Elder Scrolls Online creator Matt Firor no longer works on Zenimax’s hyper-popular MMORPG. Following major layoffs and the cancellation of his next title, Project Blackbird, the MMO lead left, and he has a lot to say about the Elder Scrolls spin-off.
After founding Zenimax Online Studios in 2007 and leading the charge for ESO, Firor is now “taking a break” from game development. In an interview with YouTuber MinnMaxx, the veteran game dev explained that he still plays ESO.
“I did take two or three months off just to get away mentally,” he says. “But I started playing it again and it’s so fun to play as a player because I can’t now just jump onto Slack and [report bugs]”. While the former director no longer works on the MMO, he still keeps up with the changes and new content that arrive with every update.
In the interview, Firor explains that one of the major pains surrounding Elder Scrolls Online came from fans labelling the game a clone of World of Warcraft. “The one thing that still gets under my skin is that, ‘it’s a WoW clone’”, he says. “Because all of the feedback we got was, ‘this game isn’t like WoW enough!’”
Firor explains that the only aspects of ESO that were similar to WoW were that the game was fantasy and an MMO. “Yes, its online multiplayer and fantasy. So is Dark Age of Camelot. Is WoW a Dark Age of Camelot clone? No. Every game takes things that the games before them did and mixes them together in a different soup and it’s awesome.”
The Elder Scrolls Online lead says that “the mandate” was to take The Elder Scrolls and make it online. With that said, none of the game’s systems were designed to copy WoW, and very few of them are even similar. “Systems-wise, it’s so different from WoW,” he says. “And WoW is a fantastic game! It’s probably my second most-played game of all time… but no, yeah, it’s its own game. If you sit down and play it like its a WoW game, you’re not going to have fun at all”.
Anyone who actually plays MMOs knows that Elder Scrolls Online is not like World of Warcraft at all. However, for those who don’t want to give MMOs the time of day, labelling any new MMO simply a ‘WoW clone’ is a very prominent, often-lazy and reductive way to describe a new title.
Gamers have always had issues with MMO spin-offs or entires in existing single-player franchsies, and Elder Scrolls Online is no different. Even with Fallout 76, a game that is more MMO-lite than MMO, players still treat it as the black sheep in the family.
It’s not just Western MMOs, either. In a recent interview, Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida explained that many fans treat the game as if it’s “not a Final Fantasy’. This is despite the fact that it’s one of the most successful MMOs around right now.
“There are still a lot of people out there who look at an online Final Fantasy and they say, ‘Well, an online Final Fantasy is not a Final Fantasy,’” the game director said earlier this month. He added that he would love to make a single-player RPG within FF14’s world, but there just isn’t enough time for that.
Right now, Elder Scrolls Online is celebrating its shift to a new seasonal release structure with the launch of Season Zero. The studio is committed to many more years of updates as well, including a new Skyrim expansion launching sometime in 2027 for all players. Elder Scrolls Online ex-director hates the MMO’s “WoW-clone” label as playersElder Scrolls Online ex-director hates the MMO’s “WoW-clone” label as players
