Actually, I would say that 20 years of playing MMOs, experiencing every feature or concept that gets touted by a developer as being the greatest idea ever, but ends up failing miserably, and having the developers in question NEVER admit that they made a mistake and then turn around and pull the same crap again next time, would qualify a person to write criticism on it, if they feel like it is about to happen again. Having said that, there is a right way and a wrong way to be critical. Some do not know the difference.


I don't know so much about sports fans, but in all honesty, I think moviegoers could do a better job than some of these so-called professionals making movies these days. Sometimes I feel like performing Hara-kiri whenever I see a trailer for yet another remake of a movie that worked fine in its original form. I feel the same way when I see yet another rehashing of the same tired old MMO mechanics that have been used and reused since EverQuest with no sign that the MMO industry will ever try something different.

I'm not saying that ZOS is going that route with TESO. I haven't seen enough of the details to make an honest determination in that regard. However, it is a fear that I have every time a developer officially announces an MMO based on an IP that I am interested in. And it is a fear that has proven true too many times. Every time a new MMO is announced, I want to believe, "This is the one that will get it right," but I don't care what little things they do differently, they still look to World of Warcraft as the only valid model for MMO development.

Those who sing the praises of games like Guild Wars 2 are going to be disappointed after they have played for a while. Because even though quests and events will be introduced in a more dynamic and natural feeling way, it still comes down to "kill these mobs" or "go fetch these things and bring them back here." BioWare told us that TOR was going to be different, that it wouldn't be about us doing menial tasks, because it isn't heroic. Well having those quests given to us in the form of a fully voiced cinematic do not make them less menial.

Maybe it's just a sign of my age, but I remember first being introduced to MMOs that were about the world they took place in, where those who would be seen as heroes by others are the ones who choose to throw down against dangerous odds, or take on a deadly mob unaided and managed to survuve through careful strategy and luck that the lag demon didn't grab them at a most inopportune moment. In games like Ultima Online, you could be the hero, but you had to actually be the hero. You didn't just go through some scripted series of quests centered around you. Being a hero meant seeing someone about to have their butt served to them on a platter and jumping in at the nick of time and saving them. I want to see MMOs get back to their roots with developers who genuinely remember what it was like to experience a world, not just some pre-scripted storyline that you don't even really need a group to experience and could have just as easily been part of a single-player game with a much smaller budget and greater potential for success...

I am hoping that at least in some small way, ZOS will start bringing that back. After all, in as much as the TES series presents the player with a heroic storyline, it is also about experiencing the world with the freedom to just be. So I like to call the TES games massively single-player RPGs. A lot of effort is put into making the world feel as alive as possible. I just wish that MMO developers in general would start putting that level of detail in their worlds. Heck just adding day-night cycles and weather conditions to Star Wars the Old Republic would make the game feel ten times more alive than it does now.

ZOS needs to pay attention to how many of the things they have siad are just too difficult to implment in an MMO that are staples of The Elder Scrolls, and have in fact been implemented in other MMOs before. If their goal is to target a core audience that likes both MMOs and The Elder Scrolls, then they really need to maybe consider adding another year to the development process if it would mean actually being able to deliver what Elder Scrolls fans love, which ironically in many cases is what many MMO players also look for in MMOs.

This comes from MY nearly 20 years of observation of the MMO industry.

An MMO can only launch once. And the sad truth is that if you don't draw your core audience in at launch, you likely never will. I've been burned too many times by MMOs in the past. I don't plan on being svckered in again. What will determine whether or not I actually purchase TESO and give it a try is not how much I will tollerate the creative license ZOS will take with the IP, but rather, how well they are able to reconcile the IP with the needs of an MMO. If they can do that well, they will have me as a customer, and gladly so. If they cannot, then they will not have me as a customer.

I only speak for myself, but I feel that I am not alone in this position.

I say give ZOS a chance to prove themselves before arbitrarily dismissing TESO as a failure. I can tell you that when Arena came out, graphically speaking it did not look all that great, even compared with other games of the time. But I gave it a chance, and I was amazed, and have purchased every TES game since. I will give ZOS their chance. Then I will give my honest opinion.

But do they know why they like it? Do they care? Guess not, Guess it doesn't matter.

Oh well, it IS the trend now adays.

90% of them are.

I agree with this

To think, all the money that they are investing in something that will probably at most bring a few new tricks to the MMO scene (be it fun or not), which could be invested in developing a super awesome engine for the single player series (which could maybe incorporate online features). I do have some understanding that engines are expensive to purchase and make, but I think it would cost much less to do that. Really, the current technical side of the Elder Scrolls series isn't that great

And people wonder why streamlining is becoming less about making things more intuitive and more about making things far too simple and shallow.

90% of everything is crap (... compared to the other 10%). No point concentrating on the unimaginative FarmVille copies and the like.

I don't even consider them 'games', and to call them as such... Well...

I must be honest here and say the following; I didn't read a thing of what you just said. This game is most definitely not a wow-clone. It -is- a hotkey mmo, but it doesn't work on the basis of rotations like world of warcraft and SWTOR do. It will have much less abilities for people to use and it will feature combining different skills to get a wide range of effects. If you will, in World of Warcraft classes have a keyboard's worth of hotkeys to use for abilities with the a focus on a singular end-effect; aggro, dps, healing, crowd control etc. In ESO, you will have very little abilities, but the different combinations of those abilities will create a wider variety of desired effects. Additionally, fights will be based primarily on stamina rather than health, which means that it's more based on resource economy than tank-and-spank strategies.

All in all, ESO is going to be a very different game. And potentially a very good game. The promise of creative director Paul Sage is an honest and double-edged one. For them, it's not about creating a good TES game, it's about creating a good MMO that stands well on it's own. However, they will have to rework a few things like how they are going to approach mixing and matching the idea of TES-identity into this MMO. How are guilds going to work, how do I identify with 'The Emperor', how will faction feel to us...? That sort of thing is important. Check my signature for one of my suggestions on how I think ESO could salvage this game somewhat.