The Elder Scrolls Online will launch into a difficult MMOG marketplace and battle against a weighty set of expectations forged by the spectacular Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.To gain greater insight into the challenges facing its developer Zenimax Online, we recently spoke to The Elder Scrolls Online’s game director Matt Firor to discover how his studio is tackling these issues.The last few years haven’t been kind to traditional MMOGs. What, in your mind, is the key to bucking that trend?The biggest single thing you can do to ensure your MMOG is successful is take your time and do it right. You only have one chance to launch, [so] you’ve got to make sure that you have a full range of features for a full range of people. I like to think of it more as we’re making a world that we want people to live in. Yes, there’s a game there, but there’s a lot of games in the game. We want to make sure there’s just a ton of stuff for you to do.There will be players whose first Elder Scrolls game was Skyrim and whose expectations have been set by that game. How do you communicate the ways in which you’re different?Well, we exist in the same universe. We’re making an Elder Scrolls game, but we’re not making Skyrim 2. So I think the Skyrim guys had that same problem when they went from Oblivion to Skyrim: “Your last thing was Oblivion, how could you possibly top that?” We’re not trying to ‘top’ Skyrim. [It’s] a fantastic game – if you wanted to play Skyrim, go play Skyrim, right?

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