They plan on regular content updates to feed hungry gamers, and that subs ”fit best what we wanted to do,” which is to provide ”meaningful content support” regularly.
Hines says they don’t want to just be adding a few bits and pieces here and there but large scale updates, and that requires a lot of manpower and resources.
”If you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth for whatever you’re paying - whether it be $15 for a month or $2 for a DLC - then you’re going to be happy. If you’re not, then you won’t,” Pete Hines told CVG. ”You could do a free-to-play game where somebody wasn’t happy, because maybe they don’t feel like they’re getting value for the money that they played upfront, even if it’s not a pay-by-month subscription.”
”We felt like the subscription model fit best what we wanted to do, not because we want you to pay per month to play the game, but because we want to provide real and meaningful content support on a regular basis. That’s not just a few items or a thing here and there, that’s real significant stuff that adds to the game in a whole host of ways, and doing so needs a good sized group of people who are working on and creating new stuff. That’s stuff we can start working on now, as well as stuff we can work on when we start to get player feedback.”
”There’s a couple of Guild quest lines in the game at the moment, but there are certainly noticeable Guilds that aren’t in the game - there’s no Dark Brotherhood, for example,” Hines said. ”You can’t set aside a bunch of people to work on a cool Dark Brotherhood quest line unless you’ve figured out a way that you’re going to pay those bodies to spend that time.”
”Otherwise you’d just put them onto something else. We feel like this approach is going to give people who want to play the best value, and reason to look forward to the next new thing that’s coming out. The Elder Scrolls is our crown jewel and it’s the series that made everything we do possible, so it’s a big triple-A title that demands huge, ongoing triple-A support.”
Game director Matt Firor had said any other form of pay model would have meant ”sacrifices and changes we weren’t willing to make.” The Elder Scrolls Online releases on PC April 4th, and on Xbox One and PS4 in June.
