The head of the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online, Matt Firor, talks about the open world and how it has changed over time. He believes that no one would play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which is highly revered by many role-playing game fans, in the same way today. The game from 2022 is completely out of date. It is his favorite game, but today’s players lack the patience for such an open world.
Who is Matt Firor? Matt Firor is one of the most important MMORPG developers ever:
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Open worlds used to be a mystical adventure place, today they are annoying
This is his topic now: The online magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published an article about how the open world has changed over the years. The thesis of the article is:
Firor believes: Players no longer want the disorganized open world
This is what Firor says: Firor believes that the change in the open world is due to players no longer having patience for the feeling of being lost in an open world.
He cites the open world of Morrowind as an example of what developers like Bethesda can no longer do. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was released in 2002 and was considered a milestone in the genre at the time:
If you play this now – there’s no compass, no map, the quests are literally ‘Go to the third tree on the right and walk 50 steps west.’
And if you did that now, nobody would play it. Very few people would play it. Now you have to give them hints and clues, and nobody really wants to spend that much time solving problems. They want to hear the story or interact with another player or with an NPC.
Players today are not as tough as they used to be
Firor explains that Morrowind is a great game, one of his favorite games, but the way Morrowind’s open world tells the story is no longer up to date.
Today, gamers are no longer as hardcore as they used to be, when only die-hard gaming fans owned a PC or the first generation of consoles and wanted to spend as much time in a game as possible.
Today, players have so many options for how to spend their time that as a game designer you have to make sure that games draw in, captivate and are fun for their players:
Running around a field trying to measure 50 paces from a tree is no longer part of it, which is kind of sad because I’m old school.
Even today, you still have to support and appeal to these die-hard players, but you also have to keep an eye on a large audience that only has 20 minutes to spend in a game.
A game designer today must address both groups as a target audience.
MMORPG players know what Firor describes
This is what’s behind it: MMORPG players are also familiar with this development. Today, you can see it in the fact that quest NPCs in MMORPGs have big question marks above their heads and are marked on the mini-map. They are also conveniently located in quest hubs, as close together as possible.
Quests usually work in such a way that you can see and know exactly where you have to go and even the mobs are marked on the map.
If a quest does not have such position indicators, but only describes in text form what the player has to do, you can be sure that this quest is a much sought-after topic for the MMORPG and is covered by gaming sites and YouTube channels with precise “How to complete the secret quest” guides.
One of Matt Firor’s companions at DAOC and Mythic back in the 2000s was Mark Jacobs. In contrast to Firor, who moved to a large company after his time at Mythic and is apparently happy there, Jacobs broke with the gaming industry after a bad time at EA and tried to do his own thing: Legendary developer says: His new MMORPG was on the verge of collapse, now it has a release date