I would pay cash dollars money for a Skyrim-engine port of Morrowind or Oblivion, and then I wouldn’t need to buy any new games for a year or two.
I guess my question is this–is there anything in a MMO that is truly “off the beaten path?” The min/max drive in MMOs is a horribly strong one, things that are off the beaten path usually stay there because they aren’t as good, worthwhile rewards end up becoming the beaten path no matter where they are in the world.
That’s the difference between 1 player and 1 million players, there is no “off the beaten path”.
Skywind. But it’s not even at version 1.0 yet.
I want to play Morrowind, but after the graphics of Oblivion and Skyrim, the Morrowind graphics make me wince.
Might as well go ahead and say one of the potential rewards: There are chests that appear somewhat at random that have better loot than can be crafted or dropped at that level. Now there are specified spawn points, but firstly you’re usually not going to find them in highly-traveled quest areas and secondly there are a lot of spawn points and the spawn rate is very low. So if you want a chest you’re going to have to look for it, and weigh your options on whether to spend your time searching for them or for crafting mats. Plus there are some random encounters…I have no idea whether they’re on a timer, but I can say they were there sometimes but not there others. The one nice thing was that the maps are so darn big you can find yourself alone even with over a 1,000 people on the server.
Still, though, I can’t help but wondering what Zenimax was thinking when they planned and developed ESO. I mean, the paid MMO market is really close to being tapped out. And I realize they started developing in 2006. But considering the success of Skyrim…perhaps sometime along the line they could have thought, we could really take a bath on this, let’s cut our losses and make this single-player. A few tweaks and this would have been a beautiful addition to the ES series, call it “Elder Scrolls VI: The VIolation of Tamriel” or something. Because I don’t want this killing Elder Scrolls like Diablo III surely killed that series.
I didn’t play Arena, but personally I feel there has been a progressive dumbing-down since Daggerfall (ES II).
MMO’s have a five year + development cycle, Zenimax along with every other game company that’s released an MMO in the past five years or so basically saw WoW and thought “let’s do THAT, let’s do the fuck out of it”. In a few years we’ll start getting the games that looked at the mostly failures of the WoW clone era and thought “maybe let’s not do that so hard”.
I did play Arena, as well as every single other iteration of the franchise with the exception of Redguard, and it wasn’t until Morrowind that they were able to produce a game that didn’t fundamentally suck.
That’s just it though…five years ago WoW was still doing roaring business, ArenaSoft was doing well with GuildWars and well into the development of GW2, LoTR Online was in development, many other ones were…I just can’t imagine the bean-counters thinking “we’ve got the best single-player RPG series going, we’re sure there’s going to be enough of the MMO market still out there to make a profitable Elder Scrolls MMO, which is either going to cost a kajillion dollars to develop or not look good enough to entice either the MMO fans or the ES fans to check it out.”
Because–in all honesty–WoW’s graphics sucked for a long, long time, GW1/2 suffers from serious lack of end-game play, and you can name any one of a number of problems with other MMOs from improbably steep learning curve (EVE Online) to overall crappiness (that APB game that lasted about five seconds). But Elder Scrolls fans would only accept a game that was great in almost all its respects because the Elder Scrolls games were, well, great in almost all their respects. When you remake a movie or a TV show, you have to make it better than it was the first time to succeed, because fans remember the movie or show as being better than it actually was. So Zenimax is in the unenviable position of making an Elder Scrolls MMO–which in itself is close to unthinkable to the majority of ES players–and it has to be BETTER than Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim (delete to leave your favorite). So you can see why I don’t even need to tell you what I saw in the beta to know that disaster could easily loom ahead for ESO. And I can tell you that what I saw in the beta was good, but “good” isn’t going to cut it, and “great” is probably going to fall short too.
To each his own, I guess. I liked Daggerfall best from a story-perspective, but damn, was that shit buggy. Even with player patches, you were best saving every 10 minutes, or at least after entering any door.
I liked Daggerfall’s implementation of factions and especially the character building better than any of the rest.
I was never very sold on ESO to begin with. The series, which I picked up at Morrowind, has a very particular feel to it and I didn’t think that it would remain true to form in an MMO. This is a case where changing the genre of the video game is very real, and as dramatic as changing the genre of a movie series. Imagine the final entry in the Hobbit trilogy is a rom-com.
The biggest problem when I actually got to play it though is that it looks terrible compared to Skyrim. Really, it doesn’t even look good compared to Oblivion, and that game is ancient history by now. The environment is barren and lifeless, and the semi-realistic graphics don’t allow for character to overwhelm low poly-count.
The more I hear about it, the more I get the feeling that after a year or so, ESO will be referred to as That Which Must Not Be Named.
Not interested here. I’d love for an MMO to unseat WoW, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon. The pay-to-play model is dying. I don’t think a new MMO is going to get away with that ever again.
Not to mention having dungeons that wouldn’t fit in the back seat of a Ford Festiva, a functional (if exceedingly wonky) climbing skill, a fully functioning 3-D map system…
Overall, Morrowind was a better game, but Daggerfall was wonderful in ways I’ve not seen since.
I strenuously object to labeling Daggerfalls mapping system as “functional.”
I don’t think it will be as huge a flop as Diablo III was simply because the more people are hearing about ESO’s problems (not to mention its pay model), the less hype it’s drawing. Plus, D3 followed D2 by 12 years; D2 and its expansion were so loved by fans of the dungeon crawl genre that just the announcement of the game sent people into a frenzy because with Blizzard concentrating on WoW they’d left the Diablo franchise aside for a long time. ESO’s announcement made people think, “Huh? Well, that might be cool, but why an MMO?” Then D3 took four years after announcement to come out and…the gameplay just wasn’t that good, the Real Money Auction House was a flop, the loot tables weren’t set right, and all it pretty much guaranteed was that we’ll never see a Diablo IV.
I don’t think people will really care that much about ESO. The kind of people who play Elder Scrolls aren’t really like the hype-driven fanboys who talked up D3, the kind of people who defended it on the forums even after it was painfully obvious that it had fundamental flaws. I’m kind of hoping that ESO fails quietly, to be honest, that gamers will not automatically equate “Elder Scrolls” with “failure”. Maybe then that won’t be the death of the franchise.
They already survived “Redguard”, but that was a different time for games.
Hell. Fire.
I wrote a huge post with a bunch of research and the board ate it and wouldn’t let me go back. Sigh.
Not at all.
I hope they have a team working on elder scrolls 6 and aren’t all wasting time on this game.
I gave up after Daggerfraud (nothing quite like falling through a floor into the void in every damned dungeon…) and didn’t pick it up again until Oblivion. Liked what I saw, so thought I’d spike my vein with just a little bit of Skyrim. Just once to see what it was like.
Elder Scrolls is redeemed, and for the reason already mentioned: It’s a huge world, and it’s all yours. That said, I would really like it if I could work a few quests with two or three friends who normally follow their own path. Like, maybe I have a pal who spends most of his time in Elsweyr and another in Hammerfel–just because people have their preferences–but we wanna bond and do some deeds in Valenwood… I could see the value in a limited capacity multiplayer game.