http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/29/elder-scrolls-onlines-main-backbone-story-is-a-solo-affair-you-dont-see-other-people-in-it/

"

Of course, once you’re playing solo online, you might just as well play solo offline. In a different Elder Scrolls game.

"

That summarizes it for me... It's a MMO after all!

Sounds like we will likely have classes and this I like. I hope they pull off the balance between single/multi gameplay well. LOTRO did it very well but SWTOR not so much.

“Since we have a PVP component to our game it’s very difficult to make a skill based game like in Skyrim, so we went back to a more traditional character based system like in the older Elder Scrolls games just to make it easier to balance to make sure the PVP system worked,” Firor explains.

Oh yeaaah.

Yea, we there's classes, we already know that about the game.


Good post in general. I hope this will at least allow some of the more hardcoe SPRPG ES players to become a little more open-minded, and try the MMO.

The more I hear about the story, the less excited I am. Why would I pay $15 to play an MMO by myself? I don't understand why they went this route..

sounds nice for anyone that is sick of noobs jumping around his face

Actually... PVP when you want it. Factional warfare when you want it. Group Dungeon crawling when you want it. Solo questing when you want it. Why not?

Go back and read my post again. I said I don't understand why the story is solo-centric.

You just brought up a whole bunch of points that have nothing to do with anything I said. I want to play the story with my friends, not just PvP and run dungeons.

Yes, exactly. Matt Firor said something along the lines of, an MMORPG is like several games wrapped into one. The solo-play and the group/raiding content, and the PvP... none of those things are mutually exclusive, it's all there.

On the surface, it sounds like the best of both worlds- get to play solo and be the hero, and take that same character into a group environment for other stuff. I just don't see how they'll be able to balance it well, and that's what I'm waiting for them to clarify.

First, in a traditional TES game, you can skill up whatever you want- if you start a thief character and soon realize there are a lot of spells that enhance your playstyle, you can do that. With the limitations of skill classes as they are in an MMO, that won't be possible anymore.

Also, you'll have to balance each class not just to the environment (dungeons and baddies) but to PVP play, which hamstrings many skills in order to ensure that each class has enough damage viability to beat the other classes. I want to see how they will make that work with the solo quests.

I'm not too keen on the idea of having to pick a handful of skills for each situation. It sounds tedious to have to rebuild your UI setup for solo play, for pvp play, for questing, etc. Again, I'll have to see specifically what the idea is behind it.

There's also the idea of the immersion, or lack of it. How jarring will it be to wander around a town and half the doors are greyed out because they're part of the solo quest, or lead to PVP while you're doing the solo quest?

They have a lot of different ideas, but the implementation is still to be seen.

You can still quest with your friends... not all the quests are solo

Nobody is stopping you. They said that the HERO story line is solo. Everybody can be the hero, in an instanced setting.

This is Elder Scrolls. The whole concept of the game is about the appearance of "The Hero" in times of crisis. That's what the "Elder Scrolls" themselves are about. If you take the individual hero completely out of it, it's not an Elder Scrolls game.

If the main quest is to be solo, why make it an MMO at all? Of course, I'd like the option to be able to quest by myself but, equally, I want to do the main quest with others. That's kinda' the point of making it an MMO. The main quest should try and make you feel like part of a bigger conflict, instead of being 1 among 1000s of people who are the hero. Being the only hero works in single player games but in the MMO, even if they have it so you're the only person in the dungeon, you still have that knowledge at the back of your mind the whole time you're playing that every other person you come across in the game is also the hero.

If you don't want to be the hero, don't do that quest line.

LOTRO does it fairly well - certainly for main story they seem to be on top of it, after revisiting volumes 1 and 2.

LOTRO does annoy me when it comes to general questing 'cos they actually make it a pain if you do this with others - I have several characters I duo with a friend and we also have a 3rd person along with us for certain characters.

Kill quests work well, collect x amount of generally means alot of waiting around for items to respawn so all 3 of us can get them (few parts of the last expansion do allow one person to collect the items with people in the group receiving credit but only in certain parts of it).

The other major pain is instanced quests, where we're forced to break the group up all too often sadly.

Making the main storyline soloable is always a great idea - some people work odd hours or later on people are levelling alts or there are new players who struggle to find a full group that will help/need it also.

One thing I would implore ZOS to do is make sure general quests objectives, whether it's kill or collect etc, are shared with groups if players choose to group up - I realise this means groups can trivialise content sometimes but for those of us who enjoy playing with friends we shouldn't be penalised.

this is bad. especialy since the trailer hinted otheriwse. Id find it better if this time id be more like. You gotta work together with all the others whose souls have been stolen.

Lets hope you can at least have a friend join your quest as a mercenary or something.

Also i think the statement about Character Customization actually means the Class System not the Character Creation with Facial Features etc.

As long as I'm not disadvantaged by not doing the solo HERO quest line I am not concerned. I have no intention of playing it. I want to be a part of the world not the king of it, that is the difference between single player and multiplayer. SWTOR, Rift, AoC all made everyone out to be the "chosen one" and I hated it. At least give us the choice that isn't disadvantaged if we choose to avoid the Story

Actually, that's not necessarily a difference between single player and multi-player, either -- a lot of role players ignore the Main Quests in TES games, for that exact reason.

It's Elder Scrolls, though... The entire premise of the series is that the "Elder Scrolls" foretell the coming of a special unique Hero, who saves the day and alters the flow of events. It wouldn't be Elder Scrolls if there weren't an opportunity for the player to role play that Hero.

Is he joking? The only TES game that wasn't skill-based was Arena, which was a mostly generic fantasy RPG knock-off with the twist of having first-person real-time action, which itself is something the series has kept. Daggerfall put the emphasis on 'no generic XP, the skills you use are the skills you get better at', which has stayed with the series ever since.

I just don't get it: there's not even co-op for the storyline? One of the benefits of an online TES would've been at least having the ability to bring your friends into your game like Diablo (even like Fable would be a start). But instead they make the game too online to have good graphics or game-play, but not online enough to have co-op story? At the end of the day, everyone in Skyrim still roamed around with a sidekick/follower, Dragonborn or not - it didn't destroy the RP. So why not have that follower actually be a friend? Why do they think removing the social aspect entirely rather than just giving us the option is a good idea? I don't like the idea of hundreds of people cluttering my storyline, but that's why I support phasing with the ability to invite friends into your gameworld. Essentially, as an MMO they're making an obscenely whittled down Elder Scrolls just for PvP and raids. That's it; that's the MMO - the rest they may as well just cut out and release as a separate bloody game. No wonder the journalist couldn't maintain his impartiality - it's just such a stupid compromise.

And it still bugs me that a single player game like Dark Souls is actually closer to a solution than TESO seems to be. Yes, they limited co-op in DS but it was intentional; if you took their multiplayer system and just turned off the limitations in joining games and perhaps added a lobby (a bit like Battle.net, I suppose) you'd basically have the exact sort of game TES should be.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that probably the majority of quests inthe game won't be instances. I bet the instanced ones will just be like last step boss battles or what not.

you make it sound like it would be super easy to take a Dark Souls system and just turn off the limitations. You also can't make the claim that a TES game "should be" any one particular way. I personally love the direction of the game so far and would highly dislike a battle.net system or a room system in an mmorpg of this size. It just sounds silly. It sounds like you have made a bunch of assumptions about a single game feature so now you have to be overly dramatic about it. Not all parts of the story are single player. That is the whole point of phasing. When you phase the game you see people on the same parts of the story you are on. I'd bet the main bosses of the story are solo and not much else.

On the other hand you can just keep playing Dark Souls since that is how a TES game should be to you. Or you can wait for one of those sweet online mods coming out for Skyrim.