Elder Scrolls Online is switching from chapters to “bite-sized” updates in the wake of Microsoft’s “awful” layoffs

Earlier this year, Microsoft laid off a lot of people and cancelled projects at various subsidiary game studios, as part of what company CEO Satya Nadella has whimsically called the “enigma of success”. Elder Scrolls Online developers ZeniMax Online Studios were among those making cuts – they buried an unannounced project codenamed Blackbird, which was reportedly a nimble MMO shooter of some kind. In the process, studio head Matt Firor also left the company. Unionised staff members have described the reductions as “inhumane”, demoralising and counterproductive, with one worker commenting that “a lot of practical knowledge just disappeared overnight”.

Now, studio game director Rich Lambert and game director Nick Giacomini have been chatting a little about where ZeniMax Online Studios is going next. They still have plenty of ideas for new game projects, apparently, but for the moment, the focus appears to be on streamlining the update process for ESO.

“It was super emotional, it was awful,” Lambert reflected to GamesIndustry.biz, discussing the mass layoffs. “But then after, you pick yourself up off the floor and […] you realize that we have this responsibility to our community, to the game, to everybody else that is still there to move forward. That’s really hard, but that’s the goal, to continue to move forward and keep ESO going.”

The Elder Scrolls fantasy MMO is in “a bit of a transition year”, Lambert continued. The development team are looking at switching from the existing bulkier, chapters-based format to a speedier, “bite-sized” updates approach, in line with latter-day seasonal content thinking. Instead of dedicating themselves to one huge expansion for around 18 months, where “most of the team’s efforts are focused on building the chapter,” they plan to get “smaller, more bite-sized things out quicker,” as Lambert explained.

It’s hoped that they’ll be able to turn around these dinkier additions in six to nine months on average, and act faster on player requests. “We’re kind of too predictable, and we want to shake that up and be a little bit more reactive,” Lambert said.

That said, game creation remains complex, and there’s no guarantee ZeniMax Online Studios will be able to chop development times in half, just by shelving the concept of chapters.

“It takes a long time to build art, because you’ve got to model it out and you’ve got to rig it and skin it, all these things,” Lambert said. “It takes time to code things out. It takes time when we’re building stories: you’re writing words on a paper and then you put that in-engine, and then you have to send it out to be voiceovered and localized.”

In his memo about this year’s mass layoffs, which come amid a time of seeming prosperity for Microsoft, Satya Nadella suggested that the overall idea was to transform Microsoft into more of a generative AI business.

“The success we want to achieve will be defined by our ability to go through this difficult process of ‘unlearning’ and ‘learning’,” he wrote. “It requires us to meet changing customer needs, by continuing to maintain and scale our current business, while also creating new categories with new business models and a new production function.”

Nadella added that Microsoft will “reimagine every layer of the tech stack for AI – infrastructure, to the app platform, to apps and agents”. He encouraged his minions to maintain a “growth mindset”.

With all that in mind, are the creators of Elder Scrolls Online making much use of generative AI, as they embark on what seems basically like a mission to pump out faster updates with fewer people? Not a whole lot, going by Lambert’s commentary.

“I mean, obviously we’ve looked into it,” he said. “Microsoft has got their big push for AI. But we don’t really use a lot of it right now. I use a lot of it for meeting summaries and whatnot, because it just makes my life easier. It helps organise my inbox and stuff like that. But we don’t have a ton of it right now.”

As for what ZeniMax Online Studios might do post-ESO-streamlining, Lambert had this to say: “I want to make more games. I’m not done yet, and the team continues to want to make more games as well. I have lots of ideas. Hopefully we’ll be able to share those at some point.”