It's extremely unusual for a videogame developer to take customer feedback as seriously as Bethesda has with The Elder Scrolls Online. When the game was originally unveiled in 2012, it immediately drew criticism for its similarity to World of Warcraft. This was largely the result of Bethesda's decision to use a third-person perspective rather than the franchise's historic first-person view.
However, in a recent interview, Maria Aliprando, Creature Combat Designer for The Elder Scrolls Online, revealed that Bethesda went back to the drawing board after the fans started chiming in.
"We weren't originally planning to do a first-person view," she told
Eurogamer. "The first-person view actually came along from direct feedback. So, we absolutely read all of the feedback from all of the forums, especially the Bethesda forums."
It wasn't a small undertaking, either. Aliprando explained that the first-person perspective was originally abandoned for technical reasons. So, the developers had to overcome a series of major hurdles in order to satisfy the fan base.
"Through the feedback, we were reinspired to go back and redo that first person [perspective]," Aliprando said. "We had an old prototype that just wasn't working out, and what we have now is really what we're going with."
The fact that Bethesda was willing to tackle such a large-scale problem in order to appease the fans says a lot about the respect that this group demands. However, we won't know if the work has paid off until The Elder Scrolls Online is released next year.