Hope you weren't too excited about that Elder Scrolls MMO

[AdamRhodes]

The mechanics are pure slop, and can/would be affected by latency, which can be problematic unless your game is 100% PvP and you just don't give a fig about the people with shit connections. The world is too small, and too content lite/repetitive. The great strength of Elder Scrolls games comes through willing suspension of disbelief and inhabiting their carefully built world, which is a world sized and built for one. Having other players...HUNDREDS of other players...knocking around in that space wouldn't do it any favors. And GameByro has been used for an MMO before (WAR) and ran like a crippled pig.

You'd want a robust, crisp engine. You'd want a significantly larger world, with significantly broader/more diverse content. You'd need to completely rebuilt/rescript combat, both to be forgiving of latency and to create cooperate/competitive challenges in order to properly leverage the one great selling point of MMOs. You'd have to deepen and expand the leveling and crafting. You'd have to allow a shift to third person...PROPERLY ANIMATED third person...for those who like to be able to see their character, which at this point has become an expected genre convention. By the time you were done, it wouldn't really resemble Skyrim at all.

Have you seen Daggerfall's map? To walk from one end to the other takes real-time days. Plus, for diversity we'll be all over Tamriel, not just in Skyrim. This isn't Skyrim:The MMO after all. Balance is definitely gonna be a major issue. Por ejemple, in Oblivion and Skyrim the enemies scale to your level, with tougher enemies appearing more frequently the stronger you are. How are we supposed to implement that in a game that could potentially have a lvl. 1 character adventuring alongside a lvl. 50? Unless they remove levels entirely and base enemy damage and defense on respective combat-related skills. ...Actually, that could work. Same enemy on screen but is sufficiently difficult for both players. Definitely kinks to work out.

Not what I'm talking about. The skill decay I'm trying to get at is not a zero-sum getup. In essence, it's a (relatively slow) process by which over X amount of play time where a skill is not used, it's value starts to decrease. Right off the top of my head, I'd probably go with 1% of a level per hour of playtime or thereabouts, and the percentage value would slowly increase the longer you go without using that particular skill, with a minimum threshold it can decrease in a given period of time (probably something like 10% of the initial, highest level per week). You can keep any skill capped by using it regularly, but skills you never use atrophy. It keeps players invested in the set of skills they selected as their "core". How big that is depends entirely on the player and how much time they want to invest into it.

Well that's just terrible. That would shackle players to the game, or their characters atrophy. Or shackle you to specific tasks, or specific skills atrophy. The genre badly needs to move AWAY from that, not towards it. I don't think you'll ever see a system like this, outside of maybe an extremely niche indie/kickstarter project.

When I read Agayek's idea I thought it was great. The skill only atrophies when game time passes, so the less you use it in-game, the lower it gets. When you aren't playing, your skills are safe. But the way he described it means that you can perform a specific action and the corresponding skill is safe from atrophy. Yup, lotta kinks.

 

[Keith Reedy]

I find your avatar picture greatly appropriate. An elderscrolls mmo is a terrible idea I was outraged when tor became an mmo I wanted another old republic game not a crap ass wow clone and now there doin the same to tes I hope they aren't gonna stop makin tes games. I hope they aren't that stupid

Pete Hines already confirmed that Zenimax Online's mmo will not affect Bethesda Game Studios production of games.

Thank god that the best news I've had all day you rock

 

[Khazoth]

I love how the internet works, in the real world i'm a cold cynical human being.


On the internet, by comparitive standards i'm a wide eyed optimist.

And all this is just because I actually wait to play a game before I let someone tell me what my opinion should be.

 

[Sir CheezyPie]

Honestly? Didn't really care when I first read about it. Still disappointing however.

 

[tthor]

why does this just scream "executive cash grab' to me?

"hey, those guys made that super popular Elder Scrolls series? I know, we can turn it into an MMO and make tons of money! Gamers love MMOs!" -"um, ok, we can have the production team take several years and several million to produce it"- "WHAT? Na, just slap some shit together and put the elder scrolls label on it, the shit will still sell like hotcakes."

 

[Offworlder_v1legacy]

It was bound to happen, people have been talking about it for ages, but I never get excited over MMO's, they usually just fall by the wayside after a certain amount of time, unless it's Everquest.

 

[Mad World]

What did people expect? I never thought that it was going to be "Skyrim with people." I always assumed that it would be an MMO with Elder Scrolls lore.

 

[Bolwing]

Hope that Bethesda will still make RPG's.

 

[Someone Depressing]

Another skull violently ripped out and stuck on a stick outside of WoW's cave.

If WoW was a king, I think this game would be hung, drawn, and quartered before it could say, "Fuck you."

It seems like the only MMO that I have faith in is MegaTenOnline, and compered to the console, single-player games (the Persona series, the recent fourth addition, Strange Journey, ect) it's sorta shit. The combat is quite bad, your character taking a while respond, demons being 3X stronger than human-characters, rendering PvP matches like cock-fights, if the chickens were paralel-plane inhabiting beings with magical abilities that defie the very power of reality and time.

But, then again, it's really satisfying to go to early-game places, find a low-level demon that gave you trouble ages ago, and use something its 4X weak to, and then see its satisying death animation, only to run around and spam area-of-effect quad-weak spells. And I like its story, I guess. SMT already has quite a good story. So, I guess the only MMO I can say I actually like (compared to others, spare WoW that, although the game is a massive grindfest, it atleast does what it's ment to be doing quite decently - make you grind. The monsters are kind of interesting and the world is big and nice) is probably one of the better ones, but it's just kind of shit, and without the main-series, and thus nothing to balance on, it'd just be another skull ripped off and stuck on a pole. It's like that peasant in a medeival fantasy movie who you're just expecting to die because he's so annoying, but never actually dies, and constantly avoids danger.

But, in all honesty, co-op can't be too bad. Two people on two different sides of the map doing different quests and collecting different items, but both get XP obtained from quests and enemies. You'd be doing this 2X more fast, and the flow of the game would be alot better because you can essentially split your quest list, like 1 person (let's just say, a mage) gets some quests involving killing enemies with low magic-defense, or maybe can go do some shopping for equipment and stuff, with the second person (a warrior, maybe) gets quests involving running from place to place doing fetch-quests and killing the occasional magic-oriented character, because warriors have good fatique and good against mages (assuming you actually train your damn magic-skills and develop resistance, that is). So, co-op seems like a good idea. But more than that just makes it seem like a cluster-fuck.

 

[Alexchaser]

Well their all my interest in the game gone. Why take everything that makes elder scrolls good combat etc and just make another warcraft clone

 

[TheGreatAndPowerfulZOG]

Ugh, I was somewhat interested for specifically the reasons mentioned in the Kotaku article. I don't really play MMOs, the horrible UIs, arcane combat systems, and grind focused gameplay always turned me off. I thought if anyone could do one right it would be Bethesda, since they're so good at making massive, open game worlds that are actually compelling. But it looks like it will be just another MMO. What a wasted opportunity.

 

[CaffeinatedBandit]

What we need is Elder Scrolls co-op. Just, like, 2-5 people essentially just playing in the same world. Interacting with each other. Murdering each other.

Anybody else agree?

 

[Latinidiot]

Bah. I already knew I wouldn't buy it, because I don't like MMOs. This only tells me that it will fail. Shame, I just hope it doesn't stall TES VI too much.

 

[Hafnium]

Wow, this looks dull in every way. One of the good things about ES is that it's not all about numbers. Once you add in MMO-sauce everything becomes numbers, and who the hell is going to use a glass sword if they got a spiky, silly looking daedric sword, when it has a smaller damage number?? In Skyrim my main guy is a fighter/mage with full glass gear, summons and the odd frost/lightning spell. Unthinkable in an mmo, where generic class structure and cookie-cutter builds cocks it all up. Jesus this was a horrible idea, and every thread on ES forums where the idea of massively multiplayer has been brought up, has had a barrage of ridicule and sound arguments against the idea. But MMO equals money apparently, and integrity to IPs is something easily forgotten.

 

[Fusioncode9]

It's not even in first person? Well there goes any interest I had in it. At least Bioware made TOR heavily story focused but his is just a joke. If I want to play WoW, I'll play WoW.

 

[Gitty101]

There it goes. All of my interest in this title just vanished. I'll still keep an eye on it, but now I'm really not expecting anything that great.

If your interest vanished, then why would you still keep an eye on it?

Because I hope to be proven wrong. And have nothing better to do with my time, obviously ^_^

 

[Emiscary]

There's GW2, and there's lame WoW imitations. There are no other new kinds of MMO.

 

[Ickorus]

There's GW2, and there's lame WoW imitations. There are no other new kinds of MMO.

If you look beyond this thread and the incredibly biased article it quotes you'll see that this game actually seems to be using mechanics much more similar to GW2 than to WoW.

If the leaked documents (to which the biased article refers) are to be believed, that is.

 

[Robert Ewing]

I made the exact same face someone would make if they saw their dog die when this shit was announced.

Why even bother putting it into an MMO? It will just join the ranks of incredibly bland, incredibly similar and incredibly boring MMO legions, and thus destroy the franchise to some degree because of how embarrassing this whole thing is.

Keep the elder scrolls single player! That's what it's good at! And when I say good, I mean REALLY GOOD. When haven't Bethesda made a good game recently!? Most peoples only complaint with them is bugs. But news flash, they get fixed!

Don't do the MMO Bethesda, just don't.

 

[SajuukKhar]

I made the exact same face someone would make if they saw their dog die when this shit was announced.

Why even bother putting it into an MMO? It will just join the ranks of incredibly bland, incredibly similar and incredibly boring MMO legions, and thus destroy the franchise to some degree because of how embarrassing this whole thing is.

Keep the elder scrolls single player! That's what it's good at! And when I say good, I mean REALLY GOOD. When haven't Bethesda made a good game recently!? Most peoples only complaint with them is bugs. But news flash, they get fixed!

Don't do the MMO Bethesda, just don't.

Bethesda isnt............... Zenimax online is.

How do people get those two confused?