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ZeniMax Online Studios founder and former The Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor left the company after parent studio Microsoft canceled his MMO Project Blackbird in 2025, but even a year later, he takes it personally when people compare ESO to World of Warcraft.
It "still gets under my skin," Firor tells MinnMax host Ben Hanson in a new interview, when anyone refers to ESO as "a WoW clone" – partly because he flat-out disagrees, and partly because approaching Elder Scrolls Online that way makes the game experience worse for anyone expecting World of Warcraft in Tamriel.
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Firor is an expert on what MMO is or isn't like another. He served as Dark Age of Camelot's producer in 2001, he has nearly 30 years of credits on some of the most influential massively multiplayer online games in history, including 1997 MMO Silent Death Online, 1998 MMORPG Aliens Online, and more. So when it comes to a relatively more modern game like ESO, he can say confidently, "Every game takes things that the games before them did and mixes them together in a different soup, and it's awesome."
"We had Elder Scrolls, and so we were fantasy," Firor continues, "built to be a multiplayer game – like that was the mandate when I got hired, was make the Elder Scrolls MMO, and I did. But, systems-wise, it is so different from WoW."
It does, at least, seem like most people who still play both games agree. In one popular Reddit thread comparing the two, the top comment summarizes what seems to be the general consensus: play ESO for the story, and WoW for the power progression. Another comment says the mere act of pitting the two against each other is as useless as contrasting "tea and coffee" to "absinthe and Mt. Dew."
Firor expresses similar indifference. "WoW's a fantastic game," he says. "It's probably my second-most played game of all time." It just makes no substantial impact on The Elder Scrolls Online, he insists.
"If you sit down and play it like it's a WoW clone, you're not going to have fun at all," he warns. "If you sit down and play it like an Elder Scrolls game, like Elder Scrolls Online, it's a fantastic game."
