This year marks the sixth anniversary of The Elder Scrolls 6’s teaser trailer. And with Skyrim turning 13 years old this November, it’s safe to say that Elder Scrolls fans have endured – and will continue to endure – a long wait for Bethesda’s next fantasy RPG. But while the famed single-player studio has been focusing its efforts on nuclear wastelands and outer space, the beloved world of Tamriel hasn’t been neglected. The Elder Scrolls Online, once much-maligned and suffering sinking player counts, is now celebrating its tenth anniversary and the launch of its eighth major expansion. And while it may be an MMO by genre, by design it’s much closer to the classic Elder Scrolls RPG format than you might expect. If you’ve spent a decade desperately searching for more stories from Tamriel, then you need look no further than Elder Scrolls Online’s ongoing saga.
Rich Lambert, game director at ZeniMax Online Studios, explains that the Elder Scrolls Online team made a “big design call to move into a more Skyrim-adjacent lane” several years ago. When TESO first launched, it was derided by many for feeling like a traditional MMO (level grind and all) wearing Elder Scrolls pajamas. Nowadays, the developers don’t even consider the game to fit the ‘MMORPG’ label.
“We decided that this was going to be more of an Elder Scrolls game and focus on Elder Scrolls things first, and be multiplayer second,” Lambert says. “Once we did that it started informing lots of things.”
Unsurprisingly, Lambert sees the core appeal of The Elder Scrolls Online as being one and the same as Skyrim and Oblivion: “One of our core pillars is freedom of exploration and freedom to be and live in the world,” he says. “That traditional Elder Scrolls feeling where you see something in the distance, you can just run to it and explore it.”
The game as it stands now straddles the divide between single-player and online RPG design, offering all the elements you’d expect of a mainline Elder Scrolls game (including a world that permanently changes based on your story decisions, via some smart instancing), but it took a couple of years to get there.
Lambert notes that 2015’s Orsinium DLC saw the game’s storytelling “shift away from traditional MMO style to a more Elder Scrolls narrative style, focused more on the character, their beliefs and how they experience the world.” Later, in early 2016, some more traditional Elder Scrolls elements were introduced, such as Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest-lines, which encouraged stealing from or assassinating NPCs in the shared world. But it wasn’t until late 2016 that the game truly turned itself around.
The One Tamriel update was the turning point for TESO, removing traditional level-based progression in favor of scaling player’s stats to match whatever region you’re in. Outside of dungeon matchmaking being unlocked gradually as you level up to ensure total newbies don’t frustrate more experienced players, there’s nothing stopping a new player from immediately skipping out on the main story and running straight into an ‘endgame’ dungeon. With a decent party, you might even win. Finally, you could treat the game like Skyrim, albeit with a shared world and dungeons geared for co-op.
As such, the much memed wait for a new Elder Scrolls game needn’t be as long and torturous as the seemingly endless journey towards Todd Howard’s next project. The sixth Elder Scrolls is (sort of) already here. Many fans are turning to TESO over replaying Skyrim yet again, partly because of that re-tooled gameplay, but also because of how much of the world’s previously-underexplored lore is elaborated on here. Each major expansion and piece of DLC brings a set of new environments, and the game has been around long enough to fill in many of the blanks of The Elder Scrolls’ world map.
“We’ve taken places that are only vaguely touched on [in the mainline RPG series], like the Sister’s Isles, and turned them into our High Isle release from a couple years ago,” explains Bill Slavicsek, TESO’s narrative director. “All we knew about that was a couple dots on the map and a mention in a book, and we turned that into a whole chapter and DLC. Any place on the map you can think of, we wanna go there. And if it’s not on the map, we want to make it”.
It feels like The Elder Scrolls Online is well on track to fill out the complete world map. There’s more filled-in regions than empty space now, plus an assortment of interesting new extraplanar locations to dimension-hop around in. While the Morrowind expansion helped bring in nostalgic fans wanting to explore its strange volcanic environment and insect-and-fungus based ecosystem, the Elder Scrolls lore buffs were best served by the Elsweyr expansion, finally taking a deep dive into the much-mentioned but never-seen lands of the feline Khajiit.
Not only did Elsweyr give us our first real look at its lush savannas and a wider range of Khajiit body types (thanks to lunar magic, they can be born as anything from nearly human to literal talking housecats), but it was an opportunity for ZeniMax Online Studios to carve out its own corner of the lore. Despite the accepted text being that dragons had been unseen for millennia and only returned with the launch of Skyrim, TESO had them make an appearance during the Elsweyr chapter (set a thousand years before Skyrim). Such an event did, admittedly, require some narrative sleight-of-hand to explain why nobody cares to mention it all during later in-universe eras.
“We take reference from a lot of different sources, internal and external,” explains TESO’s loremaster, Michael Zenke. “A lot of the stuff we do though isn’t in the lore bible because it’s new. Every release we’re adding to the canon. We’ve got a great tradition of unreliable narrators in the Elder Scrolls franchise, so unless you or your player character saw something in-game, ‘that’s just someone’s opinion, man’. So we have a lot of freedom to do interesting stuff.”
While armed with a reliable trick to handwave events that might throw later lore into chaos, ZeniMax’s writing team has grown ever bolder over time. It has been so many years since Skyrim (and likely several more until The Elder Scrolls 6 surfaces), effectively making TESO the one and only Elder Scrolls game of this generation. That, plus Todd Howard confirming that everything in TESO is canon, has allowed the team to expand into wholly new territories, like Fargrave, introduced in the Deadlands DLC. Fargrave is a ‘princeless’ plane of Oblivion, unaffiliated with any of the Daedric gods. A neutral border-world floating in the void, and a wholly new location that let the team cut loose in terms of both writing and environment design.
If this sounds like something a new player might want to jump straight into, then there’s nothing stopping you. Each of the major ‘Chapter’ expansions are designed to function as a self-contained adventure, letting players tackle story arcs as and when they see fit. The structure is yet another element of classic Elder Scrolls design that sets the game apart from its online peers. While the game has long-since dropped its mandatory subscription, the optional ‘ESO Plus’ subscription gives players access to all the minor DLC and most of the expansions to date, making it an especially easy game to pick up play.
Another aspect that has lowered the barrier to entry and further aligned TESO with its single-player siblings is the Companions system. Six customizable NPC partners (with another two due to be released soon) can be recruited to join you on your adventures, albeit one at a time. They were introduced to the game with the Blackwood expansion in 2021, but have become a ubiquitous sight, as they allow solo players to enjoy the game’s wider content more easily. Parties can also be a mixture of players and Companions, allowing tiny groups (just two, in many cases) to tackle some of the bigger, tougher dungeons and open-world challenge bosses with relative ease. Plus, the companions’ constant combat barks and interjections on what they see around them makes the world feel a little less lonely for those wanting to treat TESO as a single-player game. If you’ve fond memories of scaling mountains with Teldryn Sero or Aela the Huntress in Skyrim, Companions echoes that experience.
Obviously these systems have their limits, though. Player housing is instanced, set apart from the overworld, and there’s no chance of breaking the game over your knee with mods or console commands, but the core Elder Scrolls experience is replicated surprisingly well, right down to many quests having multiple possible endings. Your final decisions may not have world-shakingly obvious impact, but they often result in the death or a change of state for an NPC that will remain in their quest location, a reminder of your decisions for that character. Play long enough and complete enough quest arcs and the world will start to feel like you’ve made a real impact in it, so long as you go back to revisit some old haunts.
Now months into the game’s year-long anniversary celebrations, the future's looking bright for The Elder Scrolls Online. The team seems confident that if TESO keeps it up for another decade, it might well encompass the entire Elder Scrolls world (and yet more locations beyond) by the time the 20th anniversary begins. In the meantime, Lambert mentions that there are plans to improve the experience for new or returning players. “As a new player, or someone coming back after a year, it can be overwhelming,” he admits. “So we’re working on some systems to make that kind of experience better. Not necessarily hand-holdy, but more informational”. Beyond that, some big changes (details of which he refuses to divulge) are coming to player housing, and further refinements to the game’s balance to keep the meta in check.
I once wrote off The Elder Scrolls Online as a half-hearted cash-in. Now, it’s a game I’ve been playing on and off for around five years now, dipping back into and thoroughly enjoying when that Elder Scrolls itch needs scratching. While the incredible community keeps Skyrim alive through mods, that’s a very different experience to exploring brand new, official stories and regions of Tamriel. TESO may not be The Elder Scrolls 6, but it’s a continuing Elder Scrolls game that’s successfully shifted and changed to reflect the wants of a fanbase that grew up on acclaimed single-player RPGs. And that’s a fine place to be for a ten-year-old online game.
The product of a wasted youth, wasted prime and getting into wasted middle age, Dominic Tarason is a freelance writer, occasional indie PR guy and professional techno-hermit seen in many strange corners of the internet and seldom in reality. If you're looking for something new and potentially very weird to play, feel free to poke him on Twitter.
