Elder Scrolls Online creative director on class design, community feedback & more

If you’ve ever wanted to dive deeper into what goes into making Elder Scrolls Online such an engaging, content-rich experience you’ll certainly want to check out a recent interview with Rich Lambert, Creative Director at Zenimax Online Studios. Speaking to Lambert is Shacknews’ own Greg Burke who opens with a question on how the team decided to tackle things like the new Necrom chapter along with the addition of the new Arcanist class.

To this, Lambert responds that the team always looks back at what they’ve done previously before moving forward. Among what the team looked back on was High Isle, which Lambert explains to be more traditional fantasy with a storyline that’s a bit more grounded in reality given its political subject matter.

We kind of wanted to blow the doors off on that and as we started figuring out what we could and couldn’t do, and what we should or shouldn’t do, Hermaeus Mora actually came up. Hermaeus Mora is a really cool Daedric Prince all about knowledge and collecting that knowledge but they also have this really cool kind of cosmic horror vibe. You know, this Lovecraftian feel.

And we really haven’t explored that so we knew that’s kind of where we wanted to go and then we needed a place to put our story and it just made sense to go back to Morrowind, go to the Telvanni Peninsula because the Telvanni Magisters live there and they’re some of the most powerful mages in all of Tamriel so it was just kind of this good synergistic match between kind of the cosmic horror and Hermaeus Mora, and then Morrowind and the Telvanni.

Lambert goes on to talk about the complexity of creating new classes for ESO including how one part that’s kept in mind is how the new class will fit in with the rest, while other areas looked at include wanting to make sure the new class also feels and plays differently. Lambert also comments on some of the technical challenges that come with introducing a new class and how there was a lot of work “under the hood that the engineering staff had to do.”

For more on how new classes are introduced into Elder Scrolls Online, the game’s new Necrom chapter, how the team takes community feedback into account, and more, be sure to check out the full interview with Zenimax’s Rich Lambert over on GamerHubTV. While you’re there, be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, and subscribe to the Shacknews YouTube channel as well for even more awesome, informational gaming content.