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Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ZeniMax-Bethesda-Elder-Scrolls-Online-MMO,news-14481.html) has a piece claiming that Bethesda and ZeniMax are due to announce an Elder Scrolls MMO in sometime in May.

Article sites an "industry source that wishes to remain anonymous" so who knows how reliable this is. The article claims it will be called "Elder Scrolls Online", be set several hundred years before any of the existing games and have three factions.

Personally I think this would be a terrible mistake, a huge waste of resources and the death of the IP. But at least it's not Fallout getting fucked over by being MMO'd.

Yes, let's take a series known for being a semi-sandbox with pretty open-ended gameplay and turn it into an MMO.

This would only work as an aspergers-level sandbox and still get the feel of the series right.

It could work if SWTOR money was thrown at it.

Errrrrr. This is not news. In any capacity.

Hey at least it is an IP that is compatible with a few thousand nameless adventurers running around killing the wildlife.

I wonder if they are designing it around first person.

They licensed Hero Engine for a MMO back in 2007.   Based on the performance in SWTOR and Bethesda's track record for programming we should be able to hit 3 FPS on a top end rig come day one.
http://www.shacknews.com/article/50064/bethesda-sister-dev-licenses-heroengine

You assume it's going to not crash then?

At least the writing might be good.

But not really a surprise.

The idea seemed a bit odd at first, but now I'm actually somewhat excited for it.  If they follow the systems they've been using, it should truly be a classless MMO, where you can take and build what ever skill combo's you want.  When was the last time any sort of decently funded MMO did that?  If anything it should be good for the genre by having a major studio try something none DIKU.  An MMO with a slightly more advanced version of the skill/perk system in Skyrim would be pretty cool, imo.

Of course they could fuck it up by copying everybody else and making it revolve around classes, but hey, hope springs eternal!

Let's hope they don't use the Skyrim UI?

The games have lore, but all the playable races are united under the empire, so there is only one faction, which may be a problem.  And their skill and combat systems have been acceptable in each game so far, but only because of the availability of the developer toolkit that let me modify my mana amount, alphabetize spells, and generally modify things to make them to my liking.

To make an MMO, I imagine they would have to limit spell and skill customization, while trying to maximize and bank on the setting and the lore they've built up with the series.  Such a game may be fun.  I don't know.

Sorry, was the first I'd heard of it, and I didn't remember seeing another thread about it. Feel free to den if you think it warrants that.

It's been something of a partially-open secret since about 2008, albeit a rather obscure one outside of game-journo and developer circles. I know a few folks who have been working on it since then. They've just been very quiet, PR-wise.

Vewwy quiet.  They may be amongst us and we don't even know it!

 :cthulu: :ye_gods:

Sigh, an inevitable step for the franchise, I guess? Any hope that, unlike bioware, the single-player and the MMO team will be kept separate and release their own thing? (at least in the form of one or more single-player games as "lead ins" to the MMO, like Amalur and Project Copernicus)

On having no factions, I consider that a very good thing.  Please, not another faction warfare mmo.  Setting everybody under the same empire and pulling off PvP some other way will work much better for a sandbox type game anyways.  I'm tired of the split player base faction mechanic.  I also have enjoyed the series without leaning on mods.  Oblivion needed mods because of the retarded scaling system they had.  Skyrim has been a perfect experience so far though, and I can't imagine wanting to download a mod to tweak anything.

Why do you assume they would have to limit spell/skill customization?  The Skyrim system could easily translate to an MMO, and with an MMO they could actually get away with making it more advanced (they would pretty need to in order to offer enough different play style options for thousands of players on one server).

Again, I can only see this being a good thing if they concentrate on translating their game mechanics into an MMO.  The lore is pretty deep at this point, but its not anything spectacular that's going to draw people to play.  But an AAA MMO that actually attempts to be Sandbox could help advance the genre, no matter how the game is.

Likely. The singleplayer Elder Scrolls games are still being entirely developed by Bethesda Softworks. The Elder Scrolls MMO is being developed entirely by a different company: ZeniMax Online. The two studios are both subsidiaries of the ZeniMax Media parent company.

They're even located in different cities, although nearby. ZMO is in Hunt Valley, MD (near Baltimore) whereas Bethesda is located in Bethesda, MD (near Washington D.C.).

Age of Conan springs to mind, I can't say they made it work.
Not sure what way would function (as in: not turn into the most tedious, random gank-a-ton) in an MMO trying to pull in the masses.

I'm also not sure at which point 'making an MMO out of it' suddenly turned into the pinnacle an IP can reach apparently.

When people tipped to the possibilities of years worth of steady, recurring monthly revenue?  :why_so_serious:

If they could make it anything like the open world, sandboxy, first person-y, skills based fun of their more recent single player efforts, it could be fun as hell.

But it would probably end up being Diku in a long line of other Diku MMOs.  A game like Skyrim is great (IMO!) because of the above stuff.  If you lose any of that, then the luster disappears for me.

Skyrim was a MMO set up for one player. You start adding multiple players into that main area and 1) it will show up all the game's flaws very quickly; and 2) it will be exactly like the game play experience of other MMOs.

Sometime in 2005, give or take a little.

If a lot more MMOs started as solid single player games, I think the industry would be better off overall.  If a RPG game is fun in single player it has a better chance of being fun in multiplayer.  That obviously didn't apply when MMOGs were first created because the freshness of the genre hid a lot of the warts.

And before someone asserts that I meant it, I do not mean to imply that any good single player RPG can become the basis for a good MMOG.  

Studios should create single player games then put an add-on "end game" where you pay 7$ a month to play to get better gear and fight public baddies.

They also started differently because MMOs came from a different background from single-player games.  We've had enough time that they could have learned some lessons though.

I understand where you are coming from, but strongly disagree. Single player games only need to worry about PvE balance and even then it isn't so important - some abilities in Skyrim are horribly overpowered (Argonian Histskin, which allows for HP regen at a high rate, or even the ability to skip time), or much safer (e.g. ranged attacks versus close-quarters combat).

You add in multiplayer and things need to be a lot more balanced, even if you don't have direct PvP combat. Then comes the question about where characters should be limited (which isn't so much an issue in Skyrim so you can have a character that is excellent at everything if you are willing to put the time in) to encourage teaming. And in a single player title you don't have to tie the in-game story to character levels, but you pretty much do for multiplayer games to gate the narrative.

You can get away with things in single player RPGs that would cripple multiplayer RPGs, and vice versa.

Case in point:  fixing everything via "a future patch" and sucky Customer Support.

This. Bethsoft has never been about refinement on the front end, so stepping into the MMO market is going to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I'm expecting it to rival Anarchy Online levels of stupidity.

I really hope it has a PS3 port.

Hello, everyone - I have lurked on these forums for years and years, mainly because you all seem to have interesting info about MMOs that are being developed, etc.  I'm pretty excited about the idea of this Zenimax MMO, and so I finally decided to be less of a fly on the wall.

I understand a lot of the concerns I'm seeing about this:  Some people are worried that it will distract Bethesda and that it will ruin the chances of future single player TES titles.  Others are concerned that because of the shoddy polish of some of the more recent TES titles (did you see the UI on Skyrim when it came out!?), there's no way Bethesda could pull off the complexity and polish needed on an MMO.

I'd totatlly agree with those concerns, but, as mentioned above in this very thread, for the fact that Bethesda is NOT making this game.  It's being made by a sister company under the same corporate umbrella called Zenimax Online Studios.  Bethesda will continue to create their console oriented titles, and Zenimax Online Studios headed by Matt Firor will be making the MMO.

Matt Firor has been largely credited with the early success of DAOC.  I'm pretty sure he has Brian Axelson working on his team also - he's the guy who developed the combat and 'style' system that made DAOC so exciting and visceral.  Someone above mentioned that TES is one faction - but from the leak I read, there will be 3 factions in this game. (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ZeniMax-Bethesda-Elder-Scrolls-Online-MMO,news-14481.html)

So.. Matt Firor + his team + 3 factions = I'm really hoping this game will be a lot more like a DAOC 2 with a big sprawling world, and less like another WOW clone.

Congrats on your first post!  :thumbs_up:

That's an interesting idea that it might end up more like DAOC, but I'm wondering how that would function in the Elder Scrolls world? Honestly, one of the best things about Elder Scrolls to me is that factions can literally spring up from anywhere. They can be divided among racial lines, religious lines, schools of magic, Daedra worship, regions, or guilds. The idea of 3 factions almost seems limiting, although I can understand the why.

Matt Firor seemed to be in charge of designing things up to ToA, at which point he was just in a producer role. Since he's not credited with the design, I'm hoping he had nothing to do with that trainwreck.

Fixed that for you. Their TES games have had shoddy polish ever since Arena. Also, welcome! :)

Sorry, who *has* pulled off the complexity and polish needed in an MMO? If the alleged standard is something that no more than 5% of the products meet, it's not a standard.

Sure it is.  JEDEC memory and ISO power supply standards are still around, and next to nobody fully conforms to them.

 :facepalm:

I also believe that Floyd Grubb aka Castle aka the powers guy after Gecko from CoH/V is working at ZeniMax on their online title.

Besides, I'm not sure that I'm more confident of a "sister company" being more capable than the original company in creating a franchise MMO. Experience on one title doesn't seem to necessarily improve the next title, a lot of MMO companies / devs appear to do their best work on the first MMO they lead (Hartsman is the only exception that springs to mind). And if a studio doesn't deliver on their second title, they're often wiped out financially and people get fired, even if their first title was immensely successful.

But then again, I'm looking forward to watching another car crash, so onwards, TESMMO! ONWARDS!

I think the argument is more along the lines of - if they can't release a stable single player game how will they manage to release a even minimally functional MMO?   I don't know that the argument is particularly good, but that I think it is different than just "they won't polish it enough."

The real problem as far as I am concerned is that in order to do this right they will either need to 1) heavily instance or phase the game or 2) make it so nothing matters (or of course 3) actually make a proper open world game  :why_so_serious:).   But the problem is that I'm not really interested in one or two and the elder scrolls IP isn't enough to get me on board for a little while the same way, say, Lord of the Rings is. 

With regard to proper polish, let's look at one element, the UI: I would rate the UI of Skyrim a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10.  It was a step backward for pc gaming.  I'd rate most of the released MMO's in the last 5 years a 5-10 with regard to UI.  SWTOR sitting at a 5 and Rift around an 8.  I'm fairly certain that Firor's team will at least hit a 6.  I guess each of us has to determine what we consider acceptable for an MMO at release.  I'm pretty forgiving of some things if the gameplay is fun.  Skyrim's UI was so bad that it actually broke my immersion on many occasions, so my tolerance is probably in the 5+ range.

Another concern I've heard is that they licensed the Hero Engine in 2007.  Do any of you actually know if the engine itself is terrible or if it was just Bioware's implementation and modification of it that made it function so poorly that they had to pull all the high res textures and advanced options?

If you make Skyrim a 1, it leaves no space on the scale for Oblivion.

I don't remember hating the UI in Oblivion as much as I did Skyrim.  Maybe it was already modded by the time I got ahold of it?  I don't remember to be honest.  Was it worse?

It was better in some areas and worse in some areas in my opinion.  Both clearly had console controls in mind when they were designed.  Oblivions was in my opinion less intuitive and more confusing, but actually a little better once you got used to it.  Skyrim's was easier to use off the bat, but quite clunky and wasted huge amounts of space.

We're comparing piles of shit though.

I was able to play Skyrim with an unmodded UI, I couldn't deal with it with Oblivion. It's all a bit subjective though, yeah.

Bad UIs just baffle me.  They are how the player interacts with the damn game.  It should be one of the highest priorities and that is not asking a lot since there have been so many UIs modded by players that tell devs exactly what players care about.

I often wonder about this myself.  You'd think with hundreds of millions in the budget, it shouldn't be so hard for a development team to actually look at modern MMO's to see what has been added or innovated that the players really like.  UI features are just one example.  Some other things that are often tacked on after player discontent is known: Housing, social abilities (yes people do like to sit in chairs), meaningful crafting, some sort of LFG tool (not necessarily a group builder and port to dungeon thing ala Rift and WOW, but at least a UI interface where you can list your party looking for members like in DDO and LOTRO), I could go on and on.  Seriously, don't make your game in a vaccuum - send some lackeys out to level up in the other MMO's and see what is cool and, yes, copy it.

Pretty sure that Bethseda say they did no external game testing on Skyrim - all tests were done in-house using internal staff. The fact the game sold 10m+ copies is seen as validation of that approach (by them, anyway).

The UI is one of those areas where they should have been using external testers.

UI of Skyrim had issues at certain points (trading items, enchanting), but overall I was fine with it and had no problems.  Agree with Ingmar that Oblivions was much worst (though I still played it un-moded without to much trouble).  Giving Skyrims UI a 1 is just crazy land.

Bethsoft and Elder Scrolls were both in a place where I could overlook the UI after some initial bitching.

There was so many great things beyond the UI, it sucks that maybe if it was a persons' first experience with the series that they would pass it up because of that.

Now, if it was a new company with a new IP and they had the same UI, they would be brushed under the rug and never heard from again. Well, maybe not - look at the Gothic series. Does anyone remember Gothic and what a shit-show those controls were?