Departing leadership at Elder Scrolls Online maker ZeniMax Online has said it has “tremendous confidence” in the future of the MMO, but recent Xbox cuts are already showing up in ways fans can notice. In addition to the game’s new seasonal roadmap already slipping, the development team is also making some changes to the game’s microtransaction-based Web Crown Store.
“To help manage workload, we have decided to remove the Web Crown Store from the official elderscrollsonline.com website,” reads a message this week from ESO community manager Kevin Gbolie. “The ability to acquire crowns via the website will remain and, of course, this does not affect the items that will be offered on the Crown Store in The Elder Scrolls Online, you will just need to login into the game to view and purchase the latest offerings.”
The monthly Crown Store Showcase blog will also be changing. Instead of a detailed list of each new item with hi-res images, the post will become a brief bulleted list to save the team time. None of these are significant changes in and of themselves, but they come at a time when fans of the 12-year-old MMO are worried about its place in Xbox’s evolving portfolio.
Microsoft’s gaming division cut 1,600 people earlier this month, including hundreds from ZeniMax’s Maryland offices. Members of Elder Scrolls Online‘s leadership were among the layoffs, including studio head Jo Burba, executive producer Susan Kath, studio game director Rich Lambert, and production director Ala Diaz. “The roadmaps we previously shared will be shifting,” read an update from the team earlier this month.
“To be blunt, the team responsible for the blog and those screenshots doesn’t have the capacity to provide those at the scale we could before,” Gbolie wrote on the ESO forum this week. “But we will provide what we can for now and adjust from there.” Some of the game’s most loyal fans remain worried. “It is concerning. I’m tired of being called a doomer by just being realistic about this stuff, it’s not friggen good guys, wake the frick up I swear,” one player wrote.
But ZeniMax Online has reportedly claimed quality content will continue and ESO still has a bright future ahead of it. “Some good news for a change,” super fan Baratron wrote on the game’s Discord earlier this month. “This is important. According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), Zenimax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset. Which, as we know, are both highly acclaimed DLCs. So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode.”