Naming Elder Scrolls Online its own adventure, dev says

The Elder Scrolls Online has been in the making since Oblivion launched, and while developing an MMO is an enormous task in and of itself, apparently so is finding a suitable and marketable name for the game.

"The marketing department had a white board full of possible names that didn't make the cut," game director Matt Firor told Game Informer. Among them, The Elder Scrolls: Tamriel and The Elder Scrolls: Empires. Firor said they also discussed Origins, since the game is set a thousand years before Skyrim, but it didn't fit especially when future expansions were taken into account. "The Elder Scrolls Origins Second Expansion just doesn't make sense."

In the end the just went with the easy answer: "The Elder Scrolls Online, nice and easy. The title says it all."

Firor knows that expectations are huge for the game among fans of the RPG series, and that having the game set in the Second Era offers the development team a "blank slate" in building stories for the players. "No one knows really what happened in the Second Era because no one has experienced that in the game," he said. "It gives you all the characters and all the features, but none of the stories."