Elder Scrolls Online - Saving the ES MMO

Polygon steps back and takes a longer look at Elder Scrolls Online, its evolution, and where it's going with One Tamriel and beyond.

How do you take one of the biggest franchises in games and move it to an entirely different genre without losing what makes it special?

That was the question posed by the team at ZeniMax Media when it formed ZeniMax Online Studios in 2007. Its answer was The Elder Scrolls Online, an ambitious project to take the world of Tamriel — made famous by single-player games like The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion — and reshape it into a massively-multiplayer online game.

But in 2011, four years after work began, studio director Matt Firor and his team started to think they might be on the wrong track. The feedback from internal playtests was mixed. ESO was just OK, and OK wasn’t anywhere close to good enough.

Read on.