Looking Back At My Time With ZeniMax Online Studios

I write this post with a heavy heart. This is not a game design analysis post or a design pitch document like much of my other articles, but a retrospective look, an introspective and off-the-cuff one at that, at my time at my previous position in the games industry. Considering the layoffs that hit XBox studios across the industry today, and hearing testimonies from my friends who are, or in some cases were, still at ZOS as of today, I feel the need to put my thoughts on paper. So here goes.

I graduated from college in the midst of the Covid pandemic, May 2020, from New York University with a degree in Game Design. Once I had graduated, I then set forth searching for work, as many of my peers did. I will admit that that period was rough, and I’m feeling a similar burn now - sending out countless applications each week, only to receive a cold, automated rejection email at best, or be entirely ghosted at worst. This went on for months, close to a full year. I only ever progressed past the application stage with two studios before I applied to be a contract quality assurance tester at ZeniMax Online Studios. You can understand that this was a frustrating feeling, having to turn myself into a commodity hoping that companies would purchase my time as an employee, making myself and what experience I had (which wasn’t exactly nothing) sound as desirable as possible. And I applied for everything I could find - QA, design, environment art, concept art, engineering - everything. But I knew QA would be my best bet to get my foot in the door. It is the proverbial mail room of the AAA games industry, after all. Plenty of people get their start there, ingrain themselves in a company, then hope they get enough of a shine to move out into bigger and better positions. And it was to have been my start, too.

In March of 2021, my brother and I spoke to a few members of the ZOS team on The Elder Scrolls Online, opportunities granted to us by mutual connections. In particular, I spoke with a combat designer who inspired in my the desire to attain a similar position, something that has pivoted my design portfolio and outlook quite significantly. And eventually, when an opportunity for contact work opened up, my brother and I jumped at the opportunity. We both landed interviews, but ultimately, only my brother was hired. I, however, was told that, should another position open up, they would reach back out to me. For the moment, I was hopeful, but nothing was guaranteed. And so I kept searching. I did consultant work for other teams. I polished my resume. I did personal tabletop game work. And through sheer luck, I was eventually contacted again, and asked for references - they already had me go through the interview process and liked me enough, and I assume my brother was proof I could work just as skillfully, but they just needed some proof. After giving some contacts, I was finally given the fateful call to join the content QA team in May.

I was able to smoothly join their team, and over my time at ZOS, I believe I became one of the team’s biggest contributors. At least, my leads told me as such, but I had the numbers to back it up. Bug counts, closed tasks, efficiency statistics, I quickly became a jack-of-all-trades at any task they could throw at me. I could lead group tasks, I would take initiative in pursuing bizarre edge cases, and eventually I would even assist in laying the infrastructure for test curriculum used by future members of my team. But I was on contract, whose terms would end after three months. My brother was fortunate enough to be hired full time off his contact. I still waited. And waited. And waited.

The time finally came in my final month of my contract, roughly a week shy of my end date. I would be hired full-time… as an Associate QA Tester, a position that had not existed until then. I was unhappy with this at the time - I had all the responsibilities anyone else on the team had, and my performance was verifiably superb, yet I would be given a lower title that felt as if it had been created just to spite my work, potentially to justify a lower rate than my peers. But at the time, I didn’t know how good I had it. The handful of contractors that were hired full-time in that wave would become the last group to be hired off contract to this day. Any other contractors who signed on after me would come to find their contracts extended indefinitely, far beyond the terms originally set. By the time of my departure, their status would never have changed. Over time, I felt like I’d gotten on the last chopper out of ‘Nam.

ZOS would also initiate a hiring freeze around the time of my conversion off-contract. The slow trickle of new faces ground to a halt. Again, I was safe, but this was with the knowledge that I had been converted to full-time because a fresh group of contractors had been hired to take my place. Those who came after me would have no such blessing. All I could do was count my lucky stars and keep working. And as I did, policies began to shift.

I was fully remote at the time of my hiring. ZOS’s offices are located in Maryland, but I was based in Atlanta at the time. Not a problem for quarantine, but as the country’s health situation improved, and the offices’ new QA Suite’s construction wrapped up, the writing was on the wall: I would eventually have to move to work in person. My brother and I actually took steps ahead of schedule to work in the office, moving in with our grandparents and working at the offices five days a week while we looked for apartments. We were practically alone in the building, save for some IT people, some of the QA heads, and a handful of other interns and employees of various divisions, whom we became friends with. I still remember the two of us working most days entirely alone in the QA room, which was still practically untouched from the day quarantine began. Open cans of soda, desk decorations, and various other accoutrements still cluttered the nearby desks, making the room feel like a ghost town. The often dim lighting didn’t help much either.

Occasionally we’d be visited by the one other QA team member who was able to come in, as well as the director of ZOS QA himself, Michael Craighead, who had an office right by our desks. He was a kind man for how scantly we interacted we spoke, and he’d often donate bits and bobs to us from his years at the company - a bottle of Skooma soda here, some books on SCRUM there. At one point, he had us take a look at his page on Moby Games to see his work history, and I found that he’d worked on Backyard Baseball, a game I remembered seeing on the computers at my elementary school. He also was proud especially of the new QA floor that was wrapping up construction, and took us to see it at one point. He was very personable, and clearly was happy to have us with him at the offices before everyone returned as work from home policies winded down. But at the time of the first Microsoft layoffs I’d go through while at ZOS, he would eventually be let go. For much of us in QA, it felt like he took a bullet for us, as no one else at ZOS QA would be laid off. We said our goodbyes, and I never saw him again.

Eventually the new floor’s construction finished, and my brother and I were moved up there. Work from home was also rolled back to three days a week, and the floor began to see much more traffic. I’d finally get to see my coworkers in person and work alongside them. Unsurprisingly to me, being in the office with all of my team did not have much of an increase in the overall quality of my work. But it was good to meet them anyway. I would also be elevated from my associate position, stripping that part of my title and putting me at equal level to the peers I had been working with since day one. I was given more responsibilities, nothing I couldn’t handle. And work continued.

It’s here that I’ll admit that I was very proud to have worked on a game like Elder Scrolls Online. It was part of a franchise I was familiar with - not the hugest fan of, mind you, but I had played Skyrim and at least had a passing awareness of most of the other games - so to be able to work on a game I knew was a part of a major cultural footprint in the industry felt very cool. There was always something new to work on around the corner, new expansions and add-ons, and I was lucky enough to contribute to the game’s latest new playable class, the Arcanist, as well as various dungeons, raids, and especially main content like quests and world bosses. As an enormous fan of RPGs, I was extremely happy to work on a ESO. It was something right in my wheelhouse, and as one of my supervisors described it once, it was a “safe port in a storm”. ESO would always have more work to do. It would always make a decent chunk of money. My position would always have reason to exist, no matter what other things were happening across Microsoft. Perhaps I was naive, but I was content.

ZOS would survive another layoff. It felt practically annual. Other games released under the XBox Studios banner would release, and despite their performance, good or bad, ESO would march on, and so would I. I still remember the day Tango Gameworks closed, among other studios in the family. It’s selfish to admit, but while I was deeply saddened to see people’s jobs vanish like that, even after releasing an acclaimed game like Hi-Fi Rush, I would think to myself that at least it wasn’t me getting the axe. I was “safe”. But not for long.

My departure from ZOS was a complicated situation. Around the time of XBox shuttering several of its studios, an email went around my office. It was an offer for a voluntary separation agreement. At the time, it scared the hell out of us, myself included. I didn’t want to take it, but the fact that it was sent out at all said something: that the company was considering shedding weight at all. That in and of itself was my warning. Still, I didn’t want to take it. Maybe I naively thought that I could just outlast it, and nothing would come of it, but the situation was not so clear cut. The lease on my apartment was also coming to a close, and I’d have to reup it to continue living there. At the advice of my family, I had consider this: if I reupped my apartment lease, and then was laid off, I would be on the hook for a year of rent without income. The two factors were colliding together to make one enormous gamble if I stayed. I did what I could to reassure myself - my teammates, my superiors, they all gave me the time they could to hash out my options, but ultimately, the writing was on the wall. If I gambled, I could lose big. So I made the terrible decision and took the deal, and I left ZeniMax Online Studios. I was and am very fortunate to have a family I could fall back on to support me somewhat as I began my search for new employment, but among those that stayed, most did not have such a safety net.

I genuinely loved it there. I did work I could be proud of on a popular game with clout attached to its name. My coworkers were great people, friendly, and the benefits of the office were pretty great. But looking back, perhaps I do so with rose tinted lenses. Moving up out of QA was not easy. While I did see it happen every so often, it was hardly a common occurrence, and those who did usually had been working in QA for a very long time before they got their big break. My performance in QA was top notch, to the point that I was put on a different project than ESO, which as of today has been cancelled. I had been hoping that, as this game went from pre-production into production proper, I’d have a chance to cut the line and move into a development role the moment one opened up. But this pathway was unclear, and I couldn’t directly see the road. I wasn’t working toward anything directly, just chipping away at my tasks while I waited for my opportunity. It wouldn’t come. Knowing what I do now, I would most certainly have been let go as many of my friends were today.

For the past year, I’ve dwelled on my decision and the uncertainty of it. Most nights, I would go to bed and find it worming its way into my head, even as I tried to put my mind off ii. Did I make the right choice? Could I have kept my head down and survived? Will I ever get a chance like working at ZOS again? It’s unclear. But as of today, I can at least take the weight off my shoulders and say that if I hadn’t gotten out when I did, I would most certainly be up the creek now. It feels bad, but at least I have closure.

So what’s the silver lining?

I refuse to be a pessimist any longer. I’ve always styled myself as someone who can look on the bright side of things, even when such a claim has hardly been true. I am often very hard on myself, and I take great awareness of my mistakes, my flaws, my inadequacies. But I cannot allow that to continue. Not today.

I have polished myself to a fine shine since my departure from ZOS. I earned a certification in C# programming for Unity. I’ve been learning to make games in Unreal Engine 5, and learning not just its inbuilt visual coding system Blueprint along the way, but C++ programming as well. I’ve been to GDC, and made connections both there and beyond it. I’ve spoken to people across the industry, put my name in peoples heads and mouths. And I’ve had the opportunity to work on personal projects, and now prototypes and games I hope I can push to audiences all on my own.

My skills have never been higher. My learning has never been more driven. I want to become more than I was. More than just QA. I entered this industry to be a designer, and by my own power I will be. ZOS trained me in the ways of professional, AAA game creation, something I will always be grateful for, and introduced me to so many great people that I hope can land gracefully and move on to bigger and better positions in this reeling industry. I hope the future looks brighter than the present, for all of us, but I know it will take work. And with my conscience clear now, for the first time in twelve months, I feel like I can finally take my next step.

I’m working on a game in Unreal 5.

Not a tabletop game for friends, or a prototype following the tutoring of a Udemy course. I’m making a game with other people, one that we will release to the world for real. Something small, but with enough sauce for us to be proud of. Something we can call our own, with inspirations on its sleeve. It doesn’t have a name yet, but the plan is to make something similar to Five Nights At Freddy’s - the originals, back when all you could do was sit and struggle to survive. We want it to be more complex, with more to do while you wait for doom to approach. And we want it to have a notably different theme than other games of its ilk - no modern aesthetic, no childrens’ media gone dark, just pure, classic horror. Something resembling the adventure games of yore, where magic and fantasy were such commonplace genres that they were nearly inescapable.

I can’t help but think as I work on it that it would have never existed had I stayed complacent at ZOS. I hope it will turn out well, and people will enjoy it. And most of all, I hope to show off parts of it soon. A proper dev diary, unlike the slacking I’ve been doing with my Overwatch hero concept as I learn a brand new game engine. So please, keep your head up, and stay tuned. There’s always a silver lining.