So awesome! I would love that. Something akin to Battle for middle earth, but more complex.

If it was TES with online Id be for it, but its not. Its an MMO with "TES" squeezed into its name.

Still if I was looking to make an alternative I would go with Diablo-clone, because TES is already a huge hack'n'slash dungeon crawler. Throw some co-op into Skyrim and done.

I always wanted an MMO like Darkfall or Mortal online but in the TES world. But not like this...NOT LIKE THIS!!!

Not true. WoW has a small but active RP community, and anyone who enjoys the lore and chooses to immerses themselves in it can very easily. It is no more difficult to be immersed in roleplay in WoW than it is in Skyrim

A quick look at recent MMO history says the exact opposite. If you can describe your game as "like WoW, but," then you are very likely not going to succeed in any way that justifies the initial investment. The problem is that by-the-numbers design works pretty well in just about every category of entertainment available. Music, movies, and even video games most often turn a profit when it follows proven formulae, especially if it also ties into a popular IP. The difference, however, is that all of those are consumable. You watch a movie, and then you want to watch a different one. You listen to an album for a while, but you eventually want a new album. Same thing with games... except for MMOs.

The entire point of MMO design(one I don't necessarily agree with) is to keep you playing, and therefore subscribing for as long as possible. This is true even of free-to-play MMOs since people who don't play your game won't spend money on microtransactions. That being the case, any new MMO has to overcome the hold an existing one has over its playerbase in order to succeed, so the copycat mentality actually works against MMO development, as just about every game that's tried to take on WoW has proven.

Once again... in MMOs, safe = failure.

do you think this is because wow just put the right mix together first? why do they maintain their player base? why does everyone go back to it?

you're right, mmo's do try to keep you playing, that's how they make money; but how is wow doing it? because they are doing it.

I

With WoW it was a case of right game, right time. While they didn't really innovate anything, they had a distinctive art style and a (relatively) relaxed difficulty. After highly punishing games like EQ, WoW was a welcome change for some people. Things just snowballed from there. Regular content updates kept most of their original customers and word of mouth attracted new ones. Now competing with WoW is like competing with Apple's app store or Steam. You have to overcome years of content release and refinement to have a chance, and there's just no way you can beat that by trying to make the same moves they did. You have to do something different.

I'm not against an ES MMO, what I'm against is making a game that doesn't play, feel, or look like an ES game with the Elder Scrolls name slapped on it. That's usually the sign that a development team is getting [censored] by corporate money [censored]s who just want to churn out mediocre crap to make sales. We love Elder Scrolls because you can see and feel the effort and creativity in their innovative and deep game environments and mechanics.

3rd person...hotbar...? At such a basic level that's wrong. There are some features that sound cool, but it just seems so far removed from the treasured work of our favorite development team that brought us TES and Fallout 3 up to this point, and it just...svcks.

There isn't much information, so maybe some information might be released that goes against what I feel, but it just sounds like cookie cutter MMO crap.

If you can't put Elder Scrolls in it's entirety online, then don't. Please don't. Too late I guess.

Add Multiplayer Capability to Skyrim, or to future games. Just some co-op, nothing huge. Trade between those characters, communication capability, things of that nature. Otherwise it's perfect how it sat.