The Elder Scrolls Online devs hired a modder from one of its most popular addons to fine-tune its housing tools: 'it was really cool to get James on the team'

An image of Skull Island, lovingly recreated in The Elder Scrolls Online.

(Image credit: Zenimax, Bethesda / House by Futerko)

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of talking with a few of the asset wizards behind The Elder Scrolls Online's player housing community. And they are, in a word, powerful. They've been creating everything from ice cream parlours, to pachinko machines, to just straight-up Howl's Moving Castle—all by clipping premade game assets into each other ("cobbling"). It's some wild stuff. That skull in the image above? That's not a fully-fledged in-game asset, that's a bunch of rocks shoved into each other.

I also spoke to Rich Lambert, the game's creative director who (among other things) revealed to me that the folks over at Zenimax actually scoped out and hired one of the game's housing modders to help work on those systems.

If you're confused as to how modding works in an MMORPG, the dev team allows addons on a case-by-case basis. For example, Lambert told me about a magic carpet mod that lets players fly around their homes while they're building, rapidly moving an object under their feet: "It doesn't hurt anything outside of the house, so we're okay with that kind of stuff."

Lambert also tells me that his team has looked to said modding community not just for ideas, but for talent, as well: "We're doing a lot of things to make the tools better … we ended up hiring the addon author for one of the most popular housing addons—hired him a number of years ago, and he's been focused on building those tools into ESO (and other things, not just housing)."

James Sammartino is now a UI engineer, but back in the day he was Cardinal05, co-creator of Essential Housing Tools—a mod that let players do all sorts of helpful things that weren't available when it was released. Lambert says his team's "taken a number of things from there, like being able to group assets and move them all at once and things like that.

"We ended up hiring him as one of our UI engineers—he's obviously super passionate about the community and super passionate about ESO. It was really cool to get him on the team and have him jump in with both feet, wanting to do everything he can to help the community out."

Lambert said that there were "a number of" features from mods like Essential Housing Tools they'd like to incorporate. "I don't mean to keep teasing it, but in the third quarter we've got a pretty cool housing feature coming along that we're really, really excited about."

I ask Lambert if he's able to share any more details, to which he fairly replies: "I mean, it's housing related. That's basically all I can say."

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.