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This could potentially be a great game. The whole of Tamriel to discover with other players, along with impressive Elder Scrolls visuals and a smooth real time combat system (assuming they keep the same combat system). I imagine you’re quite excited, Shadow?
I wonder if they’re basing it closely on the Skyrim engine or if they’re doing something new.
I’m not optimistic about MMOs that aren’t best sellers because they have to fit a particular mold. In other words they have to cater to the majority who are basically non-gamers.
So I don’t expect anything very new in terms of actual gameplay, but we shall see, plus the graphics will probably be nice.
There are two main things that MMOs can provide at the moment that people would buy:
A sense of community.
An open ended world.
Communities are born from mutual dependence (in other words if they are forced together), or if people are really dedicated. From my experience in WoW, the community has polarized into extremes and it’s basically a Facebook game now.
Hopefully this will help MMOs evolve a bit, but I doubt they’ll break the mold too much. We shall see.
It must be hard to keep an online gaming community together when everyone is off living their lives most of the time.
I think MMOs can still be enjoyed if the world is more alive with other players roaming around, even if there isn’t a strong community tying it together. Grinding alone or with strangers in that kind of world can get boring after a while, unless there’s a lot of variety. So I think MMOs need to have a quality gameplay and even a quality story to keep people interested who aren’t necessarily playing for the community aspect.
Gamers may be a minority, but they are still a huge minority, so they will end up concentrating somewhere.
But for me, an MMO is nothing without a sense of community. It feels like you are playing a single player game with other people. I don’t understand why people were so eager to bring reality to gaming, but it’s a side effect of efficiency. Most people don’t spend a lot of time online, so everything becomes molded around catering to the majority first and foremost and giving them what they want above all else at the expense of everyone else (because games have limited budgets in order to keep their profit to investment ratio as high as possible).
That’s why I am hoping to see some competition to force publishers to cater to everyone more.
Will the Elder Scrolls MMO do it? Only time will tell, but they are competing against some very talented devs.
I’ve been waiting 9 years for this game, ever since I played Morrowind. I can finally scratch it off my list of holy grails, leaving just Half Life 3 and Shenmue III.
Doesn’t really matter if it’s good or bad, I will play it.
I know that this is very superficial, but those screenshots look like crap. They are using the same engine that was used in the Old Republic. OR looks very generic and lacks detail to me, just like these screenshots. I wish there was a way to modify the current engine used in Skyrim to run this MMO. It just doesn’t have the feel of the previous three games.
I’d blame their artists for the generic visuals, not whatever engine they chose.