love the idea

I totally agree with everything Reymas has said. In my opinion, from what they've said and discussed about TESO so far, they're going down the same path that EA/Bioware did with SWTOR as in relying on the fan base of an IP to purchase a product in a new setting (an MMO too at that, which is very tough to get right). Bioware (comparable to Bethesda Game Studios) has/had a huge fan base for almost all of their games but SWTOR wasn't as much of a success as they had hoped and they've had to resort to lay-offs and already allowing players to play for free up to lvl 20 (huge ploy to draw in new customers). For reference, World of Warcraft did not start doing this until late last year or this year, I can't remember, and that game has been out for 5-6 years.

It's examples like these that gives more weight to what Reymas has said, if they're trying to attract MMO players then they need to innovate heavily on game mechanics, which they don't seem to be doing at all. Most MMO players would rather go back to their more polished/stable MMO than stick around with a new one that follows almost exactly the same formula.

It is such a disappointment to me because I would've loved a TES MMO and Bethesda/Zenimax (not Bethesda Game Stuidios) had the opportunity to innovate hugely by bringing first-person, class-less skill system, where combat is limited to your two hands with the huge success that TES franchise has brought them. Instead they decided to play it safe and unfortunately for them they picked the wrong market for going down that route.

Now with all that said, I'm not hoping for TESO to fail, it's just so far from all the info we've been allowed, it definitely looks like another SWTOR. Hopefully they do surprise me or decide to reiterate, or end up being successful, but as of right now I cannot see that happening.

EDIT: Oh I also forgot to mention that this game isn't even being developed by Bethesda Game Studios, but Zenimax Online Studios, yes they were specifically created for making this MMO but they have no track record which adds to my doubts. This game will either make or break that studio of developers/artists/employees/etc.

I'm not really interested in MMOs in general, I tried the WoW Beta years ago and didn't enjoy it that much. I have to say that an TES MMO sounds interesting and I don't "fear" for the franchise. The singleplayer TES games always went forward in time, while the MMO takes place during the past, so whatever comes out of the MMO won't really affect future TES titles.

TESO mainly caught my interest because of the second era, which we mostly know of because of the different in-game books. My problem with it however is that wichever faction I would chose if I played it would get curb stomped in the end, since Tiber Septim will forge the Empire. Although it would be cool to play in a faction war in Vvardenfell and at the end of the game Dagoth Ur awakens and chases the Tribunes off the Red Mountain.

Well Tiber is a Nord correct? So just join the faction that has Nords (Ebonheart Pact)!

Hjalti could also be a Breton.

And still, Tiber will forge the Empire and chose the Imperial City as its capitol, so every faction gets screwed over, some less than others.

I think I just vommed in my mouth a little. Thanks for the instant depression.
TES fans won't care if TESO is a failure? really? I think they will care more than anyone else. If there is a large discrepancy between the game's potential and what the game actually is, people will be devastated. This has the potential to be epic, to be so fun and engaging that the tangible, physical world ceases to exist. From the looks of things so far, it's just W.O.W with khajiit (really poorly designed khajiit)

I'm hesitantly excited.

I'm really disappointed, almost to the point where I might not play, that races are bound to factions. =S
Though, I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out! =)

What do i think of it?

I think Zenimax Online better have something awesome to show after all the negative
opinions by alot of outlets who have actually seen the game behind closed doors.

Personally tho, i think they have already shown whatever it is they have for ESO
during E3 and there is really nothing else special that they can reveal anymore.
The game is only about 1 year away from launch. No amount of tweaking can save it now.

Take this as a lesson Zenimax Online.
This is what you get for developing the game for 5 years without any fan input.

So basically you think Zenimax Media are run by a bunch of absolute [censored] idiots.

No, I think Zenimax Media is headed up by businessmen who are only concerned about the bottom line. They let BGS have a lot of leniency because they are the ONLY profitable studio right now under their wing. All the other games they produce via BSW have been commercial, and generally critical failures. Other than that they are incredibly stringent and are now working towards becoming the next Activision or EA.

This is their board of directors:

Robert A. Altman
Chairman & CEO
Ernest Del
President
Jerry Bruckheimer
Jerry Bruckheimer Films
Michael Dominguez
Managing Director, Providence Equity Partners Inc.
Leslie Moonves
President & CEO, CBS Corporation
Cal Ripken, Jr.
President & CEO, Ripken Baseball, Inc.
Harry E. Sloan
Chairman, Global Eagle Acquisition Corp.
Robert S. Trump
President, Trump Management, Inc.

If you know anything about business you know these guys know next to nothing about the games industry. They either come from film, television, sports or investment banking. Not exactly the best bunch to be deciding the fate of anything game related.

Mark my words if this 300 million dollar investment goes belly up it will make waves throughout the company.

summed it up niceley. realy i hope it to suceed but what ive seen was not impressing me to the slightest. ill still follow this and hope they make it worthwhile. But still they did show pretty much all they got at E3... and thats not alot.

There's no way they showed "all they got" at E3.

It's quite worrying. The only Game Informer coverage that interested me were the videos about combat. It really sounded new and interesting. But now we've had plenty of feedback from journalists who have seen the game in action saying the combat feels loose and disconnected. Journalists are also pretty much unanimous in agreeing that it looks like any other MMO, and had they not been told they were looking at an Elder Scrolls game, they wouldn't have been able to guess what franchise the game is based on.

I'm really anxious to see some gameplay footage now, but worried at the same time. The environment fly-over video was nice enough, but for a video designed to showcase graphics and nothing else... yeah, it looks okay. But it's nothing special. Looks excellent compared to WoW, but compared to the other upcoming MMOs for 2013/2014 it looks really underwhelming. I think Zenimax are trying so damn hard to compete with WoW that they are completely ignoring the upcoming competition. And given that Blizzard is poised to unveil their next MMO any day now... damn. Imagine if Blizz unveils Project Titan before TESO launches.

I don't want TESO to fail, but I won't mind if it does. If you create something this unambitious and 'safe' then you don't really deserve to make a killing. WoW garnered a gigantic player base 7 years ago because it was hugely innovative for its time. It evolved the MMO genre into something highly polished and engaging. Before WoW grinding was expected, battlegrounds didn't exist, social elements were crude and poorly implemented, dungeons were just tank and spank experiences, etc.

I have no doubt that Project Titan will do the same thing: look at what the genre's shortcomings are today, and aim to completely evolve the player's experience. That's a design philosophy that deserves the support of millions of players.

They definitely put their best foot forward though. Think about - if you're going to showcase your new game, from a new and unproven developer, for the first time AND at the biggest event of the year where the entire industry is ready to report to the world on what they see, what would you do? Would you aim to show the best and most exciting/innovative elements of your game? Or would you show something normal and save the surprises for later?

First impressions are damn important. And this was the center-stage. They definitely played their hand at E3, and people were mainly unimpressed.

As much as I've never liked WoW, I can't help but agree that for its time, WoW was a huge leap forward in MMORPGs. It didn't have a lot of the more hardcoe elements of Ultima, Everquest or SWG but it did streamline and polish what those games could not.

I am curious about Titan, whether they will actually innovate or if they'll just try to create WoW 2.0 in a way. They could easily just stick with the same formula but perhaps we'll see them do it again. I'm not sure how they could now that they're headed up by Activision but who knows.

I too want to see a TES MMO and I think TESO's failure will cause a lot of problems at the company and definitely preclude us seeing a TES MMO that truly embodies the series, which is frankly, really sad.


Yeah, they showed us their all, all that they had ready at least. The terrible time-travel werewolf quest was the "coolest" thing they had ready at the time. Too bad the execution of it was laughably silly.

First impressions are everything and they've already lost a lot of potential fans.

from what i know they said they want to go a next gen MMO with Titan. it would be embarassing for ZOS if Titan turns out way better than TESO

I don't think they're even trying to sell it as truly next-gen - really, it's banking on the market being quite static. Regarding Titan, people should just stop talking about it - we have no idea what it is, except that Blizzard doesn't expect too much direct competition with WoW. It's unlikely to be a regular RPG, is almost guaranteed to not be set in a fantasy universe and it may just as likely adopt a whole different business model altogether.

If Titan is going to "revolutionize" the industry as everyone thinks, then what it'll do (ideally for Blizzard) is bring in new players rather than cycling between the same 12-15 million gamers who constitute the entire MMO market right now. What Blizzard probably realizes better than all the other 'experts' in the industry is that they don't need to compete with themselves (ie. WoW) to make the next big thing in MMOs. Instead, by *gasp* diversifying the MMO market, which is so ridiculously stagnant and un-innovative, you can actually bring in new players, such as the tens of millions who play consoles. All the numbers suggest the MMO market has completely frozen: MMO players shift from one game to another, but virtually no new ones are coming in as they did a decade ago, or at least they're not coming in any faster than they're dropping out. So my money is on Blizzard doing the one thing almost no one else with large coffers has attempted to do - something different.

And so TESO, like every other fantasy MMO, will be just another person hoping to find a golden egg - whereas Blizzard's smart enough to catch the chicken that laid it.

Very good points.

I hope they really do do something different, change the game up a bit.

When I started this topic, I also wanted some people who really knew what they were talking about when it comes to MMOs. Sure, I've played my fair share, but it's always good to get other's opinions.

With Blizzard, who knows what they are cooking up there? It could be another MMO, or it could be a game that changes everything. Or it could just be another great game that doesn't change anything.

But with MMOs these days, they all feel the same. Go to a guy, get a quest, go out and kill 'x' amount of enemies, come back and get your reward. Rinse and repeat with a few tweaks. Sadly, I saw nothing at E3 that revealed to me anything that really stands out for the game. Only lame gimmicks. Not as bad as the Kinect and such with motion control, but still not that interesting.

But it could change, perhaps they were hiding the best for later, for... some unreasonable reason. But with the way it stands, and with how many comments I have read with people commenting on it so far, it won't do that well, at least not at first.

Honestly, I would prefer to play WoW than The Elder Scrolls Online for now, and that hurts me, because I love how rich the Elder Scrolls lore is. WoW is rich, too, but it feels like they are trying to kick a dead horse back to life, only the horse is only a pile of maggots and bones now (disgusting, I know, but that's the way I see it in my eyes).


Only time will tell, and I wish the series the best. Even though Bethesda didn't make the game, the outcome of it could still inflect damage to the Elder Scrolls' reputation for future players.

For the faithful fans that knows where the real Elder Scrolls games are, we will treat the Online version like they are the "Star Wars Episode 1-3" of the series. (though 3 was getting a little interesting, but I'm getting way off topic here. )

you seem to misunderstand. by next gen MMO i actually mean an MMORPG that differs from the Formula. As all new MMORPGs that have a chance of succeeding (Planetside 2, Guild Wars 2, The Secret World just to name a few)

Let me ask a question... If you had a game under development in a world where numerous other developers were also developing their games; would you show your entire hand to the other developers?

One company in particular showed that they are very good at one thing, stealing ideas from other developers and incorporating them into their own product. And this is a simple fact of the industry I believe. If you see someone doing something in a way you think will work, you steal it and put it in your own game and try to release it earlier than the other company is capable of.

At least this is my opinion.

This is what I've been thinking since E3. ZOS seems to be playing things pretty close to the chest, which is reasonable seeing as how we are over a year away from release. Slowly over that course they will release more and more game elements. Come back this time next year and I'm sure you will see all kinds of stuff. Of course all the articles on the game have been lukewarm, they barely saw anything; and what they did see, was alpha gameplay. When a game shows up at E3, but holds 99% of its features back from the press and just keeps reiterating the same broad concepts of the game, obviously articles will be mild. They have been working on this game for 5 years, and we just now found out what it was about and the name of it. It's pretty clear this trickle of information is the companies strategy.

That's exactly why I brought up Blizzard in the first place. They won over such a large crowd with WoW because at the time of release it was different. Questing was a very rare thing in MMOs before. I remember playing Lineage 2, and the only quest in the Elf starting village was to kill 50 wolves and be awarded with a potion. It was repeatable. Quests were designed to compliment grinding back then - in this case, get a free potion every time you kill 50 enemies. Blizzard completely changed that, and many other things.

What distresses me the most with TESO (and I think it's why so many other gamers and journalists are underwhelmed with the reveal) is that the Elder Scrolls IP had a lot of potential to bring something new to the MMO genre. That fresh approach that gamers are crying out for, as you pointed out, could have come from Zenimax. Instead, they're copying WoW's gameplay and mechanics as though it's a rulebook. If Star Wars can't hold on to more than 1 million players with that approach, god help the Elder Scrolls.

Right, and that's why they've waited so long to showcase the game, leaving it until 1 year before release to reveal anything. Bioware took the opposite approach and made their game and mechanics very public, building fan anticipation for years. Both methods have their pros and cons. But I really don't think that they would hold back their big selling points from E3 - the game needs to be revealed with a great first impression, and they're only a year from release.

I hope I'm wrong. I want to love this game as much as I love the single player franchise. Maybe they'll announce their faction system was just a big joke in 6 months time and reveal a system that actually makes sense and is awesome for gameplay, saying "We didn't want to announce it earlier in case another developer implemented the system into their own MMO before we launched."

But I doubt it

yess but when your goal is to build up hype you gotta show what you got. honestly i dont think what you said is a valid argument!

As someone who has followed several MMO's from Announcement to launch I can tell you that is exactly not how its done. You build up hype by slowly trickling info, dangling the carrot in front of the fanbase.

Also because the development of an MMO takes so long and things tend to change from time to time, whole systems they find not to work will get re-done, concepts get changed. It would simply be a disaster for a dev if they came out with everything only to have it change or be removed during the dev process. You complain now for lack of info but I guarantee it would be 1000% times worse if you publicly saw things change drastically over the course of development like they do.

So yeah a slow trickle and only giving info when its 100% going to be in game is the wisest choice.