The developers of The Elder Scrolls Online do not really consider the long-running game to be an MMO, as it is currently more of a “virtual world”.
Matt Firor, director of ZeniMax Online Studios, says in an interview with GamesRadar+: “That’s why we don’t like to call it an MMO, because it carries so much baggage from 2001. And I made games in 2001, I’m responsible for a lot of that baggage.”
If the massively multiplayer fantasy RPG isn’t an MMO, then what the hell is it? “I actually see it as a virtual world, and in a virtual world there’s a lot of room for different things,” Firor explains. “If you want to do an assassination simulator, do the Dark Brotherhood stuff. If you have a hotel and you want to go in and show your house to your friends, you can do that. We literally have players just building houses and making furniture for their friends and just playing the card game.”
The Elder Scrolls Online was apparently always designed with the intention of encouraging that feeling, “because the leveling system in the game works in such a way that leveling is very individual to you,” Firor adds. “You can party with other people and your levels can be different and the game takes care of that, which means there’s no vertical power hunting in Elder Scrolls Online.”
By calling the spin-off an “online role-playing game” instead, the studio is given “enough leeway to define it however we want.” However, if players still refer to it as Elder Scrolls Online, Firor “won’t fight it… it’s just that I don’t think of it that way.”
This isn’t the first time that developers ZeniMax Online have spoken about The Elder Scrolls Online in language that distances it from the genre. Narrative Director Bill Slavicsek recently boasted that The Elder Scrolls Online is basically “the equivalent of 10+ single-player games,” while the description on the Steam page avoids the term MMO entirely. Firor also previously called it “one of the successful live service games” rather than an MMO.
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