This past week, I was afforded the immeasurable privilege of visiting the ZeniMax Online studios in Hunt Valley, Maryland to attend a small media event unveiling many of the cornerstone features of The Elder Scrolls Online. Matt Firor, Paul Sage, and the other lead developers of the project personally outlined their vision for the game, and explained the philosophy underlying its design. Not only were some major new features announced for the first time, but we were given several hours with which to actually play the game and experience these tenets of gameplay for ourselves. It was a truly fantastic experience, and to make things even better, I’m allowed to talk about it!

I’ve written a series of five articles to fully detail and share my experience with the community. You can catch them all on Tamriel Foundry:

• http://tamrielfoundry.com/2012/10/eso-media-event/
  
• http://tamrielfoundry.com/2012/10/combat-in-teso/
  
• http://tamrielfoundry.com/2012/10/gameplay-impressions/
  
• http://tamrielfoundry.com/2012/10/interview-matt-paul/
  
• http://tamrielfoundry.com/2012/10/interview-brian-wheeler/

The game is fantastic, and I hope that my coverage of this great event will help alleviate some of the concerns that I see frequently within the community. I’m also happy to answer any questions that you might have about the game or my experience at the event. I’ll try to periodically respond to this thread, but I’ll be able to answer a bit more quickly if you comment on the articles directly.

Awesome! Diving into info..now!

Damn, Im excited this is very first triple A MMORPG what is truly original. Good luck really. They might get some generic fantasy [censored] throw at them though.

Hey this is Very Nice. Maybe this should be Sticky. Three cheers for you! Haha WE HAVE OUR HERO!

Incredible work. Thank you so much!

And by god, they changed the character proportions. They changed the [censored] character proportions (a lot less cartoony now).

Only thing I'm upset about is the lack of attributes, again. But because this is a pre-alpha I expect the character system to be fleshed out some more by release, and allow us to manipulate secondary attributes like attackspeed and so on a bit more.

edit: reading other articles, it actually seems like there are whole perk-trees for health, magicka and stamina - something I would have wished for Skyrim as well, considering the absence of other attributes. While this is not as fluent as actual attributes, this adds at least the possibiltiies for interesting bonuses. Seems like they are on the right track after all.