ZeniMax Online Studios’ Matt Firor penned a letter to The Elder Scrolls Online community last night, checking in on the state of the game, the team, and the future of the MMO for the players, “millions” of whom joined the game for the first time this year.
Notably, Firor says the goal in 2021 was to “right the ship a bit when it came to major update launches,” and he says ZOS was successful, especially compared to 2020. However, the datacenter hardware refreshes will continue and have been extended by hardware shortages and supply chain issues. “To give you all an idea of the impact, some key hardware devices are delayed by one year, most are delayed by 3-5 months. We had intended to have this process complete this year, but it has taken us far longer than we thought it would,” he writes. As for next year?
“Looking ahead to 2022, we will continue to do what we do best: tell great stories and keep the ESO train running. Our content plans will be to back off major plots with ‘end of the world invasion’ themes for a bit to tell a traditional ‘Elder Scrolls’ story of political intrigue and factional infighting, concentrating on one of ESO’s playable races that has not yet had a full cultural and historical deep dive. For more info, you’ll have to wait for our traditional January reveal show. We will also—with the understanding that some of these things are out of our control—keep working on refreshing datacenter hardware as quickly as we can. This will result in a more stable platform experience for you all. And of course, we will continue to work on performance and stability fixes and tweaks in every update.”
Firor does caution that he’s putting the team’s health first, but it does sound like we’ll be getting the same quarterly content cadence as in past years: “We’re still going to have our usual high-quality quarterly content and will continue telling amazing stories, but we just may need to be a bit more selective with how we focus our efforts this coming year,” he says. “We are doing well, ESO is doing well, and we will move forward into 2022, but we are tired and anxious, and I believe everyone will join me in the sentiment that the thing we wish for the most in 2022 is for the world to return to normal.” Hear, hear.
