[PC] Elder Scrolls Online

Long rumored and much anticipated, The Elder Scrolls Online is finally being unveiled in the June issue of Game Informer. In this month's cover story we journey across the entire land of Tamriel, from Elsweyr to Skyrim and everywhere in between.

Developed by the team at Zenimax Online Studios, The Elder Scrolls Online merges the unmatched exploration of rich worlds that the franchise is known for with the scale and social aspects of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Players will discover an entirely new chapter of Elder Scrolls history in this ambitious world, set a millennium before the events of Skyrim as the daedric prince Molag Bal tries to pull all of Tamriel into his demonic realm.

"It will be extremely rewarding finally to unveil what we have been developing the last several years," said game director and MMO veteran Matt Firor, whose previous work includes Mythic's well-received Dark Age of Camelot. "The entire team is committed to creating the best MMO ever made – and one that is worthy of The Elder Scrolls franchise."

An in-depth look at everything from solo questing to public dungeons awaits in our enormous June cover story – as well as a peek at the player-driven PvP conflict that pits the three player factions against each other in open-world warfare over the province of Cyrodiil and the Emperor's throne itself.

Come back tomorrow morning for a brief teaser trailer from Zenimax Online and Bethesda Softworks, and later on in the afternoon for the first screenshot of the game. Over the course of the month, be sure to visit our Elder Scrolls Online hub, which will feature new exclusive content multiple times each week. You'll meet the three player factions, see video interviews with the creative leads, and much more.

The Elder Scrolls Online is scheduled to come out in 2013 for both PC and Macintosh.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featur...ls-online.aspx

welp there goes my life

...

What about Fallout? Fallout 4? Fallout Online?

More Fallout.

There's more than one team at Bethesda, Brett. Hell, this doesn't even say it's being developed by Bethesda. Fallout games will still happen.

I'm excited about this, but I doubt I will ever check it out once it comes out. I don't have the time or money to have an MMO addiction, and I'm the type of person who will get addicted to it...

I wonder how similar it will be to the main series entries....

12:32 PM - BuckGB: The Elder Scrolls Online is all you .
12:32 PM - BuckGB: Preview! Review!
12:32 PM - eric: oh. yay.
12:32 PM - eric: MMOs.
12:32 PM - BuckGB: It's going to be wonderful.
12:32 PM - eric:
12:32 PM - BuckGB: I can't wait to see Chinese gold spammers and characters running around named MuhRUNEZ and Dagggon.

Originally Posted by Berry Punch

There's more than one team at Bethesda, Brett. Hell, this doesn't even say it's being developed by Bethesda. Fallout games will still happen.

so this means that Bethesda is still doing Fallout? meh. let someone else have it, I say. Bethesda, however one feels about their development skills, just plain does not understand Fallout or what makes it so magical. and it's not just that Fallout 3 had a terrible engine, it's that the whole Fallout atmosphere was borked and turned into like, Bethesda's Post-Nuclear Funland 2000 or some ♥♥♥♥.

---------- Post added at 12:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:08 PM ----------

as for the MMO itself, I'm sure it will be fun at the very least though persnickety ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s (<----------) will find very much to gripe about I'm sure. If nothing else, Skyrim was a step in the right direction, especially after Oblivion, which was like, a game with a thousand things to do where I didn't enjoy doing any of them, and a huge step down from the great pacing and interesting game-world of Morrowind. Hopefully with some polish they can come out with a great game, they have plenty of potential, and as eric said one time they are like the closest thing we have to a legitimate RPG developer right now outside of indie companies.

if all else fails the soundtrack will probably be really good, it usually is.

My big concern is actually a lack of mod support. 90% of my playtime with Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind was with mods, and the games were much more fun as a result. Without those to balance out problems, add new content, and fix bugs, I have to wonder if the game will be as much fun. Obviously as an MMO its set of priorities will be very different and the entirely different developer might bode well, but there's nothing about the Elder Scrolls universe in particular that draws me to it, other than some of the excellent lore from the first 2-3 games. It'd might as well just be called Generic Fantasy MMO, because with a different team, and most likely very different game mechanics, I doubt it'll provide a very similar or even familiar experience.

IGN Article

According to the magazine Game Informer, the gameplay will involve "hundreds of thousands of prophesied heroes" vying to be crowned Emperor of Tamriel. That likely means that one player will be crowned emperor, something very unusual in a multiplayer game.

There will be three major playable factions. According to the developers, "It needs to be comfortable for people who are comign in from a typical massively multiplayer game that has the same control mechanisms, but it also has to appeal to Skyrim players."

The Elder Scrolls Online is slated 2013 release date, as a PC/Mac exclusive.

The Elder Scrolls is probably my favorite game franchise. Seeing the series churning out what seems to be another generic fantasy MMO alike to World of Warcraft or Rift is disappointing, to say the least. However, I'll be playing it as soon as I can get my hands on an adequate computer. Though I don't prefer MMOs, I would jump at any chance to discover the new lore and experience ancient Tamriel first-hand.

Finally, a ♥♥♥♥ing decent game for us unloved mac users.

...Too bad I won't be able to mod it because it's an mmo. ;__;

The three playable fractions comment reminds me of Guild Wars 2 pvp war mechanics. Should be fun if handled right.

And since this is set a millennium before the events of Skyrim, no doubt we'll see dragons again, as well as Talos, the founding of the first empire, extinct (and possibly now-playable?) races such as Dwarves, Falmer; etc.

This should be fun, but I'm worried about how'll handle the single player aspects. I mean, the Elder Scrolls games are all about the single player experience and how the player's decisions impact Tamriel, correct? If they're making and online MMO, then chances are that they're going to have to abandon the two most important aspects of the series: single-player immersion and modding.

Looks like I'll be dropping WoW next year...

Shame too. I like the Monk class.

I hope the TES MMO will have my undivided attention just like the single-player was. I don't know how can they pull this out. First-person MMORPG like Mortal didn't make it to the scene, but who knows, this is Bethesda after all.

Are they going to provide classes or it's a create whatever you want to be? If it's like Skyrim that let's you create any type of character you want, there would be a lot of balancing issues especially for those veteran TES players.

So I guess no more NPC killing? It would be a nice feature that if you kill a town guard/NPC, you'll be a fugitive and either you run, bribe or serve your sentence in the prison (one week in prison = one year in TES world).

Oooo, something like a temp ban for killing people and getting caught. I like it!!!

Yeah, kinda like that. I won't label it as "ban" though, your character would just be away from the society and be in prison so yeah, that's one week of grinding and mining in prison. XD I also like the idea of having a bounty if the player decided to run away from the law, but I don't think that would be fun, especially with abusive high-level players roaming the game.

I'm a bit concerned. My single-played was riddled with bugs for months, despite the main offender being 'fixed' in two different patches- had to use console commands to get around it eventually. I'm not sure how an MMO would go, as they tend to be be a little more buggy than single player games in my experience.

Ah well, could be fun anyway.

I'm willing to bet that it won't live up to the hype and it'll die a slow death like TOR is doing.


I mean I'll still give it a try and everything, I'm just not expecting much.

meh, there's nothing they could do here that they couldn't do better with a single player game

I dunno that much about Elder Scrolls but I do know that when a game series is MMO-fied like that, it usually turns everything into a grind- and e-peen-fest. I mean take the Knights of the Old Republic games from Bioware for example. If you enjoyed that single-player RPG experience, you'd think a MMO of it would be great, but not necessarily. It can actually water down the very experience you love about the single-player. You're not alone and are constantly forced to compare yourself to all kinds of people who too have slain this and that dragon just as you. Needless to say SWTOR didn't feel at all like KOTOR to me.

So yea, just 'cause you love Elder Scrolls doesn't all mean you'll come to like this. Of course that depends on what you like about ES.
To me tho, MMOs are usually watered down online-versions of offline RPGs

My initial reaction is, "Hey, cool!" Because for all their problems, I very much like Elder Scrolls games.


...But I have a lot of trouble picturing an Elder Scrolls MMO working out well, so...I just hope this doesn't prevent an Elder Scrolls VI from existing.

Originally Posted by ɹɐǝqıɹǝ

My big concern is actually a lack of mod support. 90% of my playtime with Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind was with mods, and the games were much more fun as a result. Without those to balance out problems, add new content, and fix bugs, I have to wonder if the game will be as much fun. Obviously as an MMO its set of priorities will be very different and the entirely different developer might bode well, but there's nothing about the Elder Scrolls universe in particular that draws me to it, other than some of the excellent lore from the first 2-3 games. It'd might as well just be called Generic Fantasy MMO, because with a different team, and most likely very different game mechanics, I doubt it'll provide a very similar or even familiar experience.

WoW's modding community is pretty expansive, so I think that there will be mod support. They'll be restricted to UI changes though, so I see your concern.