MiracleOfSound said:
Seems like Bethesda's next big project is very likely to be a TES MMO:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/03/15/report-bethesda-working-on-elder-scroll-mmo.aspx
Personally I just hope this doesn't mean no Fallout 4. I like Bethesda because I'm a single player guy who is sick of multiplayer being shoved into everything.
I would be sad to see them change direction.
How do you guys feel about this?
We need more single player RPGs, not less. My major concern is that if they decide to do an MMO off of this property we're going to see an end to the single player series. I mean when Ultima Online came out, the single player Ultima games vanished soon thereafter, when World Of Warcraft came out we stopped seeing Warcraft RTS games. I cannot think of a major game franchise that has managed to continue strong single player game development, while also having an MMO based off of it out there.
Part of the charm of Tamriel and the whole series is being this bigger than life bad arse wandering around an open world, and doing these amazing things. I mean the lore is good and all that, but when you get down to it, it's a fairly standard fantasy setting. If it wasn't for you being some god-duelling, multi-guilding, variation on The Chosen One who gets to run around exploring and doing all kinds of crazy stuff that just wouldn't work in an MMO, there would be nothing special about this at all. You do an Elder Scrolls property where you just play a general adventurer and involve yourself in a more humble experience where the whole world doesn't revolve around you... and well, the whole charm that makes these games is gone.
Single player games and MMOs both have their own unique charms, being one adventurer among many and comparitively humble in a persistant world can be fun, but so can being the epic hero around which everything else revolves. Elder Scrolls is defined by being a quality experience of the latter kind, and it should remain that way.
Of course what I think doesn't really matter, apparently Bethesda sees the money potentially involved in an MMO, and they plan to follow the green. I suspect this means "Skyrim" will be the last game of the series, and probably the last game of of it's kind. Really with the way Bioware has turned into a developer of cinematic shooters and brawlers, Bethesda going to MMOs largely means that the last major developer of epic single player RPGs is gone.