Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - When's Crossplay Coming to Elder Scrolls Online? - A Kinda Funny Gamescast Limited Series

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

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What's up everybody? Welcome to the final episode of the Elder Scrolls online podcast, a kind of funny games cast limited series. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside the Master of Hypes, Snowbike Mike. Hi, Greg. Not too happy that you're saying the final episode because I've been having so much fun with these. It went too fast. It went way too fast. Getting to spend time with these two guys has been pretty great. And talking to all things, Elder Scrolls online has been pretty amazing. Of course, these two guys are another than and Rich Lambert, of course, game director of the other scrolls online. Hello, how are you?

I am fantastic today. Are you going to miss us? Yes, actually. Oh, you. I'm looking forward to going home, but yeah, this was fun. Maybe we can share, you know, our characters. Maybe we get to play to it with the show. Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

How many characters do you have, Rich? Too many. Are they on every platform as well, just everywhere? I mean, technically, yes, but I really only play on PC on the regular. Sure. Okay, okay. Fair enough, okay. And then, of course, it's Matt Firoer.

Of course, he is the big chief. All right. He is the big cheese. Studio director. Zenimax Online Studios. Yeah. And actually, after the last episode, Rich and I were talking a little bit about the Robert's segment.

When we were talking about Robert Altman. And it's like, it's really hard to get across kind of the culture that we have that results from that. But we were trying to figure out a way to say it so that people would understand that are listening to this. But I think it comes down to loyalty, right? It's like he was loyal to us. right it was not a traditional you know CEO relationship where if he believed in what you were doing like he would literally go to war for you right and we knew that and he knew we would do that for him right and we were all pointed in the

right direction yeah i mean one of the reasons i'm here is because of him you know i when i started here robert had just opened up a small satellite office in the hunt valley area to keep a small number of engineers and artists because they lived in Pennsylvania and they had to drive to Rockville every day and they just that's like what two hours each way something like that and they were like we can't do this and he's like what would it take what if I open something closer and they were like yeah and he's like okay done and he did that's awesome yeah that's kind of and then rich was the manager of that office right and it's all because he wanted to make things work for the team right yeah it's that it just if he believed in something it was going to happen

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It actually leads me to something, but I'll get to that one second. Remember everybody, this is the Elder Scrolls online podcast,

a four-part series between the Elder Scrolls online and us here are kind of funny. Of course, if you like the Elder Scrolls online, play the game, go get the other episodes that are up on their channels. If you like Kind of funny,

come get the episodes that are up on our channel under the Gamescast feed. You can get it as a podcast. You can get as a YouTube video. You can have a great time. No matter where you're getting it, please like, subscribe and share, because we couldn't do this without you

just like the Elder Scrolls. online wouldn't be anything without you. It's community. But before we get to the community, which is what this episode's all about in the future and the cool stuff you're doing, I want to come back to this leadership question. We haven't talked at all about Xbox buying y'all.

What's that been like? Because from the outside, I think they've done such a great job of keeping it like, no, you are Xenamax online studios. That's Bethesda. It's its own thing. It's a brand still. Yeah, they bought Xenamax for great games.

Sure. Right. And a great game. publishers. So it's in their best interest and our best interest to keep doing what we're doing, right? And so they facilitate that. I will say that happened in 2020. And it's like that was right as the pandemic happened. And then Robert passed away right then. So a lot of change happened very quickly. And, you know, it was, the pandemic was tough, right? It was, it was really hard. We haven't gotten into what that did to ESO. And maybe our numbers just exploded and our servers

melted. But that changeover happened then, and that was the least problematic by far of all the other things that were happening, right? It was literally just smooth, seamless to, you know, we got support from X-Max, and now it's Xbox, right? So they just let us do what we do. I was going to say, yeah, I know, again, this is a new relationship. Obviously, we're about to talk about these COVID numbers and what it did for the game. But it is that thing of, you know, when we've been talking about Robert Altman and him telling you, like, is this going to be a great video game? It's going to be the best RPG of all time. We'll go do it.

Does that seem to be the same case here? Like, obviously different. This is an established product that's been running for 10 years live. So, like, basically, are they staying out of the way of what you want to do? Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely. It's like you tell us what you need. There are a few wrinkles like it's more fiscal year-based. It's a public company, right?

So the meetings are a little different, but the goals are the same. Spencer's always begging you for t-shirts to wear. Yeah. I mean, I love working with those guys because, you know, especially Phil, he's a gamer, right? He understands exactly what we're trying to do in the sense of we're delivering an experience to a group of gamers. And we've proven that we can do it, right? And so as long as we keep doing that, that's what he's looking for. Is there anything that interests you that Xbox and Microsoft had done? I think about cloud gaming, right, and having your game just so readily available, a click of a button.

Has that impressed you guys? is that something you take advantage of and think about for the future? Yeah, well, we did have Stadia. We did. We did have a Stadia clients. So we were actually ahead of the third one. Never forget. Poor one out.

But, no, so, but again, now that we're working with giant companies, right, these things become possible, right? Obviously, the Google thing was more of a publishing deal. But with Xbox, yeah, we're on XCloud, and we're on GamePass, and, right, we didn't have to do really anything to make those things happen. It's great.

Like, that's the cool part of working with a giant company that's technology forward thinking. They said the word loyalty. And it's really stuck with me, Greg. You know, and I think it's really impressive, right? You talk about loyalty and what Robert meant to all of you and what he kind of brought to it all.

And what you guys have done with your community and the community right back, that loyalty of, hey, this is 10 years plus, of course, with you guys on the back end. But it's wild. I think loyalty is a big one with MMOs of loyalty from the developers for the fans. of, hey, we expect you guys to deliver and you guys have. And on the flip side, the loyalty of the fans of,

hey, we're here through thick and thin. It could be bad. We're ready for the good stuff. But it is interesting when you think of 10 years in the word loyalty. It really stands out to me. Yeah. It's a relationship, right? It's like, you know, they have lots of options, right? And a lot of the

developer, virtual world developer community relationship is trust and loyalty, right? And they trust that we'll do the right things, mostly the right things, right? Because we go back and change things constantly, right? But they trust that we're the people that are going to deliver the experience that they want. When we're talking about this community and this obviously is all about them today on this episode, we obviously talked about launch, this giant explosion, the melting servers there, the learnings.

Then we talked about console launch in previous episodes. Okay, there's this giant influx. You just touched on it. Is COVID and work from home and everybody being on lockdown? Is that the the next big explosion? Yeah, I mean, the chapters happened with more wind in Somerset. And that was a steady increase, right? Nice, gentle, you know. Like you're talking about with that time coming on over the rolling launch. Right.

And we were successful, right? We had a lot of players and it was good. But then COVID happened. And like every other live service game and game, our numbers just overnight blew up. Because what else are you going to do when you're stuck at home and you can't go out? You're going to jump into a virtual world, right? And we had lots of server issues because this was at that point a six, seven-year-old game.

And we weren't prepared for an influx like that. So Graymore launched in June of 2020, which is like six weeks after we all went home. And so that meant the content was in the can pretty much. We were in testing, you know, for that. But the live services aspect of Graymore, when all these players came in. And we had, you know, you can go back and look on the message boards and social media, right? It was a time when we had to put a lot of work into server stability and bringing more stuff online. And it was, again, a good problem to have, but it was happening against a backdrop of just, you know, everything happening in the world.

And not to mention, I think it's so easy for even the way you're talking about it, to us as players to think about we're on lockdown. We're at home. We just want to play this game. You're also developers who have now been forced home. I imagine the entire pipeline is completely screwed up. Well, fortunately, we're a live service game. And because we're a live service game, we have the concept of remote access to things.

And so we had some of the technology VPNs and everything already built out so that we could access stuff from home. So also, we already had a somewhat distributed development environment for ESO. So you could work on one part of the game, another person could work on the same part of the game, and then you checked it in. So you really didn't have an excuse then. I think we were three days off of our original launch date.

Amazing. Wow. But it was the human interaction. Of course, you know, the decision making was slower. The being able to identify problems was slower. Identifying solutions was slower.

That's where it really affected us. It was really eye-opening to, because we always took it for granted. All of those water cooler talks, right? The random wandering around, you see something, you ask a question. Like all of that went away because everybody was now at home and you had to book a meeting in order to get somebody, you know, his attention because they're off in their own little world doing things.

And so all of that collaborative stuff, we had to relearn how to do remotely. And you'd be shocked at how many game development problems get solved by just happenstance when you just walk by somebody's desk and see something. Or you're in the cafeteria getting lunch and you talk about this problem and you're like, oh, we got a solution. and they solve it there before it becomes a problem. We had to learn, like I said, how to do all of that all over again. It was tough. Yeah, for sure. So then you get that pipeline down.

Not that long after. Correct me, correct me, if I'm running a year later, you launched the Xbox series X-slash-S and the PlayStation 5 client, right? We totally forgot about that. You've done a few things in this decade of this game being live. Yeah, we did that in the middle of the pandemic, and that was, again, we have our own engine, so it's very scalable,

and we've spent some time in resources to make it support the modern shaders and DLSS and, you know, occlusion. Yeah, all the new occlusion system. Our graphics guys love that stuff. Just love that. As they should. Yeah, yeah, and it's, yeah, and it looks fantastic.

Like, it basically brought our PC Ultra spec to console, and it runs great. And also we could do performance modes. We could do 60 frames a second. or you could do Fidelity mode at 4K and so it's... We don't know it's 60. Yeah.

Yeah, everybody does. Yeah, but Fidelity mode is great if you're doing screenshots and stuff like that, but you can switch back and forth so easily that you can actually choose which one pretty much on the fly. So then start bringing me, let's get, I want to start bringing you, I guess, back to community.

We're talking about back in episode two, when we talked about the console launch, one of the things we celebrated there was 500,000 concurrence across all platforms. Did those numbers compare when we're talking to COVID? We got, we didn't get quite that much, but it was in the ballpark. And again, we had launched so much content between 2015 and 2020 that we couldn't support the concurrency that we did in 2020. So we did have queues in 2020 for the first time since 2015.

And that was, again, to preserve the stability of the people that were playing over, over. people waiting. And then I want to bring it to, as we move fully to the community conversation, nowadays, what are you seeing? I know we've talked on the show, Matt, about the different types of players and the players who do check in once every 11 months. There's the big drop. I'm good.

It's different this year. It's different this year. We're changing it all up. But like, where are we at in terms of what the Elder Scrolls online audience looks like on a day-to-day basis? And I know that's really impossible to put a number on. nor would you probably want to. But like, however you want to answer that question.

Yeah, I think I'll go right back to the, to the pandemic to start with, which is the mood of the community kind of changed at that point where it went from being a great game and virtual world to a place where I can go where things make sense because the outside world doesn't. Right. And we got a lot of feedback from our players

that just like other games kind of like this, you know, like, Animal Crossing and where you can just go and live a virtual life that's not part of your normal day-to-day routine was very important to a lot of people. And we saw an explosion in housing videos because a lot of people are literally virtually nesting and making a place, again, that made sense that they could outfit that made them feel better about what was happening. And that was, you know, that's almost a responsibility at this point for us to do that because we know it was so important to people maintaining their sanity for for that time.

So the mood kind of changed at that point from, you know, to people that literally were doing housing more than a, than a lot of other players were doing questing or PVP. Sure. And it was really cool, right? It's like they took the tools that we gave them and started, if you look at housing videos on YouTube for ESO, it's not houses, man. They make animated robots and balloons. It's just crazy. Somebody did a Japanese medieval village in our housing system. And it's great. Stuff we would never would have would have. thought of and it's it's amazing and we're really happy that we can support that right so coming out of the pandemic that stayed right that that that that that concept of like it's a it's a place now not a game and so a lot of people come and come into the game not understanding that and then they see youtube and everything and and and it's it's a different vibe than you're expecting if you used to call

a duty or diablo or that is true yeah right and so that's kind of where the community is now which is like it grew in, not just in size, but it grew in understanding of what the virtual world that they're in is. I was just going to say, the community now, you know, when they're talking like FPS,

you know, high FPS and things like that, it's not like performance of the game. It's fashion per second, right? Like, that's their thing. I love it. I love it. That's their thing now, right? So that, as Matt said,

like, that conversation kind of changed from kind of power gaming, traditional to that, I can do whatever I want, be whatever I want, and look as cool as I want. So then back to someone we've talked about on this show, there's no right or wrong way to play this. Do you feel like that's really where that message comes from and took off? Like before that, but when it was just, was it just questing and it was guilds and it was traditional, in quotes, MMO?

No, no, I, well. At launch it was. As I launch it was. But once we did one Tamriel and got, yeah, it turned into a, you can play the game many different ways and all of them are fine. And I think the pandemic just added one more of those things to do, which is you don't even have to do combat, just go in and do the housing system and you know, and you don't have to do any of this stuff and just show off your house and invite friends over, right? And it just added another activity that is now very important and central

to the experience. And I guess that's the big question I would ask you is like, why is community so necessary, essential to your game. Like obviously players equals money. Yeah, I mean, it's that idea again that I've said on this show throughout all of these episodes of like, I can talk your ear off about the games that haven't made it, that didn't do the thing, that even had a community and still didn't make it.

But somehow 10 years later, you are all still rolling and still pushing giant updates and making changes. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. And I think ultimately what it comes down to is the game draws the community. And this is one of the things you like to say is it's their game. We created it. It's our game initially. And then after launch, it becomes their game.

And you do what, essentially what they want us to do with some caveats in there. Otherwise, you get like Bodie McBoatface and stuff like that. But, yeah, like you have to listen to them. You have to look at what they're doing. And we try really hard to be a part of that community. You know, we do a lot of different community events. You know, the tavern is one of our favorites that we do, which is coming up in July.

In Germany. In Germany. Yeah. It's a big, it's an event. We started in 2013, 2013 or 14, yeah. Something like that. And it's just a community get together for, you know, anybody that's in the, in the German area.

So it's usually, traditionally, has been around Gamescom. Sure. We do it a month earlier now because we can get cooler venues and stuff like that. And around there. Last year we did it in a castle. Oh, wow. It was awesome. And they get players from all over Europe.

All over Europe. Like, let's go. You should absolutely go. It's just, it's the best group of people. And it's, they look forward to it because they get to see their, their friend, their virtual friends in person, right? Relationships are made. We know people. We've gotten married.

Yeah. We can make that happen. Talk to me about that. And blow it up from just, not just Germany. But like, what are the, what do you remember the first story from the community that made you go, wow. And then like other crazy ones that have happened since then. There's so many. There's so many.

Yeah. And they're all, they're all good. Some of them are pretty heartbreaking. Some of them are uplifting, right? It's like, you know, we all,

when a, when we lose community members, it's always a big deal. And there's, you know, in game remembrances and things. And that happens far too often, frankly.

And we help wherever we can with those. But certainly couples have met in the game, then met in real life, gotten married, or now have kids and bring them to the community events. And, you know, and it's like,

it's hard not, to just get emotional when you see that because it's like that wouldn't have happened without without what we did. For sure. Right. And that's what the game is, right? It's not waving swords around and damaging monsters, right? It's about connecting with people virtually and then, you know, in real life if you meet them.

And that's the magic. Yeah, one of my favorite stories is actually from the tavern. So one of our first taverns were in this little basement dungeon thing. There's about 100 people there. And we did a bunch of cool events and whatnot. but we met a few of the content creators and a few people in the community. And then the following year, more came. And there is this one, you know, really nervous young lady who, you know, brought me this, this.

She said her English wasn't good, but it was fabulous. Sure. It was perfect. And she wanted to show me a bug, right? Like about this particular item, you know, show me this bug. And I was, okay, cool, thanks. We took it back to the team. We got it fixed.

The next year, she came to the tavern again. But this time she had met somebody at the tavern previously. Nice. They were now a couple. Fast forward a few years. They missed last year's tavern because they were having a baby. And they were together. And when we went back for Gamescom, we ended up having dinner with them.

They brought the kid out for us to meet and all that other stuff. That's incredible. Like, yeah, they would have never met if it wasn't for ESO. And that's just super, super cool. What about developers on the team? I assume I mentioned it earlier. and from the direct a few weeks ago, months ago, the fact that one of them is talking about the starter area I'm working on,

but I, of course, started, like, how many of the, how old do you feel? Everyone out there is like, oh, I've been listening to you, Greg, since I was in junior high and they work for me, I'm like, ah. Yeah. Yeah, 17 years, 18 years is a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of, you know, it's, in that sense, like when we've been here for so long and I've had a studio where so many people worked, and some have left and

gone off to do great things, right? And it's, it's, it's hard not to feel pride at, right, almost parental, you know, at the people that you mentored that were interns that then went into the team and now go off and start companies and make great games, right? You know, we're, we're recording this during GDC, right? So you're seeing a lot of them now because, you know, we all get together, you run into them, you know, in a hallway. And it's like, it's a really, really, really good feeling. Yeah, it's, it's so, so much fun to watch people grow. Yeah. Especially, you know, like, Lauren was the one that you were talking about. Before she was on the team,

she was a player. You know, a player that was really enthusiastic and really passionate. And we ended up hiring her. We have a number of people on the team. Carrie, who was also in the video. Carrie came from that, you know, Alec came from that, right?

Where, you know, they were just, they were vocal people in the community that we were able to, you know, work with and hire, and they turned into these juggernauts, which is awesome, right? Watching people grow is just so cool. Yeah, the best,

part of management is hiring people that are better than you. And we are definitely at that point. If you saw the direct, right, you'll see the result of that, right? They're amazingly good people that are very good at what they do. Talk to me about how you listen to the community. Again, you know, we've talked so much throughout this series about how great the community is, how you, you know, strive to drive out toxicity and that's not what it's about. But then there's also been an underlying current from both of you of like, oh, well, the community requested this or they wanted this or two weeks after, you know, all the bad YouTube videos people were making for no reason. We had this core group that's like, hey, we agree there's problems, but we're here for the

right reasons. Where do you go to find them or do they find you? Everywhere. So I spent a lot of time on Twitch, spent a lot of time on social media. You know, one of my favorite things to do is to just lurk. A poorly kept secret is Rich and I are both in guilds in game and we're with people who have no idea who we are. Sure. And I've been in guilds since day one that I'm an active member in. And I have no idea who I am, and Rich is the same. And we get a shockingly, really good amount of information from just playing with people in the game, even if they're not talking, just seeing what they're doing.

Like, I can complete this dungeon in 30 seconds if you do this exploit. You won't be tomorrow. We'll fix that. Right. And that literally happened. And so it's fun, A, just to play your own game. And Rich and I probably played this game more than any other people because we have to play it before on the dev server and then we play it on PTS when it's being tested and then we

play it on live on it's live on but on all the great so uh it's it's a commitment right but when you're in it with the community and you're seeing it from their eyes is when is when you can actually see the things that need to be done and we're not perfect at it obviously right but but it really gives us a the right perspective yeah and we get to experience the same pain we get to see the same things you know i during covid got bored and started streaming EOS for a while. So I did that for a while and that was cool. I got to see that side of things and understand what, you know, a lot of the streamers go through. So that was a new perspective for me and I got to see that stuff. And we do community night trials with a number of folks

where we used to call it tipsy trials where we might get a little, we might drink a little bit. You might indulge. You might indulge. That's the word I was looking for. And just have fun, right? and we go and we do the thing and, you know, it's a once a week commitment, but it's tons of fun and people love it. Have you been surprised by the community, the PC side, the console side, the Xbox to PlayStation side?

If I've learned one thing from this entire thing, it's that there are hardcore console players and they're very, very, very not hardcore PC players, right? It's that is not a thing, right? We have super hardcore console players, right? And a lot of our housing, community is on is on PC it's just it's just what it is and right at this point the device you're playing on is just a door into your world and it really doesn't matter how you get there once you're

there you do what you do yeah gamers are gamers yeah it's funny you say about the door once you're there you're there it's just a device you know you all put out a call for questions for this show oh boy did we you did i was not aware of you you open the net it's been fun guys The goal you'd open the net on that one. And like every other question was Crossplay. Oh. I know you, I know you gentlemen very well now.

Yeah. I know that there's been a lot of whiteboards. I'd imagine this is something that's come up a lot. Probably for a very, probably since console launch, if not right before it. Yeah, we get that question a lot. Why is it not possible? Anything is possible? We're working on doing some underlying,

underlying tech changes that would make it possible. Okay. Like, we know how important it is. Of course. Again, started working on this game in 2007, didn't even think about two platforms, much less six or whatever, or whatever we support now.

And everything's an Xbox if you didn't know. Right. Yeah, I mean, the 2007 version of us. That actually makes it easier now. Yeah, that's a good point, actually. That whole concept, right? The, this is an Xbox thing. Because that philosophy now comes from the top,

and that makes it easier to get the agreements done to do, right, to do what you need to do to do crossplay, which is an extremely long GDC presentation of technology, you know, handshaking other technology. Wait, you don't just flip the switch? You don't just flip the switch. And it's not just a technology problem either. Oh, yeah, yeah. Stakeholders, yeah, platform holders, yeah.

So it's something we know about. It's something we really want to do. We're working on the underlying tech for it. And we'll see if we can make it happen. That's awesome. Yeah. I can only imagine building a 2007 game. You know what I mean?

And not how do you ever future proof think about this and stuff? So even having that answer is good enough. So there you go, everybody got asked. You don't have to ask it every time on every other question about it. But again, that's what we're talking about is your commitment to this community. And honestly, again, even as an outsider for the most part, right, who's watched your presentations or listen to podcasts or done these things, like the way you talk to them. I appreciate that you have answers. So many people will dodge things and not, and Dodge is actually too, that's too negative of a word.

you know what I mean, but find a way to cleverly get out of the question. Yeah, that's just not dodging. We really want to do cross-bler. We really want to do it. I swear this is something that we understand is very important to players. We want to do it. And we're trying to figure out a way to do it. And we're working on that right now.

Okay. Good. Thank you for that. And thank you for watching it. Remember, of course, this is the Elder Scrolls Online podcast, a four-episode limited series from us at the Kind of Funny Gamescast. If you like it, why don't you like, Subscribe, share, follow, tell your friends, do whatever it is for the platform of choice that you're on,

whether it's over on, or the Elder Scrolls Online's channels, or if it's over on, the kind of funny channels, no matter where you're getting the show, thank you for your support. And for now, here's a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by the Elder Scrolls Online. Every legend starts somewhere, and in ESO, it starts with you. Join the millions of players in the award-winning online fantasy RPG. Write your story into a vibrant chapter of Tamriel's distant past and discover a world steeped in adventure and possibility. ESO is more than a game. It's a virtual world where you belong. This year,

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a little bit about the community because we've talked a lot about PVP, but we haven't really dove into it. And that is something that brought me on. I can remember watching Twitch streams of the giant scale battles of three different factions colliding in the middle. And I thought that is some of the coolest stuff around.

What is PVP like now in 2025 and beyond? What are some of the steps that you've taken to really make sure it is kind of future-proofing, constantly evolving and getting better? Well, we just went through a series of pretty crazy tests on live towards the end of March. And we're recording this before the tests happen.

So literally they're experimental tests. So we don't know how they turn out, but we're confident that information will come from them that we can use. The whole goal of doing this test is to prove out some of the performance problems that we've had in Cereidil in the larger scale battles. And it's focused really on the abilities, the combat, how much we can jam through kind of that pipe. You think of a fire hose.

Yeah. It's only so big, you don't we get so much water through there. That's basically what we're testing right now and on the ability side of things. If that goes well, we have a direction. If it doesn't go well,

then we're going to go and have a think about what we do next in Ciridil. But outside of Ciridil, we've got battlegrounds. Those came in in Morewind in 2017. We've got Imperial City, which is this hybrid PVE, PVP thing, which is tons and tons and tons of fun.

and the storyline is phenomenal in there. You know, the Drake of Blades is awesome. That whole storyline is really cool. And then dueling, right? So those are kind of the avenues for our PVPers to get their thing on. Yeah, going back to the beginning of the project, obviously, the original mandate for the product was Dark H Camelots, PVP, Wows, PVE, Elder Scrolls, IP. We've gotten away from many of those for business reasons, right, you know, that we talked about in episode one. but the PVP thing is still there.

It's just that it happened that our user base, the massive numbers of users came in and were not interested in PVP. However, a very important part of the community is massively interested in PVP. And by giving the PVE questing people, abilities, all of the armor sets, doing the champion system, right,

doing the PV gear chase, that adds items, literally, to the game. And each one needs to be a little unique and special. And each one requires some CPU when the player does it in the game. And when you add that to a PVP system where 900 players are in game at one time, it stopped being able to work, basically. So instead of taking away, historically, instead of taking away a lot of the abilities and that sort of thing, we actually just scaled down the number of people that were allowed in a Cereidil campaign at once. And the point of these tests is to redo

the ability system just in Cereidil, just in the PVP part of the game, and get back up to the 900 that we had, which was 300, 300, 300, so it's a three-sided PVP game. So it's a natural evolution of the game. And I know our PVP players that really want to go back to that have been very frustrated with us, but there are four or five other groups of players that also want content that are massively frustrated at us for not giving them, you know, stuff faster. So, you know, we did do battlegrounds. We did things that we do over smaller-sided PVP to try to alleviate some of that in the interim. But now it's time to go back and actually look at the PVP system and make it perform it. And it's going to come, if this test works, it'll be,

you have a separate set of abilities in PVP than you do in PV. They're named the same they are in PV. It's not that. It's just they just act a little differently in PVP to be much more performant. Gotcha. How... Thank you for coming to my TED talk. No, I love you. I open up the door.

I love you. Like, we're testing and we're trying. The question I would be out of that one is, how maddening is it to have a game that has all these different types of players? We're talking about PVE. We're talking about PVP.

We're talking about people who are just designing homes. And you just said, you know, we hear the PVP people yelling at us, but we also have these five other groups yelling at us. Like, first off, when you look at it, what are the groups? And then how do you look at it? keep them all happy about losing them?

It's, you have to do what you think is right at the time. Right. Right. It's a constant weighing, you know, resources versus pandemic versus, you know, servers melting because too many people are like, right? All these take resources to deal with. And so, which is why we haven't been able to do PVB for a long time, because the servers melting as part of, part of the pandemic was directly, would have directly affected the number of people in Ceradil because it was a CPU. too many people on the servers problem. So, right, there's always reasons, and I know they sound like excuses of the players, and frankly, I understand that because I love the PVP system too, and I would

really love to go in like it was on launch day. You know, it was just swarms of players, you know, everywhere, which is, which is awesome. It was wild. It was cool. Do you remember this? You had these moments? I remember this very well, yes. There's nothing like that, like that feeling of just

massive numbers of players, like, you know, Braveheart style, running into battle, and it's awesome. There's literally my favorite. part of the game. And so this experiment that we're doing is kind of this new when we're talking about seasons and changing things. This is something we could not have done in the chapter model because we were forced to launch something every June 1st and we just didn't have the resources to do things like this that took, obviously, engineers away, designers away. So now that we're stretching the model out, so we're not launching content quite so big content quite so often

and definitely not on the same calendar day every year. It gives us the chance to pry out these six, eight-week tests, a time to develop them, three months, whatever it takes, that we can do these experiments, right? And now, if this works, right, we have the basis for a system that then we can flesh out into a real, real new serodil that has its own kind of gear or ability to chase

that's much more performant. And the other part to that as well is there's just some problems that are much harder to diagnose than others. And with seredil, in general, all of that happens because of load. And so trying to reproduce that amount of load on a full server internally for us is super hard. Like we use bots and things like that.

But a bot can't replicate what a player does. And so like trying to track that stuff down. And we've done a ton of these types of tests over the years. Like Ed Tafo and Brian Wheeler, you know, Brian Wheeler is our lead combat and PVP designer. And Ed Tafo is CT. He's the tech director now. Studio tech director. Who did a lot of the server stuff.

They worked hand in hand for like three years, working on the servers, trying to get the performance better. And it helped significantly, but it still didn't bring us over that threshold where players stopped feeling that input lag, that lag. So then we started doing tests like,

well, let's turn the champion system off in Cirodil. Let's turn proxets off in Cirodell. Let's turn group healing, you know, on. No NPCs. No wondering. Drop a ball on it. We went through a ton of, of different things.

And so this seredled test that we're doing or have done by the time this goes those live, is that next evolution in there to kind of go through and incrementally test where the problem is. And it's maddening to us because we can't fix it. We can't, right? Like it's

really, really hard to do. So that's, again, that probably sounds like an excuse. Well, to illustrate, and this is a very live service game design story. like, so there are, you know, every, every gamer knows FPS frames per second. Of course. So, so that, 98% of the time, that's, that's your client and that's how, how many frames it's displaying on your screen, you know, per second. There's also server frames per second, which is how many, how many cycles

a server can perform every frame. And so, uh, the problem with our PVP system is it, just like on a client, our server gets bogged down when too much stuff goes through it and the FPS goes way down. So we actually, over time, when our players were thinking we weren't doing anything about PVP, we actually got our server frames for CiroDil from like 700 down to 300, you know, which is like half, which is a miracle that we did that. But the problem is anything over like 70 was unacceptable to the players. Right. Right.

And so we cut it down by literally, literally, we doubled the number of frames. and yet it wasn't enough for the players to notice. And that's why we're now doing this. When we realized that, hey, we had done everything, we actually made it so much better on the server, yet it's still not discernible to the players than now we know we need to. Yeah, and for the vast majority of the time,

like the server frames are really, really good. They're below that threshold. But primetime, right, full pop campaigns, then, yeah, there's these hiccups occasionally. That's what we're trying to solve. Yeah. Video games are hard to make, I feel like, in general. Yeah, let me know on this,

that you're always on the, treadmill. Something's always happening. Yeah. But it's fun. Yeah. Every day's different. I feel like that's got to be something that again, we talked to the, for every very first

episode, the first thing we talked about was the, you know, unspoken synergies, right, between oh, other scrolls online is 10, kind of funny is 10, this, that did, blah, blah. The other one I think that I've talked to so many developers about is that it took me a long time, but there was a developer friend of mine who released a game that was very well received, but she was having a terrible time at lunch because she was reading the comments from the people who didn't like it. And I had this moment of clarity talking. I'm like, oh, man, like you in my world would get to publish a YouTube video once every six years and then look at those comments and do it. Whereas for us and kind of funny, there is this joy and pain and

everything else of, we do this every day. And when you don't like it or don't connect with it, we see that comment and we want to iterate on it. it immediately, and it might not be something we can immediately change, but if it comes to the next big, you know, Patreon push or anniversary or whatever, you see us constantly revising what we're doing to get there. And I feel like your type of game development is so much more like that, where you have this line of the community that's there and you see them every day and you see the peaks and you see the valleys and you see the feedback that's got to be, again, powerful, but again. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's that same boat, right? You know, you put your blood, sweat, and tears into something and you release it, and then some people love it. And some people hate it. And some people really hate it. And right? You just, you got to deal with it. And people generally don't complain unless they're really passionate. And I think I said that, said that earlier. And so you got to, you got to dig into that and see what they're really upset about. Yeah. And something that I am sure you will, you will agree with because you get it every day too. You definitely, after a certain point, we've all been here long enough with, with that internet thing is that you can look at a comment pretty easy. tell if it's in good faith.

Yes. Right? And even if it's full of things you don't want to hear, if it's in good faith, there's something there that you should probably take account. And then there are some that's just whatever. Like, life goes on. So again, talking about this, what I think is interesting and very similar to us

is you're saying, you know, those people who really hate a thing, I assume that like us, when that happens, they're giving you the good faith to fix it, though, or to listen to them. Yeah, generally. Obviously, there's always going to be atrophy, people leaving it coming and going but like the majority of this audience i feel like would probably be there with you through all of it yeah i mean again it's all about trust yeah and and so you know

we have to we have to show up you know with with with the changes and so as long as long as we keep doing that i think we'll be on the right trajectory i've heard you uh both talk about it and elder scrolls online in general talk about it but like how the eso community is the best one in gaming and how toxicity has been cut, not out because that's impossible, but to such a low level. I want to know from both of you, why? Why do you think that's the case, Matt?

Well, we've talked about this a lot. We all have our own theories. First of all, it's a... And I say this all the time, and I know it sounds like a schick, but we are a virtual world as much as we are a game.

So we attract people that aren't necessarily in it to dominate. and whenever you're in a game that's about domination or winning or competing right you get a totally different type of person not they sure do Mike yeah yeah you want to tell your stories of playing fall guys and just stopping to throw people off but but I think there's something I and I know Rich will probably have a complete different answer but there's something about a game that came out of the gate not sprinting that had a group of people that believed in it that then actually started

sprinting and those people are there and they're your evangelists and they're like, no, these developers, this company, whatever, right? Stick with them because they're going to do the right thing. And I think there's something to that there. Like the lack of immediate giant success meant that we had to fight for it. And our community, we did have a lot of very supportive community, even back when we were a meme, right? And there were people that were fighting back against that.

And those are the people, I think, that are the core of the community that when you log into the game as a new player and they're playing and they're playing and they ask a question. Like, it's in their best interest to get a new player in and teach them how awesome the game is because they want the game to succeed. And so I think the pay it forward part of that has been a big, big, big part of our success. Something we haven't talked about. That's an interesting callback to you, Matt, of course, is that you wanted to do an MMO for Fallout. Then that, of course, didn't happen. You came over here.

This happens. But then Fallout 76 does happen. And Fallout 76 has such a similar story of stumbling out of the gate. having an audience and finding it to where, of course, they have this giant explosion with the fall of TV show, let alone I'm sure COVID numbers going up. Did you reach out to them at their launch? Did you talk?

How does that relationship work? First of all, I love that game. I actually grew up in West Virginia. Oh, nice. Like I'm literally, I know the map. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I wasn't part of the team by any means. But there were ideas being bounced off,

especially after launch, which is like, you know, how do you, you know, respond to feedback? that kind of thing. But they're good at what they do, right? You know, it was like anything that I added would have just cemented something that they were already thinking about. Sure, sure. You know, it's not like I had a magic bullet or anything.

It's like listen to the community and look at what people are playing that actually play all the time and do more of, add more of what they're doing and less of what they're not. And it's just, you know, basic stuff. But they were already already on that path. Yeah, I got to have a few really good sit downs with them when they were talking about doing their version of one tamrail,

the one followed or whatever they ended up naming that. Just to kind of give them some, here's the issues we ran into,

you know, some knowledge sharing and stuff like that. But as Matt said, like, they know their game, they know what they're doing. We were just there

to kind of help when they needed questions answered. Speaking of knowing your game, knowing what you're doing, and of course, your community. Again, the direct happens.

You come out, you talk about this. And again, your messaging is so great and even the, and even the ad read in this episode I like so much, right? Because it's about you. You keep putting it on the player, right?

Of like, this is your world to go do it in. Before we end this podcast, this amazing series, and before Mike and I streamed the game today, of course. Very excited. Twitch.tv slash kind of funny games. YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. It'll be up there forever. And I'm sure we'll be playing more of it.

My question really becomes then, let's talk about now that we have all this information, what we're about to set off on, what we have set off on, and then even beyond that where we're going with it. So I guess recapping what's going on right now. Yeah, I'll do the... Bullet point high level.

Yeah, the high level. And then, of course, Richie's actually implementing... I think the theme of this, like people are focusing on seasons and what that means in other games and having either a positive or a negative opinion based on that. It's important that what we're actually doing now is changing the model so we have more time.

to do things that we need to do that we've been putting off for a long time, right? And chapters were awesome, but the community was starting to send us very clear messages that doing the same thing every year was a little too cyclical. And even though the content was fun, right, hey, maybe you should fix these things. And we literally didn't have the time to fix those things, whatever they were pointing out. So we could go back to doing one large thing a year, right? That would fit into what we're doing eventually. But what we're doing right now is kind of unplugging the chapter so that we can free up the teams to do things that we've wanted to do for a long time. Like continue guild storylines, like, you know, fix problems in Rivenspire.

I don't want to, Rich is going to punch me now because we've read on that zone. But, you know, Fixeridil, right? Like all these things have been stacking up and we haven't had the time to do them. This model gives us the time to do those things while delivering great content. It's just it's going to be delivered either a little less often or it's, going to be targeted at a specific zone to fix something or to add something. But we're still going to tell great stories, but now we get to react a little more to problems that need to be solved. I think that's the key. It lets us be a little bit more flexible in how quickly we can

react to things and do more unexpected things, right? Like that's definitely a big piece of feedback is, yeah, the stuff is good, but it's starting to feel formulaic. So we want to break that mold and do something different. And why aren't you doing crossplay? Right? This gives us the chance to actually delve into the very difficult technical problems that need to be solved. We can never do that with the chapter model. No, I think, you know, I think you've made the case for it in this episode before we even got to this part of it. I'm like, okay, cool. Well, here's, we're going to go focus on PVP because that community means it.

We're looking into crossplay. What are the other, and nobody's holding into it, but you communicate so well. What are the other pain points you see with ESO right now that you'd love to touch on and hopefully get the time bandwidth? Yeah, we call it modernizing. Okay. Like, in many ways, we've modernized every year. We have a current-gen console client. We are always adding new graphical stuff, right?

But there are still things like, we've heard since 2014, the combat feels very MMO and not very first-person, Elder Scroll. Right, and to make it a little more visceral. And we've never had the time to do that. Like, our animations are a little 2014. Our zones are, the older ones, are a little 2014. our UI, our PCUI especially, right?

It's not fantastic and it needs to be updated. We've already announced that we're going to redo that, right? We have a list of these things that I just pick the top five or six there, right? That's what we're looking at. There's the new and returning player experience, right? We've been so focused on putting new stuff in and adding new stuff for the veterans, we kind of lost sight of what's that like for a new player when they come in. Like, holy cow, there's 10 years of stuff.

Where do I start? what's the right order right we get that question all the time and p.s. there is no right order but go build your house. Your houses are big. You just said this before we started filming which was you know hey I'm jumping back in after a while and holy shit. Yeah. That's the thing.

It's like it's overwhelming because the game is so large that especially a returning player that has an idea of what the game was like in 2018 or whenever the last time they played were it's a lot different now and we don't do a good job of reintroducing a player into the back into the world. And my reaction when you said that was you should just roll a new character. But I'm committed and I like this. And that's the right answer, right? And I had the wrong answer there because I wanted you to see the new tutorial and everything.

But you don't want that. You want to play the character that you played before. And we as developers need to make that experience better. 100%. Yeah. Michael? We're winding down. It's very special.

This was a lot of fun, these four episodes. You know, MMOs growing up as a kid, that was my bread and butter. I loved MMOs. I loved this shared world, this experience I got to experience with my friends. And ESO was a really special one for me. So getting to go behind the scenes with you, too, was a moment I'll never forget. And I'm sure the audience will share the same of this was a lot of fun to get to learn, see the future, and just talk, which has been great. Thanks, you too.

This has been a blast for us. We could, Matt and I could talk, literally talk about ESO for days. That's what you do. Yeah, that's what we do, right? Yeah, but rarely in this death. Like it's great to kind of stretch it out and actually explain. Like a lot of times we're announcing things. And players like, why are you doing that?

You just announce something, right? This gives us the chance to actually explain why we're doing it, right? And even though I know we've left a lot of questions unanswered with some of the things we've said, right? We're trying to get across in this format, which is great, which is we get a chance to explain things a little more and not just announce them. I guess, you know, my big question for both of you, and this is, you know, way back to journalism school at Mizzu, is what didn't we ask? you. We got to talk this entire time. We've done these four episodes. You know, it's four hours of content we've done on ESO. But I feel like there's always something that is in the back of your head of, I wish we would have gotten to that. I wish we would have done that. Is there something, Matt,

that stands out to you, Rich that stands out to you. And I want it from both of you of whatever it would be. But like, I never, you know, it's that thing that when we set off to do this show, it's that idea of like, I want the kind of funny audience to find game development information here. And I want the ESO audience to find ESO information here. And I don't want to, alienate one of the other, so I don't know if I skewed away from a topic you wanted to get into. No, I didn't have an agenda coming in, but I think the question, and we might have answered it unscinctly over the last four hours or whatever is why should you play this game? Oh, yeah, that's a great question.

Right, right. I just thought of that. That's a good one. Why should you, hey, cut it out, put it back in. Guys, Matt specifically, why should you play this game? Why should you play ESO right now? Yeah, well, I mean, the answer is, for, if you listen to, if you get listened to this far into the podcast, right, you get a pretty good idea.

But it's a game that has a community that will welcome you that doesn't enforce a playstyle on you that gives you a virtual world to explore based on one of the best known IPs in the world. And you can kind of carve your own path in that. Is it perfect? No. But it's a great game and a great world with a great community. Nailed it. I can't do better than that. Do you have a different question that you wish I would ask you?

I mean, talk more about your wife? For me. I think I do that enough. I think I do that enough. No, I mean, I think that the thing, actually, maybe I will, because she imparted this bit of wisdom to me when I first took on the creative director role because I was really worried, right?

Like, if I make a mistake, I make the wrong call, people lose their jobs, right? That was always kind of in the back of my head. And she's just like, you got to do what you think is right and think about our family, just our family dynamic as it is. She's like, when I'm planning meals, we have four, well, technically we have five people at home. She can't make a meal that satisfies all five people. How are you going to make a decision that satisfies millions of people?

Like all of them at the same time. So don't worry about it. Do what you think is right. And that really hit hard for me. And it's something that I think about all the time whenever I do stuff is, yeah, we're going to make the wrong call sometimes. But there's going to be people that are going to support it. They're going to love it. and they're going to keep playing, right?

And those that are upset, we will try to hit them, well, not hit them. We will try to satisfy them, you know, at some point over the course of the year. That's a fantastic question and answer. Michael, you got,

what didn't you get the chance to ask? What are you about it? You know, it's just been so much fun to celebrate and these moments where you have those big announcements, we get to see the wowing trailers. And as fans, it is always cool of, wow, oh my gosh, I'm blown away.

The hard work that goes behind. in the decision making of what those are, those characters that may or may not return. What is the excitement level for the team when it is, hey, this is the moment we're going to share this big thing. Who makes those decisions? What kind of fun do you have? Yeah, I mean, Rich does too.

But, you know, with a game like this, with a team this big, with a game that's been around, right, the whole team needs a very clear direction of where they're going. And so that's what we try to do. You know, both of us are now at the point where we're not, and we can't get involved so much in the day-to-day decision-making because there's so much of it. But we really try to keep the team pointed at the place we're trying to get to. And the team loves making new stuff, but they also love going back and bringing back those beloved characters, right?

You know, the Rasm Dars of the game and so on and so forth. So they are really excited about what's coming this year and the stories that we're telling and the big event that we're doing and the wall and whatnot. So, yeah, like, the team's really, really excited about this. They should be. Congratulations. You know, I think, again, like, you guys have built something so special. But, again, even to go watch that direct or hear you talk about it for four hours and the passion and the love and the care and the, you know, this is 10 years of the game.

Sure, like we said, but since 2007, right? Like, it's such a healthy chunk of your lives. It is. Your professional careers and the fact that you've been given this opportunity to grow it and you have and you've changed it. Like, I hope you both are incredibly proud of what you've made. And everybody, obviously. back home working on it or and their homes working on it. You know what I mean?

How separate the company is. Yeah, it's a great team. You know, it's a, it's really a great team that allows us to do this. And so can't speak highly enough of them. Like we try to set the direction, but, but, you know, there's a lot of people. It takes a village to do a game like this and we have a good village. Yeah. And it's, it really isn't, it's going to sound cliche, but it is really an honor to be able to represent the team.

Sure. Like, obviously Matt and I don't do all the work. Um, there's a lot of really smart people that are really, really passionate about the game. And we get to talk about this thing that, you know, they have put their lives into. So it's, it's a big honor. Okay. So two things before we get out of here. Back to you.

I need to have you tell me what is everybody excited for. It is Friday, May 23rd right now. What is going on? What is coming? What is the big push this year? This is a new way for us to tell stories in ESO, right? This year is focused. on the worm cult.

You know, this is a continuation of the base game story. There's a brand new way for you to build your characters with our subclassing. So now you can, like I said earlier, you can be a necromancer slash warden slash archinist if you want, right? Like you have all of these abilities. I think it's over 3,000 combinations of class abilities that get added to your repertoire if you want. We've got Solstice, which is a brand new island, with some very cool stories focused mainly around the Argonians and the High Elves. Sounds weird, but it makes a lot of sense. When you get in there, you start to dig into there.

You start to learn more about, you know, this outcast group that's there and kind of doing their thing. And then, of course, we've got the big Soul Wall event, which is the first time we've ever done this. That's based on servers. So each server will progress their own way. And then we cap that all off with all kinds of cool quality life improvements and whatnot, which we didn't really talk too much about. Well, that kind of floor. Comes under modernization.

Right. Comes under modernization. But I think one of the things that I will say is our housing community has been really, really patient with us in terms of like all the cool things we've built. But one of the pain points for them is just inventory pressure. You know, they have all these furnishings. all this crazy stuff that they have to kind of manage. A lot of people have storage homes where they store... Just toss it all in.

Yeah, they just, right? It's like the warehouse in Indiana Jones. 100% right, yeah. Like literally you walk in and you see just the rows of top of end. And it's multiple houses that have this, right? And so we implemented a furnishing vault or are implementing a furnishing vault where they're going to be able to store some number of these in the vault and clear up a whole crap ton of inventory space.

So just lots of things like that. this is a question for you and then it's going to be a question. I was thinking obviously we're talking so much about returning players all these different changes, modernization, but we're going to stream it right now basically, right? Are we rolling new characters?

I really would love you to see the new opening area and the tutorial and how they've redone this because I remember day one of what it really looked like and recently I have re-rolled a character and I think it's a great job. But Greg, I would love for you to be the most comfortable. so we're going to stick with our normal characters and we'll find our way

and we'll look north and we're just going to go straight to the map and tear it. Because like I was thinking the we have new people watching obviously hopefully they're excited they want to go play it. My question to you guys is

what is your advice for a new player on how to start, how to play ESO? It's a good one. Yeah, I mean, that answer would be colored by the way that we play the game but I would.

Which we play very different. We play very different. PVP, all right, it's based in this Camelot game. Yeah, yeah. But when I play, yes, I do PVP a fair amount, but I very much like the exploration also. So what I would do is go through the original tutorial, creating a new character, and then go to Orsinium, which is my favorite place in the game. Which, again, it was the one zone that we had two years to make, and it just feels right.

And some of the best quests in the game that aren't even, the main story in that zone is great, but some of the side quests are unbelievable. But that's what I would do. My advice, and this is me as a power gamer, but what I would do is just take your time and go slow. And I think the biggest thing that players need to understand is you're never behind. So you can always play with whomever. So you can just come in and play whenever. Love that.

But the biggest one is there is nothing you can do to your character that you can't undo later on easily. So just experiment and make choices and try something. If you want to pick up a destruction staff and shoot fireball, go do that, right? If you want to sword and board it, you can do that. Like, just experiment and see what sticks with you because you can always undo it later on. If you want to pick pocket guards, you can do that.

You can do that. There's a whole thriving criminal enterprise system that literally exists on you stealing stuff and fencing it, right? There's so many things in the game that you can do that are amazing and you don't know until you go and try it. Yep. Just go slow, explore, learn the world, learn the lore, and try stuff.

I'm going to work on my house I'm very excited about it this whole time I'm very excited He asks the guards don't like it when you pickpocket So you better be good To get yourself up get out of it Be careful yeah yeah Matt and Rich

Thank you so much for letting us Be part of your story For the past four episodes of this To celebrate your 10 year anniversary It's been incredible Yeah thanks for having us This is a big thrill To be able to go in this depth with this

Yeah it was a lot of fun Really enjoyed it Good I'm glad you had fun And Mike Thank you for hanging out with me Thanks Greg Thank you to everybody an experience of a lifetime, another one we get to share together,

and one I'll never forget. Thanks, Tommy. Remember, everybody, this has been the Elder Scrolls online podcast, a kind of funny gamescast special. There's been four episodes, so if you're just tuning into this one, go ahead and get back to it, whether it be over on the ESO, YouTube, whether it's over on the kind of funny YouTube or our podcast service, Gamescast, you could find it there. Of course, we are going to be streaming this one, and I want to do a long one, all right?

We're doing a long stream today. None of this three-hour business. We're going longer than that. You can catch it live on Twitch.tv.tv slash kind of funny games. YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. Obviously later, you get it on YouTube whenever you want to. But for now, we will bid you a do and remind you that you can go play the Elder Scrolls right now in Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Go ahead and do it.

Give them some feedback. And remember, until next time, it's been our pleasure to serve you.