In 2014, The Elder Scrolls Online brought the legendary RPG experience online for the first time. Like the games that preceded it, players can choose their own style of play as they embark upon an epic adventure across all of Tamriel.
Players could choose to go at it alone on a heroic quest as in previous Elder Scrolls games or explore the huge, rich world with a few select friends. You can even play with hundreds of other players in massive PvP battles to save the Empire.
The latest Chapter Update, Necrom, introduces an all-new playable class, the Arcanist, and delves into the lore of the Dark Elves. Necrom gives players the opportunity to explore Morrowind’s Telvanni Peninsula and the endless library of Apocrypha in Oblivion.
To learn more about The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom and the game’s almost decade-long history, IGN Southeast Asia spoke to the game’s Creative Director, Rich Lambert, on what fans can expect from this update and beyond.
How did you get your start in the video game industry?
Rich Lambert: I'm Rich Lambert and I'm the Creative Director of The Elder Scrolls Online, and I have been in the games industry since 1995. I got into games completely by accident and I wanted to do something completely different at first, like major in business or teaching pro golf.
One of my buddies got a job testing games, he took my resume and the rest is history. I got a summer job in between semesters and never went back and been doing it ever since.
What do the Elder Scrolls games mean to you?
Rich Lambert: I think the big thing is just freedom. Freedom to kind of do whatever you want and explore at your own pace. Let the player really play in the world and learn more about the people in the world.
The thing that I love the most about Elder Scrolls games is there's no single source of truth, there is no dungeon master that says this is how everything happened.
There are multiple perspectives, there are multiple different stories for the same story, and it's really up to you to kind of go through and interpret those things and come up with what happened on your own.
And I just love that it's so freeing as a player, but it's also a lot of fun as the developer because you get to really explore a whole bunch of different aspects.
With a whole new class and new enemies, how much change will the Necrom update bring to Elder Scrolls Online?
Rich Lambert: It's definitely a big change, especially if you're gonna go in and play the new class, the Arcanist. It is very different than anything we've done in the past. This is our seventh class and we've learned a lot over the last six and this one really plays differently.
At the same time, the Arcanist is super easy to get into. That was one of the really early design decisions we made was when we landed on the Arcanist’s unique Crux mechanic, where a combo point system is added which we also made sure that new players could use it well.
So as a new player, you can just go in and hit buttons to get big cool abilities that sound awesome which makes you feel really powerful, but then there's this mastery curve the more you play it and the more you start to interact with the Crux system.
You start to develop a rhythm and see just how powerful the Crux system can be and it just takes you to the next level. From a class point of view, there's nothing like it in The Elder Scrolls Online.
Taking cues from Morrowind and Oblivion, how have these games provided the blueprint for updates like Necrom, and how much research does the team do to get things right?
Rich Lambert: A lot. We have Michael Zenke, who is our loremaster, and that is literally all that he does is focuses on making sure that we are getting the lore right and adhering to what's already been catalogued and documented over the last 30 years of Elder Scrolls lore.
We lean heavily on Bethesda Game Studios as well, as they're the IP holders and we run a lot of ideas by them going back and forth. It means a lot to us to be trusted with the IP and trusted for as long as we have been.
Next year will see the game being 10 years live, and throughout the decade we've been able to go to a lot of cool places and explore a lot of cool subjects and storylines. We’ve been able to show players things from the lore that were only ever in books, and now they get to see them for the first time in-game.
Oblivion was the first Elder Scrolls game that I worked on with Bethesda, and so even being a part of the lore and the history of things for as long as I have, there's still stuff that just blows me away. It was very neat being a part of that and then seeing where things have gone and how things have really grown over the years.
What would you say are the differences between the Daedric realm of Apocrypha and the realm of Oblivion most fans are accustomed to?
Rich Lambert: First off, the realms of Oblivion are always kind of shaped by the personality of the Daedric Prince that runs them. Oblivion was a really oppressive place, spiky and rocky with lava and whatnot like a mini version of hell.
Apocrypha is the realm of the Daedric Prince Hermaeus Mora and he isn't inherently evil. All that Mora cares about is this collection and cataloguing of all of the knowledge in the world.
So with that single-minded goal, when players go to Apocrypha, they’ll see books everywhere as well as other different mediums for storing knowledge and collecting knowledge. It has this really interesting cosmic horror feel and vibe as well.
With a long-running MMORPG like Elder Scrolls Online, how do you and your team keep things fun and fresh, especially with the tenth anniversary on the way?
Rich Lambert: I can't really go into the plans for the tenth anniversary but we are already working on that stuff. It takes up to eighteen months to build a zone, and so we've been hard at work on next year's chapter already.
The stories we've told help us really set the path for doing something different than next year, another big thing that we do really early on is we talk about mood and feel for the Chapters and we try to boil the synopsis down to one word to help with the mood and vibe.
So like with Elsweyr, when we were doing the Dragons and whatnot, revenge was the big story. That really helped kind of tie everything well. With High Isle, the word was Camelot, which called for traditional fantasy and a much more grounded political storyline.
This year, the word was cosmic horror, with a big giant world-ending story. This meant a Cthulu vibe, which really got our artists excited. With all these ideas, we can really keep things fresh while balancing them with the lore of Elder Scrolls.
What are some of your favourite games of all time?
Rich Lambert: I've been a gamer for as long as I can remember and one of my most favourite games is Yars Revenge for the Atari 2600. That was the game that really got me into the medium and realise there was something special about video games.
EverQuest will always be a very special game for me, that's where I met my wife and we've been married for 21 years now, going on 22.
You know as much as I hate to admit it, Elden Ring is probably cracked in there and I've always had a love-hate relationship with those types of games. I also have a guilty pleasure for idle games as well, so I love just kind of playing around with those.
Yeah, that's how you learn for sure as a director, seeing what other people are doing, these games are how I learn and the more I get to play, the better of a designer I turn into.
What advice do you have for up-and-coming game developers in Southeast Asia?
Rich Lambert: The answer that I always give is to show whoever it is you were trying to get a job with that you want to do the job right and that you are really into it. So if you are applying to be a writer, show me that you like to write and show me your portfolio of things that you like to write.
If you want to be a designer, show me how you wanna be a designer. Like, take a concept from your head, put it on paper or a game engine, test it, iterate on it, and get feedback on it. That game development loop is really important, and the more you do it, the better you get at it because it can be really daunting and overwhelming.
It should show that passion for whatever it is you want to do and mods, in my opinion, are the most important and demonstrable of what it is that a person can do. For example, my Lead Content Designer had no experience in the games industry when we hired him.
The thing that won us over was he had created the largest mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion ever. It had like 100,000 lines of dialogue and all these different quests and characters that he and a couple of his buddies did,
He recorded all the voiceovers himself and built it all, he was passionate about making games and wanted to do this, so we hired him as a designer and that was 13 years ago, and now he's my Lead Content Designer.
There are lots of really passionate game developers out there that are more than willing to talk about their experience, talk about how they got into the industry, and talk about important things that everyone should know and are sorely needed for the games industry.
Everybody wants to make games but is not an exact science. If it was easy, everybody would do it and everybody would be successful. It’s a really tough industry and you have to do it, you have to be really passionate about it and grind sometimes to get through things.
It's hard and sometimes there are sacrifices to make but you have to make in order to do it, but it is ultimately super rewarding and super fulfilling.
The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom has gone live on June 5 for PC and Mac, and will be available on June 20 for Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
