Right, now after watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCmveOvYXzo, I have to say I'm loosing bit interest.
The Elder Scrolls RPG has always been about going anywhere you want, no matter of it's hostile or not.

That video is pretty old. You can now go to the enemy faction areas when you are lvl 50 but you wont see anybody from the enemy faction there. The devs describe it as a new game + so the mobs are probably all lvl 50 and you can do all the other factions quests there. It's not the best solution but better than completely locking you out of their areas.

Are you kidding me?
You might want to update yourself.

It's an awful solution.

It's like when you reach max level in World of Warcraft you can do battlegrounds or raids, it's going to feel that way.
Not like it's an open world from the get go

Walking through my own territory and seeing members of enemy factions wandering around would break my immersion.

In any case, you reach level 50 (?) and you can enter enemy territories. So, pointless making yet another thread griping about it.

I agree with the OP. The current solution does break immersion a bit, like their other uses of instancing / phasing.

Not a deal breaker for me but I definitely put it in the con column for the game.

As we know, once you reach level 50 you can then explore those areas.

The video was intensely annoying. How many times do we have to hear the 'this game should be like WoW!' comparisons. From what I can see we've already had 5 years of mostly failed wow clones. Let's actually let an mmo developer go in a newer direction and wait and see it pays off. The mmo industry needs that badly.

Oh, and if the guy had said 'immersion breaking' one more time I swear I'd have put my fist through the monitor.

Hahah, I feel you man, he's always on the misinformed side when it comes to most games, his whole "I'm sarky" persona does no justice to his stupidity and ignorance, either.
He made 2 videos about how true first person was useless and shouldn't be put in the game. I mean, COME ON...
Almost EVERYONE in the comments section in the videos were saying how stupid he was, including me, who he decided to ban, which was quite pathetic.
Other than that, the video's old.

I'm not a big fan of it either and well i could say that about a lot of things this game is doing but at least this is a small step in the right direction.

This. I really like to copy this link in threads like this. Here we go:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-07-17-the-elder-scrolls-online-reinventing-a-franchise-in-an-online-world

Its NOT a 100% open world like in Skyrim or Morrowind. You should see this like The Elder Scrolls "novels". PvE will have a personal story which is unique to your alliance. PvP will be available in Cyrodiil since it will be the focus in these "novels". Thus the decision to change/or stay in your alliance will be pushed by your storyline. Its like learning different perspectives.

In addition: This video even su*ked in the past ...

Awful? It's a structure that's probably there to keep the game's RvR focus. If you allow fully open world pvp in an mmo with a huge gameworld what you end up with is a diffuse world of sporadic ganking and small scale pvp. What you might not get is enough players and focus to enable decent RvR action and large scale, objective based pvp.

The latter is actually far more 'immersion breaking'. If the gameworld is meant to be one of warring factions what you need is a hotly contested warzone. If there's no 'warzone' to be found. only gank squads and soloers spread throughout the gameworld, the game's actual premise starts to break down.

Basically: Open world pvp is great in a sandbox mmo, and it's needed there. But a non-sandbox, RvR mmo needs focus and structure to have purpose.

I sense too much single player experience care.
I read that you can play this game all alone if you wanted too.

In order to get that experience, you just lock yourself on an empty "instance" or "server" within the "zone" you're in thruout the game?

That's a bit weak. Firstly WOW gets a lot of things right. Secondly using any one feature of WOW doesn't make it a WOW clone. By that logic launching the game in English in English speaking regions would be enough to make TESO a WOW clone, instead of just sensible.

The kind of phasing associated with the faction locked territories is something I've only seen in Champions Online and Lord of the Rings Online. I wasn't a fan of it in either. Part of the appeal of playing an online game instead of a single player is being part of an online world. Phasing disrupts that in a sort of hallucinatory manner for the sake of single-player story.

Ok, let me try and explain in simple terms why the sort of open-world pvp in the video doesn't work in a game with an RvR focus.

Full open world pvp only truly belongs in a sandbox game where the entire gameworld forms the battleground, because players can build their own objectives and factions for others to focus on. The whole thing changes dynamically and the gameworld's structure is player created. Open world is needed here to give the players the freedom to construct that structure.

A game with a pre-existing, focused, RvR element cannot afford to spread its conflict out throughout the entire gameworld, away from the actual conflict zones. What's the point of having conflict away from all the objectives and structure the devs built for the purpose? Where pvp exists in the open world were there isn't any structure or objectives what you end up with is something of a pointless exercise in ganking and duels. Sure, that can be exciting for a while, but is it worth eroding the RvR element to have it?

+1 and i do not think he understands what you are trying to say.

I'm sorry but you're missing the point! He didn't even say that World of Warcraft did anything wrong.
Even developers in bigger companies (for example: Marc Jacobs - ex-Mythic CEO) stated that the biggest fail in companies is to compare your own game to World of Warcraft. And thats something thats absolutely correct.

World of Warcraft created a lot of easy content. It made a lot of things easier and casualfriendly - Huge things in less time done. Even raiding with a lot of organization and so on. But let World of Warcraft be World of Warcraft. Copying World of Warcraft is just a sign of attracting World of Warcraft's community. Why should those switch the game if they have completely equal content in that MMORPG?
Zenimax obviously tries new and different things instead of reaching World of Warcraft's peak. Thats why new games are developed.

I thought we're over with this already.. Play Skyrim or wait for ES6. Very first thing they said they take this to "new bold direction". Think of it as they're branching the ES brand. Before you throw the "lore" card, current lore is we are at WAR.