General:Interview with Matt Firor at Gamescom 2018

ElderScrollsPortal: Why did you decide on a high fantasy setting for the Altmer in ESO? Why not something alien, weird and unique?

Matt Firor: Great questions. So, when we did morrowind, Vvardenfell was in the north-east, right? And we wanted to do the opposite of Vvardenfell. Summerset is in the south-west, so it’s the exact opposite. And Vvardenfell is alien, and dark and crazy and weird and alien and we wanted to do 180° so we made it high fantasy, very visually appealing, very much high fantasy vs. alien. That’s why. And it’s cool.

ElderScrollsPortal: It looks very nice and it’s beautiful. The high fantasy setting with these arrogant Altmer it truly feels like Gondor in Lord of the Rings.

Matt Firor: Exactly. On the surface, you know, the Dunmer look crazy but if you do a lot of the quests and talk to them they get more normal if you interact with them a little. The Altmer look pretty but if you talk to them for five minutes they’re crazy, so it’s again the opposite. That’s what we try to do.

ElderScrollsPortal: Complete different direction for the next question, which is: Will we be able to hire NPCs for our homes?

Matt Firor: To put NPCs in your homes? Other than your vendor? We are thinking about that. There’s a technical problem where we don’t have physics data in the house so if they walk around there’s no physic so they’d just walk through things. So if we do it we want to add physics but if we add physics that makes it more complicated and you can’t put as many items in the house. So it’s a technical issue but it would be lots of fun. We are, in the Murkmire update, going to have music boxes. So we have cool little items in the house so you can play all the ESO songs.

ElderScrollsPortal: Will there be further cooperation between ESO and Legends and maybe even Blades?

Matt Firor: Yes for ESO and Legends. We’ve done a few items back and forth between the two games. We’re gonna look at doing more with that. We don’t know about Blades yet.

ElderScrollsPortal: And maybe play cards within ESO like other fantasy games do?

Matt Firor: It would be cool. No plans yet but that would be cool.

ElderScrollsPortal: Are any of the other continents planned for future content?

Matt Firor: Not in ESO. We still have still much to do. And you know we only have one daedric zone in Coldharbour so we can do other daedric zones too. Even before we think off of Tamriel we have lots and lots.

ElderScrollsPortal: Are guild halls planned for the future with events for pvp or anything like that?

Matt Firor: It’s not on our road map but we tried with the big houses that a lot of people make guild halls. We’ve been thinking about it but not on the road.

ElderScrollsPortal: Will Molag Bal ever reveal his secret plan?

Matt Firor: Some of that was related to the events that happened in Clockwork City, Morrowind and Summerset. So I don’t want to give you an answer on that because there are lots of things in the future.

ElderScrollsPortal: Talking about the future and maybe the past: Will we meet the old protagonists, especially Cadwell, ever again?

Matt Firor: So, nothing official here, but we love bringing old characters back. You know, you played Summerset, right? So we brought, don’t want to spoil for any people that didn’t play it yet, some characters came back that we hadn’t seen since the launch and of course Razum-Dar. So, we will always do that in our future content. You’ll see characters from the base game in every update.

ElderScrollsPortal: Is more Akaviri content like the Tsaesci armor planned?

Matt Firor: We do have some Akaviri stuff coming up at some point. It’s a weapon or an armor set. You know that’s part of ES lore. All the stuff from Oblivion, the game. So I think we’re going to work on some Akaviri weapon and armor at some point.

ElderScrollsPortal: So, Murkmire is kind of famous for its sacrifices on the pyramids. Will we be able to see some of that?

Matt Firor: Yes, the main story of Murkmire will be exploring old Argonian ruins to find some artifacts. You’ll be an archeologist. It’s also interesting that Argonians don’t care so much about their past and they very much live today. They don’t care about tomorrow, they don’t care about yesterday. Some of the story revolves around trying to explain to Argonians why it’s important to study the past. It’s a lot of cool Argonian lore.

ElderScrollsPortal: You mentioned some technical limits. Which is something that comes to your mind that prevented content that you wanted to do?

Matt Firor: Every game system has technical limitations. Ehm, there are so many. Basically every game system that has lots of players coming together in the same place is fun for players but bad for the game, right? So think of mass events in pve or pvp. Very much is limited by the number of characters that we can display on screen at one time. That determines how many people can be in one scene in pvp. It determines how many people we want in a city and in pve. Think about places where the performance is the worst in ESO. It’s always places where there’s lots of other players. That’s the biggest limitation.

ESP Recently there’s been, and still is, the discussion which came up with Sony and that they’re preventing crossplay. Crossplay would be cool for ESO too. You have the mega servers at least. Is crossplay, in the future, thinkable?

Matt Firor: For ESO probably not. The architecture was done five years ago or more and now we have player bases that are very much used to their own. If we allowed everyone to play together we have so many names and guilds that are the same on three or four different servers and we’d have to figure out how to. If you have player name one and player name two it would get really confusing. But if I was making a new game today I would want it to be possible.

ElderScrollsPortal: This question might be to complex but how is the process in developing new content, especially for the lore content. We collect everything we have in the past games, books, styles, etc. Do you create something around that and how far do you go back? To Arena which is very far back?

Matt Firor: Mostly different answers depending on what part of the world we’re talking about. For Vvardenfell we had Vvardenfell so we wanted to make that very nostalgic like you’re going home but for Summerset, you’ve really never been to Summerset before. Yes, in Arena but that doesn’t really count. So if there’s no lore for an area we work with Bethesda Game Studios on a timeline and make sure that the official timeline is correct. If it’s an area of the world where there is lots of lore already we use the lore they have and add new character.

ElderScrollsPortal: You still have an internal database then?

Matt Firor: Yes. And we share that with Bethesda. We talk with Bethesda.

ElderScrollsPortal: During the translation process of Skyrim we got a glimpse of the database and I was just thinking about if you were also using the very good fan wikis like uesp who have very good quotations.

Matt Firor: We use uesp. Fan wikis are not our only source because we have the other sources too but we use all of them.

ElderScrollsPortal: Do you think it’s an advantage that TES has become such a huge name? Does it influence your work as a creative director? Or would you rather have a smaller title?

Matt Firor: It’s great because it’s Elder Scrolls but when we started this game Skyrim hadn’t come out yet so it was just really Morrowind and Oblivion so it was wide open. It was a huge continent with lots of possibilities. With Skyrim came a lot more pressure to make sure that Skyrim players would be happy in ESO but it’s all good. There are so many fans of the ip that it makes the game popular just by having an Elder Scrolls name. So the pressure is to make sure everyone feels happy when they come and play the game. Actually when we launched it it wasn’t quite there yet. And then a year later when we launched on consoles where there’s much more of that it felt much more like the game that console Elder Scrolls players would want.

ElderScrollsPortal: If you could choose on Elder Scrolls title to take with you on a deserted island which would it be. Except for ESO of course.

Matt Firor: Oh come on. I would say Skyrim because of the mods.

ElderScrollsPortal: And without mods? Just the core game?

Matt Firor: It’s really hard to play Morrowind now with the old UI. Obviously Morrowind was the biggest, Daggerfall was even bigger. It’s a hard question. Probably either Oblivion or Skyrim. I really like to play them. I love the story in Oblivion. Very Elder Scrolls.

ElderScrollsPortal: Have you personally written any quests, characters or something for the game itself?

Matt Firor: I haven’t done any since the beginning of the project. I did all the work to set the world up, what the alliances were and what part of the world we would be creating. We have such good developers now that I would not nearly be good enough to write. If you notice our quests get better and better every update there’s a reason for that. I am not personally working on it.

ElderScrollsPortal: Arena and Daggerfall were very hugely influenced by pnp like DnD and all these pen and paper settings. Are some influences from these pen and paper systems in Elder Scrolls online?

Matt Firor: I think every developer uses everything that they’ve done on a game side to think for ideas. But it is interesting that we have two original   employees on the ESO team, Lawrence Schick and Zeb Cook. Both of them were at TSR in the 70s so they were original original employees and they’re great. Lawrence is our lore master. He did White Plume Mountain, the DnD module and he was there for a long time and then Zeb wrote the original hardcover Dungeon Masters Guide. He was there from the start too. It’s great to have them on staff. But we all grew up playing pen and paper games. The young developers obviously didn’t but they still play them. We play pen and paper games all the time and miniatures and things like that. I think as game developers you look anywhere for inspiration. So, yes, pen and paper, other games, books movies things like that.

ElderScrollsPortal: Maybe you also have pen and paper games from The Elder Scrolls planned?

Matt Firor: Is there one?

ElderScrollsPortal: I don’t think so. Maybe in the future?

Matt Firor: It would be cool. That is a Bethesda question.

ElderScrollsPortal: We’ll have to push them for that. Will we get to find the Eye of Argonia in Murkmire?

Matt Firor: No. This is our own separate. If you played through the original zone, Shadowfen. Our goal for Murkmire was: use what we did in Shadowfen and make it better. Shadowfen wasn’t the most fun time. The quests were good but you got lost all the time because the areas were all the same. The waters were too deep and you had to swim everywhere. Our goal was to make a better Shadowfen. Three regions that look a little different so you know where you are so you don’t get lost. One is very dark and murky and one is kind off lighter on the coast and you can walk everywhere without swimming. So we really wanted to make a better Shadowfen.

ElderScrollsPortal: Since ESO is an online title and there has been quite some controversy about especially loot boxes recently with discussions about gambling and so on what’s your opinion on loot boxes?

Matt Firor: It’s easier in ESO because all the monetization in ESO is optional. There’s no gameplay systems, it’s all different cosmetics or even if you want to buy a mount directly it’s not a better mount. The boxes in ESO are really just to make yourself look cooler. And you always get items out of them that have value. You get potions and things like that. You can look in the store on our servers. The goal is to make sure you always get something useful and then you have a chance to get something cool. And again, really optional. Any monetization you don’t have to buy any of them.

ElderScrollsPortal: What is your favorite content? Maybe a questline that you really liked?

Matt Firor: There are many. I’ve got to say my favorite Elder Scrolls questline of all time is the Oblivion Dark Brotherhood. My favorite one in ESO is hard because it’s so big but the Morrowind questline with Naryu and Veya was probably my favorite one in Morrowind. That was great. Where you had to make a real choice at the end. If you watch the YouTube of did you kill Veya or did you not kill Veya there are actually differences in the story layers. If you go to Summerset that story continues and depending on what you did in Morrowind it makes some changes for what happens in Summerset.

ElderScrollsPortal: Do you plan to make more quest which have an impact on the environment or was this just an exception?

Matt Firor: It’s more to make you think. With Veya it’s is she there or is she not there? The difference is she shows up in the world if you let her live. You can talk to her and with Naryu if you talk to her again she makes fun of you. It’s cool to be able to do that but you can’t make it change too much. We really want to make it a moral choice on the players part.

ElderScrollsPortal: Is there a character which is your alter ego or a character to which you relate a lot to?

Matt Firor: I don’t really relate to characters because it’s a game that I helped create. It’s hard because I know to much about the mechanics behind it. Of characters that I like the most I think Cadwell is the first one. I really like Razum-Dar mostly because he’s just awesome a James Bond cat. And Naryu is great too. I guess she’s more complex. You have the easy cat James Bond and you have the complex assassin and you have John Cleese it’s perfect.

ElderScrollsPortal: Last question. Do you have any plans for the future which you can tell us?

Matt Firor: We are already working on next years chapter obviously but no details and we’re thinking about the one after that already. We have years of stuff planed. So we know all of 2019 and we are working on ideas for 2020.