stuff, right?

Yeah. you said this is all, you know, building up doing this, title update 6, and then console launch. Console launch ruins flawlessly. Everything goes perfectly. This is it. This is the moment. This is the other two episodes of the show. This is it. This is the big moment, right? Yeah. So, uh, I think ESO was either the number one or number two selling console game of 20, well, no, Fallout 4 was that same year. So that probably, probably beat us. That's fine. All in-house. Yeah, all good. Um, but whatever. number was forecast, it was a lot more than that.

I have numbers here because I didn't want to make you memorize them all. Three million new players in two months. 2.7 MAUs and that's... One thing. Active users. Just making sure you're on... In July 2015, 500,000 concurrent players across all platforms. And then $230 million in revenue.

Yeah. That was a good year. Pretty impressive. It was pretty impressive. So all of July was pretty much sleepless. So June, all of June. It launched June, right? June or July? I forget. June. So, yeah, so we actually had at the office, I actually got, like, our office in Hunt Valley, Maryland is right across the street from an Embassy Suite Hotel. And we got seven or eight rooms and just put the keys on the front desk. So if somebody had too much, they just went and got a key and went over and slept for a couple hours and then came back and put the key back. And we rotated that way because, yeah, we had a rolling launch, so worldwide launch, which, I'm sure all of your viewers know what this means.

It means New Zealand gets in first, then Australia, then Asia. And it's like over the course of that day, of course, it launches at midnight. So by the time it gets to North America, it's midnight. You're a bit tired. Not a good idea. Yeah. So as it launches in New Zealand and Australia, like, and then Asia and then Europe, like the euphoria is just building. Because there's a lot of people playing the game.

You've seen these numbers pop. And the numbers are going crazy. monitors with everything. Big old war room, yeah. Yeah, giant war room. And the problem is New Zealand, great people, not a whole lot of them.

Australia, a few more. Asia, Elder Scrolls isn't big in Asia. So the ramp was nice and gentle. And Europe has two time zones kind of goes up. And then North America hits and it sort of just milk because everybody gets in at once and it's midnight on the East Coast and the game

is down. and so it was so much bigger than we thought it was going to be. And we thought it was going to be big. So it took us a good two or three hours to figure out what was going on there. And then the next two weeks was... And again, is it an interesting answer? I don't even know. What was going on there?

It was a log-in... It's just a load. A log-in load problem where we needed to distribute the login load on the edge device in our data center, needed to actually have more ports opened, basically. We basically dedossed ourselves. Yeah. Right? Got it.

Got it. There's so much traffic that we had to redirect some of the compute power to the edge. Got it, got it, got it, got it. But then the problem was now people could log in, and now too many people were logging in. And that was the two-week problem, where we could only fit maybe 70,000,

concurrent on each of our pods. So we had North America, PS4, North America. like Xbox, Europe, PS4, Europe, Xbox.

Each of those could only hold about 70,000, and the demand was like 100 plus, and so people would get in login cues,

and I'll never forget, somebody posted on social media, like, hey, it says I'm like, uh, uh,

1,750 tech and in line. That's got to be some kind of bug. No, that was true. That was accurate. That was accurate. That was not a bug. And so.

Is that one of you, when you're talking about these pods and, you know, 70,000 or whatever, when you set that, where you're like, this is going to be good? Or is it was, are we being ambitious or? This was the, so there is an agnostic decision to that. It's made by the head server person who's this guy, Ettafo, who I've worked with for years. It's now the CTO is us. And it's what will be a good gaming, what, most people you can get in on a pod and still have a good gaming experience? Got it. And that's where he said it. No matter what the demand was, he was like, the people that are in are going to be fine.

We don't want to ruin it for that. And so our job over the next two weeks involving lots of phone calls directly from Robert and, and, and. How angry really? Yeah. What were these tones? Like, can you please tell me how you can get more people on your servers, right? It's a good problem to have. Of course. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

Yeah, so again, while Rich was off and team were off fixing, you know, content problems that we found, I was locked in a room with two, me and Ed and a couple of server guys. And we literally sat in that room and watched the charts. You know, you could see how users logging in, CPEs. going up until it got to the red and finally after eight days Ed figured out how to fix it and fix it and then we got up to 125,000 concurrent

and then that was fine. That's where the 500,000 number comes from because with our login queue and all of those servers added together, that's a lot of people. Pretty crazy. Yeah, it was an outrageous number. Congratulations on making it happen. I think that's...

You know, there's the phrase it's a good problem to have. It was a good problem to have, but it was still pretty... A problem. When the dust settles and the things are back to green and everybody can get in and play the game, then what are we seeing? How does, what, I mean, you guys have created a game and I know you're, no one knows this better than you. So I'm, I'm talking about the audience. You've created a game that is never done. That is,

you're never, you're never, you're never shipped. You're never, you're never gold. You're never done. There's always another thing. So I assume this is great. Numbers are great. It's back to looking at feedback. It's back to looking at hurdles. I assume console players are going to have different problems than PC players to some degree? They were the same kinds of things. It goes back to the gamers or just gamers and they can do anything. It was the same kinds of things and we had done

a ton of stuff. We did six updates in a year, which is ridiculous, right? We do four in a year now. So we did six updates in a year, a ton of new stuff added in there. People were really happy but there were some lingering things, right? The whole, it's still hard to play with my friends, right?

It's that kind of stuff. And so we started taking that feedback and and started talking more about what we could do to change that stuff. And it led to some very interesting, interesting conversations, for sure. Tell me about these conversations. Well, yeah, so first we, so we took that year off making new content while we were on PC. Our content teams were actually still making new content. We just weren't putting it in the game.

So after console launch, we actually had some content in the can. And so we launched Imperial City, which was a PVP-centric PVEE zone, which is awesome. If you never played Imperial City, any of you out there in ESO Land, go play Imperial City. It's a lot of fun. And the next, which important for this conversation, was Orsinium. And Orsinium was our first real DLC. Still, I think, is the best content that we've done

because we had a team working on it for like two years because they had time to go in and do all of the little things. It feels amazing. The story's great. But we had the problem, and this and the one after that the last big argument discussions that Rich and I had. So consoles out, we have millions of players, Orcinium. We want to, Imperial City was easy. It was PVP, right?

Our PVP system is level scaled. So you go into the PVP zone, and it doesn't really matter what level you are, just matter of your skill and your build and your gear, because we wanted as many people to play PVPs. So Imperial City, no problem. Orsinium comes up, and then we have discussion, what level is Orcinium? because this is a level-based game.

If you're level 10, you can't really have group with a level 15 person, right? That guy, you just won't get any. It just doesn't work. Sure. Old school, old school still in that sense. And again, a product at the time, especially for you guys with this MMO background.

Like, yeah, that's how things were, especially in 2000, let alone where we were in 2015. Like, for, you know, people who need to be educated, remember, it was such a big deal when I forget, Borderlands 2 was like, hey, you come together. It doesn't matter. all able to play. It was like, what? How's that possible? What are you doing? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we had oblivion in Skyrim as single player games, but North Star is there.

It's like, it's like, it's just the world scale to you. But Orsinium was like, what level is it? It's the best content in the game. Do we want to save it for max level players? Like, we want people to get in there. And it's like, well, if it's low level, then the max level players literally can't play it because they're not going to get rewarded for it. And so after many whiteboard sessions. Yeah, that was the test bed for it's levelless. And we had to figure out what the heck that meant and battle leveling

and solve all the grouping issues and all that other stuff. But it was, it turned out to be the right thing to do. Players absolutely loved it. And we saw, like, things we didn't even think about happen. Like,

guild recruitment went through the roof because there was a place where everybody could all be and they could play with their guildies. Didn't matter what level it was, right? It didn't matter what alliance was. They could just play

with each other. And we were like, hmm, that's interesting. And then that led to a few days at Matt's house over the Christmas break talking about one Tamriel. Yeah, yeah. Well, back to Orsonium real quick, uh, if you all missed it when Rich went over. We called it levelless or battle leveling. But what it basically meant is you could just go into the zone and it, the zone scaled to you or you, actually you scaled to the zone. And so we didn't even tell the players what level was. We didn't mention it at all. We didn't even, and they just went and played and nobody. even knew it was in there except for the guys that are that are crunching the numbers. And they're like, wait a minute, something's happening here.

Yeah. It's an interesting twist on the similar problem we talked about earlier, right? Of like, well, okay, I come to join you, but in your game, the world's already been destroyed. So we show up and there's an era where you should be, but you're not because you're in a parallel universe. Yeah. And if I'm level one and you guys, come play with me tonight. I'm like, yeah, I can't do anything. Yeah. And, you know, the term I used when I was in meetings with Rich and the team, it was like,

Like, does anyone really care what level they are in GTA? Right? You just jump in and play. Why can't we just jump in and play? And Orsinium showed that we could do that, and players didn't even know we were doing it. It was done in such a good way. And like Rich said, it made it sociable again.

Like, you know how old school MMOs are. If you're five levels underneath, they're not, no one's going to group with you. It's actually hostile to social systems to do that. And it's like, so that really opened our eyes. so this leads to you going to his house over Christmas break yeah it was it was what was that in 2015 Christmas 20 it was 2015 right after Orsonianian launched right after Orsonian

launched and Matt was like hey we we need to chat and I'm like uh oh so we spent spent two days at his house over the Christmas break talking about doing the Orcinium treatment to the entire game I was like what like really and so we had to go through a whole host of things everything from You know, do we gated again, do we not, to like what's progression look like now? Yeah. Because that's a huge part of an online game is progression and all that stuff. And there are some heated moments, but we got through it and we got to a really good place.

And then... What's the heated moment look like on this? Well, not changing the levels. It was a bigger discussion initially, which is we have this hit game. We have a lot of people playing it. We just launched this amazing DLC. We're finally in a great place. We're feeling that.

We're finally in a great place. What do we do now? Yep. And you're like, blow it all up. Pretty much. Or you can also see, which is where we started with this, of like the path that started before launch

of us making the game more Elder Scrolls like, making the game levelist, like I said, like oblivion and Skyrim, is kind of the Holy Grail. Like there. Like, again, does anybody care what level they are in Skyrim really? I mean, you know, you can do anything at any level pretty much.

and so we wanted that idea in there or seen him prove that we could do it and the yelling was more about it sounds easy to make the game levelist but what it really did is if you were in the launch version of the game you created a character you went to bleak

let's just do daggerfall you went to Strosse Mackay then you went to Betnik then you went to Glen Umbra then you went to Stormhaven then you went to Ribbon Spire right every player did that So that means we developed the content, not the quest, but the content, the monster level, the way the game interacts with you. We made that with the assumption that you would have five or six zones to get to level 50.

So Glenumbra had a lot less cool stuff than the last level in it because it assumed you were going to be a higher level and monsters would be more difficult. Sure. Yep. Right? So it wasn't just making it level. It meant Rich's team, and this is where he was trying to explain to me. what a giant pain in the ass was going to be,

was going in and make every zone zero to 50, or zero to max level, right? Every zone had to have world bosses, had to have easy monsters, middle monsters, you know, a group group. And so every zone became a microcosm of the game. And that was where the complexity came from. Gotcha.

Yep. And then itemization, like how do we handle that, right? Like, we had to implement an entire system around making sure players understood that they were still gaining power as they were leveling up. But it wasn't based on level. So how do you do that? And we came up with, you know, kind of the battle leveling system and the stars. I don't know if you noticed the stars.

You went through five stars. So that tells you how powerful your character is until you're 50. And then that basically goes away. And it's based on your gear and your level. And now your champion points. But yeah, it was really, it was fun. Like, it was fun conversation. It all had to happen behind the scenes, though.

I was going to say, what happens when you come down from the mountaintop and you tell all these developers, hey, by the way. It was about the same reaction. And that was interesting, right? Like, pitching this to the team. And there was a pretty big split between people who were like, yeah, this is a great idea. And oh, my gosh, I'm going to be looking for a job in a year.

Oh, wow. And it wasn't. They really thought, like, they thought I was going to fail and kill the game? It was, yeah, it was the, this is going to be the death of you. ESO if we do this, right? And when we eventually had our first playtest with it, a lot of those people, when they played it, they were like, I understand now. Like, this makes sense now. This is awesome. We were wrong. This is great, right? And I'll never forget, Dan Batson sent me a long email. He's like, I know I was a vocal critic of this. You guys were totally right. Like, this was the absolute 100% on board now. Like, this is great, right? And the players had that same kind of reaction, right? When we announced that we were doing this, they were like, oh, my. my gosh, what are you doing? Like, this is the worst thing ever. And then they played it and went, got it.

I announced it at E3 2016. This is a funny moment. And seriously, it was probably had a lot to do with the game's future success. At E3, 2016, we announced this on stage. We had, you know, the BE3, the big show. And there was a woman sitting as I was on stage, like eight rows back. And you can't see anything when you're on stage, right? the light chain and was just freaking out when I was when I was talking and so and and she was sitting

next to some media people who recorded it and it went semi viral that like uh I think it was a when you invite your mother to your to to to to to your product presentation it was it was the funniest thing but that actually got like a million views and and that actually that was when we announced one Tamrio and and she and her and her boyfriend I think I met her later great It was an awesome person, super excited about One Tamriel. And it made people actually ask, Elder Scrolls online. Why are people flipping out about this? Oh my God, there must be something here, right?

And it actually helped us amazingly well, especially with One Tamriel, because it got people asking, media started asking about what is this thing, you know, and then our user base started to respond. And then when it launched, it was like, oh, yeah, this is great. And like nobody freaked out. And it was like, I can just play the game. And wives and husbands can now play together and you can recruit friends. Here we go.

To crank up the sound, I got to hear it. I can't quite find the moment. Look at that. How cool. How did you find that? I've been looking for that video forever. Yeah, I actually had to stop at one point. Are you okay, ma'am?

Are you okay? Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. But so that was a moment. And when we launched, it was anti-climatic. Because to the players, they just launched in, it logged in, and it was... And to you guys, you're like, first off, it's humongous undertaking.

I have to imagine this changed the servers and how you did all that to some degree. A little bit, but not... It just distributed the load more across, because before you had to be like, okay, if you're launching a new update or, you know, all the players are level one and they're going to go here and they're level two and you've got to keep switching load from here to here. But now you can log in and go anywhere in the world, the load is actually much, much more evenly distributed.

And it actually helped us more than it hurt us. So then, once Hamrail's launched, which I think's interesting because it feels like there's a lot of parallels to what you guys just announced to the last direct in terms of like, hey, we're making this more for everybody in this day, and how we're going to get you content. Yeah, well, it's interesting, just as what we've been talking about here, it's like, we're not afraid to make changes when we need to make changes.

I think that's the, like, we don't want to stay. Your advice from the end of the last episode, right? Yeah, we don't want to stagnate. It's like we want to make sure that we're, we're, keeping moving forward. But yeah, we launched that year. We launched Theves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, which are story DLCs, which were awesome.

And then we ended with one Tamriel. And then it was... What do we do next? What do we do next? Yeah. And actually, this is Todd Vaughn's idea. Todd Vaughn's the VP of product development of Bethesda. He was like, now that you have all this great stuff,

you should actually cash in on the nostalgia the actual big moments of other Elder Scrolls games and make a package of new stuff. Don't just dribble it out over time, which was Theaths Guild and Dark Brotherhood. And it's like, just do something big. And then the team can focus on it, meaning the publishing team can focus on it.

And I was like, well, what hallmark area would you like us to go to? And he's like, Morwin. Yeah. And that's where we'll end this episode. Come back next time for episode three to talk about Morwin. about the secrets of Tamriel and everything else is going on under there.

Of course, ladies, gentlemen and NBs, thank you so much for watching this episode of the Elder Scrolls online podcast. A kind of funny games cast, limited series. Remember each and every two weeks,

we're here for a four-part series, meaning we're back on Friday, May 9th for a brand new episode. Of course, Matt, Rich, Mike, thank you so much for another great episode and hanging out. Again, we could just talk and talk and talk about this.

It's so much fun. Yeah. All right. When we come back next time, We're getting into some more of where they've been and where they're going. But until then, it's been our pleasure to serve you.