This summer, Bethesda's ZeniMax Online Studios team was caught in the Microsoft layoffs crossfire, with the dev's in-the-works MMO ultimately cancelled as a result. It's said that internally, members of the team were stunned at the cancellation of the project due to its quality, and the game's axing seems to have only spurred them on to make something new.
Talking in a new interview with gamesindustry.biz, Nick Giacomini and Rich Lambert of ZeniMax talked about the ongoing success of The Elder Scrolls Online, and the aftermath of that Microsoft cancellation. The devs are grateful for the ESO fanbase, but are wary to put all of their eggs in that one basket for the future of the studio.
"I don't think you can ride one thing into forever. I mean, obviously we want ESO to be successful, we want it to be that 30-year MMO, and commit to it,
But if you put all your eggs in one basket, there's issues."
Lambert also had some interesting things to say on the studio's ambition moving forward. The ZeniMax boss said "I want us to be the most successful studio in our entire organization" — that organization being Bethesda — while also mentioning that they already have other ideas for another game outside of ESO.
"I want to make more games [...] I'm not done yet, and the team continues to want to make more games as well.
I have lots of ideas. Hopefully we'll be able to share those at some point."
Whether the ZeniMax team will be able to share those ideas, ultimately, will be up to Microsoft. The Xbox owner cancelled the team's other MMO after it had been in the works for years, and it seems like the next one would have to be something truly impressive to be greenlit all the way up to actually releasing over at the Bethesda studio.