The Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle has been live for a few weeks now, and after spending many hours in its new setting, we’ll be giving our verdict very soon. But before that, to celebrate the ambitious expansion, we sit down with director Rich Lambert, who had a lot to say about the unprecedented content, along with a beautiful parrot and impressive canines.
“We wanted it to feel different, something extremely different than anything we’ve done before,” says the man from ZeniMax Online Studios in the video of what they were trying to deliver. “We really did high fantasy with the elves, we did some dark and gloomy things that were cool, but we really wanted to change things up. That was a big focus on the visuals of High Isle and what it was. On the On the other hand, we wanted to tell a different story, and we’ve told a lot of stories over the last few years that are doomsday stories, soul-crushing stories, and we wanted to change that and do something that was a little bit more based on reality, a little bit more on politics and focus this crime thriller, somehow figure it out and it fits perfectly with the Bretons and their whole medieval aristocratic culture. That’s what the Bretons are and they just blended in perfectly.”
ESO: Tales of Tribute was heavily influenced by Dominion
Later in the interview, we asked about the development of the all-encompassing deck-building card mini-game that comes with the expansion.
“Tribute was something we’ve wanted to do for a very long time,” confirms Lambert, “this concept of tavern games, this alternative activity that you can do socially. We have a lot of quests, a lot of killing, we have a whole range of alternative activities related to it on housing, crafting and antiquing and whatnot, but we don’t really have a lot of those social activities that are outside of dungeons and world bosses and things, so that was kind of the goal of finding something that would fit that bill. We are all gamers, we watched tons of games, read books, watched movies… Dominion was a huge influence, it’s one of my favorite card games in the world, I absolutely love it, and as we went through and built up tributes, we walked a lot Prototyping through, we did a lot of paper prototyping, in Excel we had a little team fork and built unity prototypes for a while so we could do mechanics and layouts and stuff l could figure things out so that when we were ready to actually build it in ESO, we just worked on the core gameplay mechanics and tried to figure out exactly what the game was. It took a long time like everything does when you make games. It has taken us a really long time, well over a year, to go through this process and end up where we are today. I personally love it, I’ve been playing it live since and it’s just a lot of fun. I absolutely love it”.
Elsewhere in the interview, Lambert confirms that they are “already working on next year’s chapter.” Are you currently playing the MMO? What do you think of the new mystery and card game?