I was rather excited when I heard the news and then, nearly instantly, apprehensive of the whole affair. It would hardly be the first time a game had great potential and then turned out rather poorly. I won't name names, but I'm sure you can think of a few such titles. I believe TES Online has some of the highest potential of any online game in recent years. I have various excellent reasons for this belief, but that's not what this topic is about. This is about the potential that's never fulfilled in some games, with a focus on this game.

Why do games with high potential fail? What happens? Is it the developers making the poor decisions or are they just influenced by publishers, investors, etc.? Do they believe that copying mechanics from other games is the way to go? Perhaps judging by the success of those games, it may appear to be a sound idea. Are the players to blame? Many people dislike change. The genre has been mostly unchanged for many years now. When a title introduces new mechanics, many gamers seem to dislike them, preferring the old way, what they know. Many people look at previous games with what I dub "nostalgia glasses" and refuse to see how something new may be good for the genre as a whole.

Perhaps creating online games using the same mechanics and features again and again is the safest bet. Will this game make that same choice? How much of it will be similar to previous TES games, and how much will it resemble every other MMO in the last 5 years.

What do you think?

I suppose if you want the simple answer to why MMOs fail, the most common reason I've witnessed is early release - which has reached the point where it's more the norm than not. You can have a marvelous concept, a wonderful community, and an obsessive dev team, but if your game is an incomplete, bug ridden, mess it's not going to matter.

The second reason would likely be lack of retention, MMOs are not like other games - to succeed you need to not merely sell the game, but sell a culture to an extent, since the social game is a large part of why people stick around. To do that naturally you need mechanics which encourage building communities.

Beyond that, well I suppose there needs to be a concern with getting people to play the game in the first place. This requires obviously a certain degree of excitement about and interest in a given game, but more than that it involves consistency in demonstrating fun (you can't afford to have a game that's hyped then as actual footage arrives disappoints), and an active outreach to the customer base by the developers in the form of interaction and continual presence (interviews, conventions, etc).

I think it will be a great game...

and maybe I will try it out although wow made me sick of mmos

too much grinding in that one and the game had a bad community, sure me and my buddy met some nice folks but over all all the end content was way too hard to get to (as in time consuming) wished they just made it hard to get to via game play mechanics and not some sick endless grind for gear and runes and enchants...etc

i cannot agree with what the OP stated. No people dont like the old Mechanics. No WoW like game besides WoW realy survived. People are starving for a breath of fresh air. And New MMORPGs such as GW2, TERA and Secret World are all going in new directions. Just TESO is not.

they've been at it for sometime now, arguably longer than skyrims 3 years, that coupled with the extended content additions that MMO's have....it can make or break this truely

In my experience big AAA MMO's don't so much fail as kind of very slowly wither away. Usually, it's because the devs didn't plan for the 'end-game' - either there isn't much high level content (SWTOR, WAR, Rift), or it's completely unfinished (AOC, SWTOR.)

It seems to me that ZOS has some good ideas for end game content, especially the persistent PVP war taking place in Cyrodiil.

If people didn't want old mechanics why do they still play WoW? Also, Lineage II did really well as well. None of those games that tried other things have worked well. Lord of the Rings Online and FFXI also maintained strong sub numbers for a long time . How is Darkfall and Mortal Online doing with their sandbox?

AOC was such a sweet game at launch till you left Tortage, then everything was half done.

I really hope TES:O will use valve time for release, I would rather wait an extra year or two than have a half baked gooey mess.

First impressions are such a huge deal with MMO's. If they have a bad launch the adoption rate loses momentum and the game falls into a F2P death-spiral. I think the reason why we have never seen a WoW killer is because every MMO that has had a slight chance of claiming the crown has always launched with not enough polish or not enough marketing. WoW was put out at a time when people would play a half-done game because no MMO's were really polished and they had a huge marketing budget on their side. Now WoW has a massive amount of content and most of it is polished and balanced. This gives little chance to any MMO to claim the crown.

Of course TES:O does not have to be a WoW killer to be successful, but a boy can dream.

Darkfall and Mortal Online's problems were that they weren't from an established IP, nor did they have a big budget. In fact, no established IP or big budget sandbox has ever really been tried since SW:G, which had it's big flaws (combat, story, content and bugginess) but was otherwise extremely innovative and immersive. I would really love to see a studio have the figurative balls to give it a try with a big IP and budget and see how well it would do.

Obviously sandboxes are a desired gameplay type, or Rockstar and Bethesda would have been out of business years ago.

why do they still play WoW? out of fammiliarity! they invested so much time in that MMO and all the other games seem to die. Of course they stick to what they know and what their friends play. But event he Juggernaut WoW is slowly loosing subs. So yeah...

It it has the feel and flavor of the single player TES games many single players customers will make the leap. If not oh well...

Why did they pick WoW over SWG and EQ? And WoW losing subs so they are only at 5+ is by far and away still well ahead of anyone else. Other MMOs lose subs much quicker than that.

ZeniMax Online are handling a tricky balance. On the one hand they cannot just clone the big dog carbon-copy, because the current MMO players will have no reason to shift to another game. On the other hand they cannot veer too far away from the standard MMO formula, because then those same players will discard it as alien.
The painful truth of the matter is that they are forced to design the game in such a way that it maximizes its ability to pull players away from the current major MMO's, especially WoW. An MMO cannot survive on the relatively small TES single-player fanbase, at least for its first several years.