It seems weird to think of Elder Scrolls Online as an underdog in the MMORPG genre. It’s been a big five MMO since its first couple of years of life, and it routinely wins top awards from people who actually know MMOs. As the purveyor of an MMORPG website, I can tell you that it’s one of the few MMORPGs whose coverage could pre-empt almost anything else; if it’s WoW, GW2, XIV, or ESO, it leads.

And yet ZeniMax Online Studios apparently feels as if it’s been neglected by the greater gaming industry, which is probably true, as most MMOs have been neglected by the greater gaming industry, at least to my recollection over my last 15 years of doing this job. In fact, that’s the subject of a recent interview excerpt over on PCGamesN, which chatted up former ESO game director and now ZOS studio director Rich Lambert.

“It’s something that’s always kind of befuddled me; ESO has always been flying under the radar,” Lambert reportedly said. “It’s either not taken seriously or dismissed or whatnot. But it’s an amazing game, and it has an amazing community. Once you get to experience what the community and the game are like, you generally stick around for a while.”

“I’ve been in countless interviews and at countless shows over the years where they’re like ‘oh, when does this come out?’ It’s been out for years! It’s kind of mind-boggling to me [that we’ve] flown under the radar, and I think it’s because we don’t trumpet [ESO]. We’re generally very behind the scenes, just working really hard, doing things right – we don’t necessarily celebrate our successes as much as we maybe should. Some of that is going to change; our communication style is going to change going forward, and maybe that will help some of those things.”

I’m not even sure he’s wrong there; one of the worst things we could say about ESO prior to 2025 was that its content cadence was solid and predictable and not very flashy. In fact, we did say that! But I bet some of our readers have opinions.