Developers working on The Elder Scrolls Online don't really think of the long-running game as an MMO because, at this point, it's more of a "virtual world."
ZeniMax Online Studios director Matt Firor says as much in an interview with GamesRadar+: "This is why we don't like to refer to it as an MMO, because it's just freighted with so much baggage from 2001. And I made games in 2001, I'm responsible for a lot of that baggage."
If the massively multiplayer fantasy RPG isn't an MMO, then what the hell is it? "I actually view it like a virtual world and there's lots of room for different thing to do in a virtual world," Firor explains. "If you want to do an assassination simulator, go do the Dark Brotherhood stuff. If you want to have a hotel and go in and show off your house to your friends, you can do that. We literally have players that only do housing and craft furniture for their friends and only play the card game."
The Elder Scrolls Online was apparently always designed with the intent to foster that feeling, "because the way the leveling system works in the game is that leveling is very personal to you," Firor adds. "You can party with other people and your levels can be different and the game handles that, which means that there's no vertical power chase in Elder Scrolls Online."
Calling the offshoot an "online roleplaying game" instead gives the studio "enough space that we can define that how we want," though if players call Elder Scrolls Online anyway, Firor is "not gonna fight it... it's just that I don't think of it like that."
This isn't the first time that ZeniMax Online developers have spoken about The Elder Scrolls Online with language that distances it from the genre either. Narrative director Bill Slavicsek recently boasted about how The Elder Scrolls Online is basically "the equivalent of more than 10 single-player games," while its Steam page description avoids the phrase MMO entirely. Firor previously called it "one of the successful live service games," rather than an MMO, too.
