I'll keep this short and sweet. How in God's name can we expect an MMO that follows TES' formula of character building. The builds in TES are so madly unbalanced that it would take the combined forces of every technical genius in America to balance it out to workable MMO in which no build outranks another. Otherwise, you have preferred builds, which will become de facto classes.

Not to mention, if we want a multiplayer system that involves more than spamming attacks at your enemies, you have to have clear roles. It doesn't have to be "tank, heals, DPS", but it has to have some structure. Boss fights need strategy, each role needs a purpose. If you can make an almost infinite number of "classes", then how do we establish good strategies for defeating bosses? And if there's no proven set of strategies to defeat a boss, then they'll honestly just become what they are in Skyrim - generic enemies with a crap-load of stats.

The Elder Scrolls relies on a dynamic world. I kill a merchant, not only do they stay dead, but someone just might take over their shop. You can't have this kind of freedom in an MMO, or else all of Tamriel would be devoid of NPC life by the end of the launch day.

A good MMO needs instancing of some form. Because then, you either have

a) a set of well-crafted dungeons that you can only visit once
(more likely) a bunch of similar dungeons, like the Nordic crypts in Skyrim, or a rogue-like system that, while interesting, would not have strategic, challenging fights

It seems to me like people want the MMO to be a Tamriel-wide single player game with a truckload of other players. A successful MMO (I'll say it, World of Warcraft) forces you to cooperate with players, fighting through failure, to reach end-game content. A poor MMO focuses on a brilliant story and amazing graphics, which effectively turn the game into a single-player game with a subscription and a chat system. If you want a truly successful TES MMO, it has to be one that forces multiplayer upon you.

Oh that is so wrong. You can SOLO your way to the level cap, never cooperating with any other players. There is no failure in WoW, merely differing levels of success (as perceived by the player and community). End game content is a dull grind.

If you really want to force multiplayer on someone, you need a sandbox where other players help provide the content. Otherwise your multiplayer experience will probably be something akin to "LFM THISTEIR'SRAID PST" while siting in the capital city of your choice, picking your nose while paying more attention to the TV than the game.

I was going to say a few more things about some of the other stuff you typed up, but please understand, you are wrong. I mean that as politely as possible. Everything you said has been done before. You don't need rigid class structure. You don't need classes defined by a roll, rather, you know what roll you want to fill, and build your character to do that role. It has been done before, and people enjoyed it. There were good MMOs in the past that didn't have instancing as well.

This is one of the two things I think they could have done better. You don't need classes to balance strategies, you can balance around skills and spells.

Endgame =/= level cap. I never implied that you couldn't be qualified for endgame content without multiplayer, but there's no way you're beating the high-level raids without cooperating well with other people. And I won't deny that WoW fails in that a whole hell of a lot of its endgame is a grindfest - but the grinding mars a good concept. Their concept - forcing multiplayer - is great, their execution of it is a bit mediocre at points.

And you really can't trust players to cooperate on anything past killing NPCs. It's hard to make successful PvP groups. A sandbox world based primarily on the community's decisions would either be too focused on individual expression, creating a bizarre and unlikely world, or based on majority decision, creating a tyrannical majority. MMOs need a (mostly) set world.



But how long will it be before someone stops specializing in archery, heavy armor, and destruction magic, realizing that if they are better at destruction magic than any hybrid player, any dungeon group with sensibility will pick them. Then we have pure-breeds, eventually creating classes centered around specific abilities or small sets of abilities. A boss that requires an entire set of skills would be too difficult to gather a group for (not to mention to build a strategy for), while a boss that requires a particular set of skills but not much of others will potentially disqualify players that don't focus on one of those skills from a dungeon because they won't help for that fight. The beauty of WoW's system, as bizarre as that phrase sounds, is that every build has a role in every boss fight.

In other words, if we build boss fights around skills, then players without those skills will never see those bosses, and many players will centralize around certain skills just so they can get in the most dungeons. AKA, classes.

See, you're looking at it from a min/max standpoint. Although I guess after playing any MMO from the past decade, one would be conditioned to do so. I'd be lying if I said I don't look at it that way to. However, unspeciallized hybrids in PvE settings have ALWAYS been underpowered. Remember druids/shaman/paladins from vanilla wow? They were forced into a healing role end game, and even then, they couldn't do that as well as a priest. Now, in a PvP setting (which you have curiously omitted) your hybrid archer/mage has more options than a pure build, and that actually IS worth something.

And lets not forget that "classes centered around specific abilities" are often so because of the failure of developers to properly balance their game.

I won't deny that TES' current standing skill system could be very beneficial to PvP. But I honestly find that this game will be more focused on PvE. Because most people prefer to bash enemies with their friends, not kill other players. I haven't done any in-depth study, and I know there will be outstanders, but big-name MMOs like World of Warcraft, the Old Republic, and our old 90's favorite (just kidding, we hated it then) RuneScape all focus primarily on Player-NPC combat.

So perhaps there is a way to do this. But it'd be like balancing the game on a very sharp edge. The thing is, WoW still only has to compensate for a very solid, double-digit amount of builds, while Zenimax would have to make sure that even an ability-based fight is balanced to perfection. Not a lot of wiggle room.

Wouldn't they be on a very sharp edge anyways by making a game that plays exactly like most other MMOs out there right now? (Highly PvE focused, slight attention to PvP, point/click/auto-attack & hotkey spam.)

Now if it is F2P, well that is a whole different matter, but if they are planning on a subscription based game, and most of your potential customers have vast quantifies of their time and a good amount of money into another game, do you think that simply saying "But its the Elder Scrolls!" is going to cut it? Especially when the only thing you're taking from the Elder Scrolls is its lore/geography and not the "freedom" one usually associates with that IP? I dunno...

This, exactly. The truest sand-box MMO that forces multiplayer is EVE Online. (Most beautifully hostile game in existence in the MMO world, haha.)

Did I read this correctly? WoW is a single-player game with a subscription and a chat system...

Do you honestly expect "true" TES MMO?

No, I do not expect anything. I think more people should be like me.

I hope this is the last time I have to say this:

IT. HAS. BEEN. DONE. BEFORE. AND. HAS. WORKED. WELL.

http://www.darkfallonline.com/

http://www.mortalonline.com/

Can this asinine "It'd be impossible cuz GI said so" argument please die now?

We need a sticky thread for this

now you want something like that to be attempted again right? with a larger budget and more experienced developers.
sounds reasonable to me. but i think if they spent too much time on the mechanics the world would suffer. thats how i have felt about all elderscrolls games i have played. its how i still feel about skyrims production, that they spent alot of time on mechanics and not enough on fleshing out the world.
just my opinion.

I expect some compromises when a single player game is adapted into an MMO. However I don't expect to see the concept so completely changed as to be barely recognizable. You wouldn't make a Grand Theft Auto mmo where you couldn't steal cars.

As to the question of combat and balance. You do not need character classes or traditional levels to achieve a viable and balanced combat system. You can have "roles" in combat (Tank, DPS, Heals, etc) without classes. As long as you have Tanking skills you will have Tanks in combat. The same is true of other roles in combat. In a classless skill system if you take skills that increase your threat generation, give you more health, etc. then you are a tank.

Systems like this have worked in other games. I hesitate to point to CU-SWG, but it sort of worked. It just needed some tweaking. Balance in SWG was achieved by limiting the number of skills you could acquire. The Secret World will allow players to amass a huge array of skills in a classless system. In that game balance is achieved by limiting the number of active and passive skills a player can utilize in combat. You might have picked up 100 different skills but you can only use 7 active and 7 passive skills at any one time. Ryzom is another example of a skill based system.

Classless systems can be done. You get your balance from limiting the number of skills you can acquire or by limiting the number of skills you can use at any one time. You get your combat "roles" from your skill choices. What's the fear here that a player will choose his skill set poorly? You can address that though game mechanics. SWG allowed you to refund skills and get new ones. Secret World allows you to simply change your toolbar.

It can be done. It just requires a little courage to break from the norm and a little desire to innovate.

MMO? No.
Limited multiplayer ala Diablo? Give me that any day!

A true MMO? Yes, since most MMOs are essentially the same as World of Warcraft.
A true Elder Scrolls MMO? Nope. Not by a long shot.