Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom interview — how ZeniMax conjured the Arcanist

The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom is now available on Xbox, and we spoke with creative director Rich Lambert to discuss the nostalgia-filled expansion.

The Elder Scrolls Online is gigantic, offering us ways to explore Bethesda's Tamriel with friends, meet new or returning allies and enemies, and experience new activities — all of which are canon with the mainline single-player games. Despite the vast amount of content already available, developer ZeniMax Online Studios continues to roll out yearly expansions. Last year we had the chance to visit a never-before-seen area of Tamriel with the High Isle Chapter, which we spoke about with creative director Rich Lambert in January, but this year's Chapter, Necrom, is a nostalgia-driven adventure, and we couldn't pass on the chance to sit down with Lambert once again.

Nostalgia and a Daedric Prince that wants to stop destruction

"Mora especially was one that has been on our list for a very long time. I think Mora is one of the coolest Daedric Princes. They're not really inherently good or inherently evil, which is kind of a nice change of pace," Lambert said. "They are just really concerned about knowledge, hoarding knowledge, and documenting as many things as they can. So being able to explore that and show that in their realm was a lot of fun for us."

Indeed, this year we're helping Hermaeus Mora stop a plot that threatens the very fabric of reality, and Necrom sees us head to Mora's Daedric realm of Apocrypha, first seen in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC.

"I think that the biggest thing we wanted to pull in from Skyrim was that kind of sense of nostalgia with Apocrypha. They [Bethesda Game Studio] really set the bar for what it could look like, and then we wanted to expand upon it. It's all about knowledge and cataloging and whatnot, books are a huge element, and you get to see that in at least one of the biomes we built, but we also wanted to kind of take that a step further and really put our own take on things, Lambert said.

the elder scrolls online necrom xbox interview creative director rich lambert

Hermaeus Mora's realm of Apocrypha features towering stacks of books filled with forbidden knowledge, but much like any other Daedric realm, it's also full of dangers for any adventurer that travels there. Its landscape will feel overly familiar to players that enjoyed the location in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but interestingly, a lot of the inspiration ZeniMax used for it came from fossils. "We have Clockwork City, and there is a very unique way in which a lot of data is stored there. It has a lot more kind of steampunky, almost computerized, like things, and we didn't want to do that here," Lambert explained. "So we started digging into fossils and how fossils could be used in this regard, and that really started informing some of the biome choices and some of the landmarks that we created in the zone as a result — it was just a lot of fun digging into that side of things because we knew we wanted to tell our own stories, but still make sure that people felt like this felt like the Apocrypha they knew."

Of course, Apocrypha isn't the only new area we visit in Necrom, and to get to the Daedric realm, we'll first need to travel to the Telvanni Peninsula to find the portal in the titular city of Necrom. This won't be the first time the Peninsula has appeared in a game either, as we had a chance to explore it a little with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Both the Telvanni and Mora seemed to have been a match made in heaven... Oblivion.

"There's always tons of lore in-game when looking back at the previous games, even for us there were locations that we didn't get to at launch or with Morrowind that we wanted to get to. The Telvanni were one of those kinds of cultures that we really wanted to dig into, so it made a lot of sense for us to kind of go there, especially with the type of story we were trying to tell once we focused on Hermaeus Mora and being able to go to Apocrypha," Lambert said. "Bringing the Telvanni into it made a lot of sense because they're some of the most powerful magic users in all of Tamriel and this is very high magic that has a cosmic horror kind of vibe and feel to it."

Rise of the Arcanist: "What the hell does Bob mean?"

In keeping with Necrom's knowledge-based setting, the new Arcanist class offers us the chance to wield Mora's forbidden knowledge to protect our allies, heal their wounds, or unleash a devasting barrage of pain on our enemies. With Apocrypha and the Arcanist being so entwined with each other, we were interested to find out what came first, the chicken or the egg — Apocrypha or the Arcanist?

"A little bit of both, right? Like chicken or the egg is a good analogy. So, we wanted to do one for a while, but there were a lot of technical challenges, and there were a lot of art challenges to do that, and we were able to resolve a lot of those. So we knew we could build a class. We didn't really know what the class was or when we were kind of going into it. One of the really fun parts about the team that we put together for that; is we gave them specific goals, like it had to be tightly integrated into the overall narrative. And outside of that, it had to feel different, had to look different, and it has to be kind of a completely different experience," Lambert explained. "Then the team just started iterating and going through and we probably went through 40 different class types on our way towards the Arcanist. It was interesting. We kind of struggled early on because people were so tied to names. They start doing it and naming it, what is the Bard, what is a Monk, what is a Berserker, you know? What is this and that, and the names really started kind of pigeonholing the team into what the class could be and the mechanics that were associated with it.

"We just kind of had a little bit of a powwow and were like, 'you know what, screw the name... it's called Bob! Bob is the name of the class, but what does that mean?' It's like, exactly, it's a fresh slate, go start prototyping mechanics, and figuring out what feels good. We landed on the crux of the combo point system, and then, once we had the mechanics figured out, we started to layer in a lot of the lore, and we knew that we wanted it tightly interwoven with the story; it made a lot of sense. Once we figured out exactly what Hermaeus Mora was and the story that we were telling, we could layer in those kinds of elements. But yeah, it was really interesting how we went through it. It was very different than the way we've created our other classes, and I think it worked extremely well because what we have is this really interesting class that feels like it's part of the update, but really stands on its own. It doesn't play like anything we've made, it doesn't sound like anything we made, it doesn't really look like anything we've made, so it was really, really positive for us."

Lambert tells us that the Arcanist's reception has been "unbelievably positive across the board, new players and existing players alike," but it sounds like the team at ZeniMax also had a ton of fun testing the class themselves. "When you're going through like what the hell does Bob mean? Like, exactly. Don't be constrained by anything. Just go in and make something really cool, try some bits and bobs out, and see what happens. It was really freeing, like things just really changed from then on. And we started getting really, really cool, creative pitches, mechanics, and things — it was tons of fun.

"We knew from the other classes that the Arcanist had to be able to fulfill any of the major roles. But what it did inform was some of the things that the Arcanist probably shouldn't be able to do," Lambert said. "The portal is a really good example of that when we initially started prototyping it. There were a lot less restrictions on the portal and where you could place them and how you could use them. We were breaking all kinds of things as a result, getting out of the world, breaking encounters, doing stuff, so just being able to go in and play test a lot of existing content to see where those holes were really helped us a lot."

Necrom's success is only part of this year's content

When we spoke to Rich Lambert at the beginning of the year for our High Isle retrospective, he told us that a focus for ZeniMax in 2023 is to have smooth rollouts for updates, as High Isle was prone to bugs and stability issues. With the launch of Necrom, and the two dungeons in the Scribes of Fate DLC that arrived in March, it would seem the team has succeeded thus far.

"We didn't have any server downtime. The servers came up early, there haven't been any major bugs, we don't have to do any hotfixes... it was a very, very good update for us."

While there haven't been any major bugs introduced with the Necrom Chapter, the odd bug will have made it through, which ZeniMax will look to squash in the next couple of updates. We can also expect to see the new Endless Dungeon Runner system arrive toward the end of this year, although that remains a mystery to us.

"The next few updates that we have planned, 39 and 40, are focused on bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. We've also got Endless Dungeon Runner coming out in the fourth quarter as well. So, there are still tons of new things coming in."

While the future remains forbidden knowledge, we still have the exciting Necrom Chapter to explore, which launched just last week. We were eager to find out what Lambert has been most excited for players to experience when exploring the Telvanni Peninsula and Apocrypha.

"Oh, boy. I mean, there's lots of really cool content in there. Obviously the Arcanist is probably one of the highlights. It's our first class, like you said, in four years now, but I am kind of a big fan of Hermaeus Mora and kind of what they stand for. So I was really excited to get players into Apocrypha to revisit a location they know but also see how much different it could be and what other things there are there, and I think there's some absolutely spectacular world-building done in there. The art is amazing, and so it was really exciting to see players dig in there and just kind of get lost in this really, really cool environment and just have a blast doing it!"

The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom is now available on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. Have you been exploring the new content? If so, we'd love to know what you think of your adventure so far. Drop a comment below and let us know, adventurers!

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Written by Tom West

Tom has been playing video games since he was old enough to hold a controller, experimenting with a number of systems until he eventually fell in love with Xbox. With a passion for the platform, he decided to make a career out of it, and now happily spends his days writing about that which he loves. If he’s not hunting for Xbox achievements, you’ll likely find him somewhere in The Elder Scrolls Online or fighting for survival in Battlefield.