Elder Scrolls Online

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Elder Scrolls Online

Post by Cal » Thu May 03, 2012 4:22 pm

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/05/03/elder ... of-skyrim/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/ ... nline.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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.

Click the images below for the full-size renderings of the cover, and continue on to find out what other surprises are in the issue and when it will arrive:

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Ramone » Thu May 03, 2012 4:29 pm

YEAH!!! I am really excited about this. However it might not be out for a while.
REQUIEM

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Cal » Thu May 03, 2012 5:08 pm

Image

This map kind of suggests they'll be using pretty much the entirety of the Elder Scrolls world <yikes>

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Iksee » Fri May 04, 2012 8:08 am

Think it will be first person like elder scroll games? Or just like a normal MMO set in the universe?

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by DDuc » Fri May 04, 2012 9:24 am

Privet Iksee wrote:Think it will be first person like elder scroll games? Or just like a normal MMO set in the universe?
I'd say first person is the way to go.

I hope it wont detract from any future Elder Scrolls titles though.
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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Cal » Fri May 04, 2012 10:56 am

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05 ... ls-online/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The whole of Tamriel! That’s what The Elder Scrolls Online will contain, so you’ll be able to stride your way through Morrowind and shiver your way through Skyrim. Disclaimer. The whole of Tamriel except for the bits that are going to be chopped out to make room for expansions and Skyrim won’t be as detailed as in Skyrim: The Game of The Place. A lot of Tamriel then. There’s a great deal of player on player action promised, although no NPC marriages. Oh, and you can become the Emperor. What else can be learned from an American magazine’s leaked coverage?

It’ll be a World of Warcraft style game. That’s not based on an analysis of the facts and careful comparison, that’s based on the fact that it’s described as having World of Warcraft-style mechanics. Toolbars with skills loaded onto them, third-person perspectives for all and a concession to classes and levels. That said, every player will apparently be able to develop a broad range of skills, as well as having every guild in the game open to them.

There’s a big emphasis on exploration, with dungeons, caves and entire quest lines hidden from view until a player stumbles across them, rather than being referred to by an NPC, marked on a map with a big ‘X’ and then pointed to a bloody great floating arrow. That’s how most things will be handled but there will be actual discoveries to make as well.

As for the plot, it’s 1,000 years before the events of Skyrim and, wouldn’t you know it, a great evil is rising and three factions, each containing three races, are trying to stop it. While squabbling and warring with one another. So you’ve got your nords, dark elves and argonians in the Ebonheart Pact, high elves, wood elves and khajiit in the Aldmeri Dominion, and bretons, redguards and orcs in the Daggerfall Covenant. In between all the questing around, characters will be able to fight for the Imperial seat.

To become Emperor you’ll have to conquer Cyrodiil, taking forts, mines and farms in many-on-many PvP scraps, eventually attacking the Imperial City and engaging in a 100 vs 100 battle, the winner of which becomes Emperor. Not all 100 of the winner, obviously, but instead the member of the victorious faction who contributed most in the conquering process. Not sure how that works but it could lead to some delightful arguments.

It’s a shame that the whole Being The Emperor thing will apparently be for bragging rights rather than political power. The development team is the 250-strong Zenimax Online with Bethesda providing lore assistance but not actual development assistance. There are veterans of Dark Age of Camelot at the team and although I’m allergic to PvP, it’s the faction against faction struggle for supremacy that has me most interested.

The rest sounds fine. It does seem an awful lot like WOW, although that doesn’t hugely surprise me. A stamina bar that dictates how many blocks and dodges a character is capable of should make combat a little less like forming an orderly queue and the removal of aggro and claims of more interesting than MMO standard artificial intelligence could give fighting a different feel. There are also public dungeons, ‘phased questing’, which sees the world change for players involved in certain quest lines, and full voice acting.

There’ll probably be an avalanche of details and screenshots any day now. There might even be an announcement of an announcement of a teaser trailer for a trailer.
Potential excitement level has plummeted, I guess we'll have to wait and see how it turns out...

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Henry Hoover » Fri May 04, 2012 12:41 pm

I predict a flop

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by DDuc » Fri May 04, 2012 12:48 pm

Henry Groover wrote:I predict a flop
I predict a total meh.
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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Nick » Fri May 04, 2012 2:48 pm

Competing with World of Warcraft. Instant flop. Just like the last 10.

Shame!

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by TheLittleGeordie » Fri May 04, 2012 3:28 pm

<disgrace> could've been amazing but sounds pretty s***
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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Cal » Fri May 04, 2012 3:33 pm

To be fair, having hotkeyed skills doesn't instantly make it another EQ/WoW style game. That could have just been exaggeration by RPS for extra traffic. Wait and see how it looks over the next year before entirely dismissing it.

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Cal » Fri May 04, 2012 4:58 pm

NeoGAF have a shitload of info.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=472749" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
-Releasing 2013 for PC/Mac
-Developed by ZeniMax Online Studios
-MMORPG
-250 Person Team
-Started development in 2007
-"This time, saving the world from the awakening of ancient evil is only the beginning. What happens when hundreds or thousands of prophesied heroes all think that they should be Emperor?"
-The game is fully voice acted
-Third person perspective
-The game uses a hotbar to activate skills like other traditional MMOs
-Visually it looks like other Hero Engine MMOs like SWTOR
-The general art style is kind of like RIFT or Everquest 2
-You can't be a werewolf or vampire
-Crafting, alchemy, and soul stones will exist in an unrevealed form
-There will be Daedric Princes like Molag Bal, the primary antagonist, and Vaermina, "whose sphere of influence extends to the dream world and the nightmares of mortals", along with some unnamed others
-Constellations will be in the game a la Mundus stones (which work like guardian stones) and also give the answer to things like block puzzles where you step on the blocks in a certain order
-Tons of towns ranging from Imperial City, Windhelm, Daggerfall, Sentinel, Mournhold, Ebonheart, Elden Root, Shornhelm, Evermore, Riften, and a lot more
-Radiant AI will not be present
-There will be mounts, but no flying mounts
-Fast travel exists in the game in the form of wayshrines, which are also your ressurection point, and you can teleport from one wayshrine to any other wayshrine you have already visited
-There most likely won't be dragons
-Sneaking will be in the game, but how it is implemented is undecided
-They're not talking about pets right now
-There will be no player housing
-There will be no NPC romances or marriage
-"It needs to be comfortable for people who are coming in from a typical massively multiplayer game that has the same control mechanisms, but it also has to appeal to Skyrim players."
-Features most of Tamriel including Skyrim, Morrowind, Summerset Isle, and Elseweyr.
-"Not all provinces are included in their entirety; Zenimax Online is keeping large areas inaccessible to save them for use as expansion content. Nonetheless, every major area is represented to some extent."
-As an example, Windhelm is fully implemented, but Winterhold and the mages' college won't be in at launch.
-There are three player factions:
--Ebonheart Pact: The Nords, Dunmer, and Argoninans
--Aldmeri Dominion: Altmer, Bosmer, and Khajit
--Daggerfall Covenant: Bretons, Redguard, and Orcs
-"Recreateing the freedom Elder Scrolls players expect within the World of Warcraft-style mechanics Zenimax Online is using for this MMO would be impossible without changing the way that players interact with the world."
-As such, the game uses a hubless design
-For example, you don't necessarily pick up a quest to do the following, but if you kill all the necromancers in an undead barrow, a shade you free at the end will reward you.
-However, to help you find these events, various NPCs you talk to will tell you where they are happening and put a marker pointing them on your map, which is obviously totally different than receiving a quest.
-Not all quests will have NPCs that indicate where they are
-The game uses MMORPG genre standards such as classes, experience points, and other traditional MMORPG progression mechanics, but they try to present it "around the core fantasy presented by traditiona Elder Scrolls games" such as traveling around and righting wrongs or seeking riches
-The game world is very large relative to Skyrim
-You can explore almost anything you can see
-the game is set 1000 years in the past
-You can't master every discipline
-The imperials are an enemy to all three factions, lead by the noble Tharn family and the King of Worms, Mannimarco, and are hatching a plot to take over all of Tamriel
-But BEHOLD, Mannicmarco is scheming with Daedric prince Molag Bal to take over the world behind the Tharn's back
-Also, your soul has already been stolen by Molag Bal, which is the reason you can come back from death over and over again, and the starting plot is that you're fighting Molag Bal to get your soul back from him
-Hitting the level cap takes about 120 hours
-Each faction has their own leveling content
-An example quest is the story of Camlorn, where you have to stop evil werewolves who have their eyes set on conquest. First, you have to do a "standard MMO kill and collection quest" to sto ghosts from attacking some mages and soldiers. The ghosts are reliving a battle that the werewolf leader was in. You summon a ghost to find out what's going on, and the ghost tells you to wear her dead husband's armor to re-experience the battle he died in. You then get transported hundreds of years into the past to fight this battle. During this battle, you can choose to save the dead man's wife or to pursue the Werewolf leader. ZeniMax chooses to save the man's wife, who then tells you that the Werewolf leader is weak to fire. This information is helpful when you fight him, but you don't actually need to do this quest before fighting the werewolf leader if you don't want to. Basically, you can skip parts of quest chains if you want, but you get some benefit for playing the whole thing. Also, whenever you go back to the town you just saved, everything there hails you as a hero.
-The game features three faction PvP where you fight to take over keeps and use trebuchets and other siege weapons to help do it. At the high end, you can have 100 v 100 battles. There are also farms and mines you can try to take over. Mots of this happens in Cyrodiil where your goal is to take over and hold the Imperial City to get faction wide bonuses for it. If you have played Dark Age of Camelot, this probably sounds familiar. For those who haven't, essentially the entire zone is a giant PvP area will all sorts of points of interest.
-The most accomplished PvP player on your faction becomes emperor whenever you take over the capital
-When you take over Cyrodiil, you will be able to adventure in it as a hostile city a la Kvatch
-The game will have raids and heroic modes for its dungeons as end game content in addition to faction PvP
-There is also balanced PvP for people who prefer eSports
-The game will also have high end public dungeons
-Public dungeons are essentially instances that aren't actually instanced, so anyone can be in them, so imagine a World of Warcraft dungeon that featured everyone on the server in the area instead of just your party
-There are standard instanced dungeons as well
-Back on the topic of the skillbar, you have a limited number of skills you can use at any given time, and can change them whenever you're out of combat
-The number of skills is equal to (paraphrase) "a light and heavy attack with your current weapon that take up the first two slots, a few more spells related to your class, and an ultimate in the last slot".
-The ultimate is used once you gain enough finesse, which is earned by doing well in combat
-You also get a bonus loot chest if you're soloing and max your finesse, and you can also build finesse by comboing with other players
-For example, a rogue can put oil on the ground that a mage can set on fire
-A fighter can also spin in the firestorm a mage puts down, which sends out fireballs
-If you've seen Guild Wars 2 videos, the above will seem familiar
-You can't combo with the abilities of enemy players though, so if an enemy faction player drops an oil slick, you can't set it on fire
-The Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood will be presented, but in what form isn't detailed as their contnet is hard to recreate in an MMO setting
-NPCs will try to work together and use player like behavior when fighting you, and (at least to my understanding) have stamina as well
-They want the AI to be good, so instead of enemies in a dungeon sitting around and waiting to be pulled, you will be attacked by the entire room and they will try to react to how you are playing
-The claim was not demo'ed to Game Informer
-You destroy dark anchors to gain reputation with the Fighter's Guild. They are large hooks that fall from the sky pseudorandomly and have Daedric guardians next to them. They are easier to kill with a group, and once destroyed, everyone who participated gets a reputation boost with the Fighter's Guild, and eventually nets you rewards like new skills and abilities.
-The combat model will not be real time due to latency
-The combat is based around a stamina bar which you can use to sprint, block, interrupt, and break incapacitating effects
-Blocking is the primary focus of these abilities, and can do things like stopping the secondary effects of attacks such as an ice spell slowing you
-Stamina also applies to PvP, so stamina management (and wearing down your enemy's stamina) is important, as your crowd control abilities might be on a long cooldown, and if you use them before the enemy player runs out of stamina, they will probably just block the effect
-ZeniMax feels that having the stamina bar will help break down the Holy Trinity as stamina allows you to do things like tank
-However, healing is still a big part of the game
-There is also no aggro mechanic in the game, which is part of the reason stamina blocking and healing exist

And I think that's everything super major. There is still a fair amount about PvP and questing in the article, so feel free to check it out if you're interested in the game.
Also, screenshots and concept art; http://www.gamesradar.com/elder-scrolls ... ns-leaked/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Nick » Fri May 04, 2012 5:09 pm

I'll have a look at the screenshots and art when i get home. Sounds decent, i just cant see them pulling it off and getting a big enough player base.

Any idea on how much they'll charge per month?

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by DDuc » Fri May 04, 2012 6:07 pm

[youtube]c3cAA1ZycfY[/youtube]

I hate it when they release pointless trailers like this. <disgrace>

You can get away with it when it's actually revealing a major title (GTA 5, Skyrim etc), but no point doing it for an mmorpg that nobody knows nothing about.
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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Cal » Fri May 04, 2012 6:10 pm

Yeah that video is s***, so I didn't post it. <whistle>

I guess E3 is when things will get interesting, since they're already doing the Dawnguard stuff then. Surprised it's been in development so long without an announcement, hopefully a sign that it will actually be a complete game with an end-game and minimal bugs next year.

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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by DDuc » Fri May 04, 2012 6:16 pm

There were rumours that a Elder Scrolls MMORPG was in the making.

The fact that they already stated Zenimax were working on a different project gave it away.
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Re: Elder Scrolls MMO Officialerised.

Post by Cal » Fri May 04, 2012 6:19 pm

DavideDuck wrote:There were rumours that a Elder Scrolls MMORPG was in the making.

The fact that they already stated Zenimax were working on a different project gave it away.
Yeah it was well known that it existed, but waiting 5 years to make it official is nice. Instead of saying "yeah we're making a game, it won't release for another 6-7 years though so enjoy the wait".

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Re: Elder Scrolls Online

Post by Cal » Fri May 18, 2012 10:05 pm

Main storyline will be solo.
The last thing you want to do is have the final confrontation with Mehrunes Dagon as he's stomping across the Imperial City, and you see like 15 guys behind you waiting to kill him because they're on the same quest. As MMO online designers, the thing we wanted to make sure we hit the most was that feeling that you're awesome, you're the hero, and we do that through a mix of technology. Where when I am confronting a major foe in the game, I'm doing it in an instance where I am alone, and we have a whole part of the game that is 100% solo, which is the main story, where the world focuses on you; you are the hero, everything you do is solo and the world reacts to you that way.
Also video - http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/ ... n-mmo.aspx" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Re: Elder Scrolls Online

Post by Cal » Fri Oct 26, 2012 8:07 am

Sounds like it holds more promise than I thought.

[youtube]SLp0ykvotEI[/youtube]

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Re: Elder Scrolls Online

Post by Cal » Thu Nov 08, 2012 5:00 pm

[youtube]1_Fr6VF_1LA[/youtube]

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