The Elder Scrolls Online Interview
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With the Elder Scrolls in particular you seem to have spent a long time thinking about incentivising players. Are incentives even more important in MMOG design than they are with other game designs?
Yes! MMOGs are collections of games. They're a bunch of different things all going on at once, and a different type of player will focus on a different type of gameplay. Personally? I'm not a crafter. I want to go explore. That's me. I tend not to do instanced dungeons a lot, but that's a separate kind of game again, and if it's the whole endgame where it's a raid, it's a different kind of game yet again. The incentives come from having experienced people working on different types of systems and knowing what people like and don't like about each of those systems. The philosophy is: give them something to work toward, don't hit them over the head.
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Can you say a bit about the exploration side of the game? Rather than just relying on quest trees, players are encouraged to explore the landscape with just their compass, Skyrim style?
That came out of our internal playtest. Our original model was still exploration-based, but not as much as it is now. Our original model, we didn't have quest hubs, but we had NPCs in strategic locations around, and we left it to you to find them. Then, through playtest, we had people in the office who were not MMOG players, and they said, "I can't find the content." We realised somebody had already solved this problem for us, and it was Skyrim and the compass, and it just made sense that the compass points you to those NPCs, and they give you the quest.
