You’ve got to pick a pocket or two thousand
With sneaking and stealing now implemented into Elder Scrolls Online, it’s only right that Bethesda Softworks added something to use it with: enter Thieves Guild. This new content takes place in Hammerfell, bringing the dusty sand-covered zone back into the foreground as plays pilfer their way through the multiplayer universe.
To find out more about the upcoming Thieves Guild DLC we spoke with the game’s director Matt Firor about the new content, and what it means for Elder Scrolls Online.
GameWatcher: Elder Scrolls Online is unique in that it can approach extra content since it doesn’t always have to rely on having to extend a particular storyline. Does that give you extra freedom for design?
Matt Firor: I’m glad you picked up on that because our last DLC Orsinium was heavily story-based with some systematic things like bosses and we had some fun with that. But yeah, Thieves Guild is kind of a marriage of story quest content with cool characters and an epic story that everyone loves from the other Elder Scrolls games but we also made it so that quests take you out to the rest of Tamriel. Mostly for a couple of reasons: one, we had the Justice System that went in about a year ago and players can steal and pickpocket and things like that, and now there’s a reason to do it because we make the Thieves Guild DLC tie in to the Justice System. So the Thieves Guild actually gives you contracts so you can go and steal from a specific lockbox in Daggerfall for example. So really, it kind of ties the world together more in ways that we haven’t really done before.
GameWatcher: Does that affect the way you design the content for this DLC?
Matt Firor: Well we had the cool story, but the Thieves Den as it’s called in Abah’s Landing is an outlaw refuge just like the ones everyone already knows in the rest of the game, except this one is actually the headquarters of the Thieves Guild. So it has a job’s board and NPCs, and the NPCs can give you a quest and the quest can be part of the story but it can also be part of an adventure to go out and figure out who the personalities of the Thieves Guild are and what their motivations are. But it can also be to simply go out into Daggerfall and steal things from people’s homes. It’s a hub of things to do if you really enjoy sneaking around.
GameWatcher: How did you go about designing these new sorts of quests?
Matt Firor: Well we’ve got these new quests called Heists and they’re different because you have to go into parts of Tamriel and you have to sneak and you cannot be discovered by the guards, there are places to hide - so it’s much more skill, stealth-based gameplay which is an all-new quest type. And we also came up with - in Abah’s Landing, which is a trading city - and there are opportunities to sneak into warehouses and steal from them.
GameWatcher: With Hammerfell being so completely different in terms of visual design, was it a challenge returning to the area?
Matt Firor: Well it’s actually fun, because Tamriel is hugely diverse. But yeah, Hammerfell is the one province that is sandy and Sahara desert-like with palm trees and the like. So we have one zone in the game, Alik’r, but the Thieves Guild content takes place in another part of Hammerfell called Huw’s Bane which is at the tip of the peninsula. It was great to go back and work with the desert-type stuff and not do another forest zone, but also it gave us a chance to work on the stuff we’d learnt from Orsinium. Especially how the city was built.
GameWatcher: It must be nice to work on a zone that hasn’t been in an Elder Scrolls game before…
Matt Firor: It definitely is. Because we’re set a 1000 years before the other Elder Scrolls games it gives us plenty of scope for characters and story but not so much with landmass because that’s not enough time for geology to change. But yeah, it’s cool to approach something that hasn’t been in an Elder Scrolls game before - as far as I know, maybe it was in Arena the very first game. It was a lot of fun.
GameWatcher: So just generally, how do you decide what content to work on and include in DLC?
Matt Firor: So for the first DLC we worked on after the console launch last year was things that we had been planning on for a while, Imperial City, Orsinium and now Thieves Guild and obviously Dark Brotherhood is coming up next. Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood are sort of hallmark Elder Scrolls experiences that everyone is interested in. And they have a certain framework, there’s always story, there’s a lot of intrigue, there’s a lot of gameplay associated with them. We approach those with the idea that it’s got to feel familiar to those who have played Elder Scrolls games before, it’s got to fit into the world but it also has to exploit some cool Elder Scrolls Online systems. Which is why with Thieves Guild we also sent players back into the world to places they haven’t been to in a long time. At this point there’s a huge, huge amount of landmass in the game and so there’s a lot of space there to actually implement systems that can freshen up these areas. For example when I play it on internal server I haven’t been to Daggerfall in over a year probably but my first quest in Daggerfall sent me back there and I go to go back and see it again. It was pretty cool. And so that’s the way we’re approaching future DLC, what’s the cool story we can tell but how can we implement it with the rest of the world so it feels really cool?
GameWatcher: Will that affect the way you decide what content to create since you’ll be sending players back to experience areas they haven’t been to for a while?
Matt Firor: That’s one of the goals, but it’s not the only goal. We give you new areas, we give you new story, new geography, so it can’t be all of one thing and none of another. There’s a balance. But yeah, I think that most future DLCs are going to explore a lot of Tamriel in both new and old areas.
GameWatcher: You’ve previously emphasised that the community playing ESO is the reason the game has been a success and that it has affected the way the game is developed and played. Is that true for deciding on what kind of content to create?
Matt Firor: We always take feedback into account. It was interesting because people have actually be asking for Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood for a long time. It’s not too hard to listen to feedback and realise that people want to be the Gray Fox again. But we’re always listening; this update and the Thieves Guild has a ton of stuff that is free, like the 64-bit client that will help performance and things like that. Scrolling combat text that will appear on screen - how much damage you’re dealing - and taking all of those things and feedback from that.
GameWatcher: How do you find a balance between working on updates to the game and new paid-for content?
Matt Firor: We have a list for every quarterly update for the next four, five even siz quarters and we always state the development time for them and merging community feedback and it can be things likes text chat on consoles. We took that feedback and put it our own plan. So think of it as us having a bucket of things to do, we have to create new content, we have to always polish the things we want to add, we have to create stuff for the Crown Store and we leave a space for emerging community feedback.
Elder Scrolls Online will have the Thieves Guild DLC unlock on the 7th March, 2016 adding in a new story and plenty of new sneaking missions to undertake in the world of Tamriel.
