The Elder Scrolls Online

Key word *some* hope.

Utnayan_sl said:

More glorious marketing spin from Paul Sage which really does nothing different but wants to make it sound awesome. (I will hand them that. The one thing these relic designers have proved is that they sure can sp[in the most base-style development into something that sounds fantastic. Kind of like when Bioware-Austin talked about each class having it's own unique storyline. It sure did. For 10% of the game.

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I didn't play UO, but I thought it was well regarded. I will admit that Paul Sage sounds really annoying in the video interviews and, while he seems nice, he has a lot of "marketing guy' in his tone that I really don't like.

BTW, not sure who Anthony Sullivan is. I'm tempted to Google it, but, nah.

Utnayan, I read an interesting article on the web a few years back - it was some guy giving a post mortem on the development of DAOC, and I don't remember his name. The way he describes things, they had about 25 employees, and a shoestring budget. Their server was in their office and he described Firor and some other kid programmer as basically heroes. I'll try to find it. Yeah, I fucking remember all too well that the game wasn't done when it launched. Yay for me rolling a blademaster and not know that Hibernia was not done with getting monsters and items. I still loved that game... and they DID finish it, and I got years of awesome times out of their work, so I can't hold a grudge about that.

** Edit ** Here's the article I remembered. Not exactly as my mind recalled it, but interesting.

http://www.brokentoys.org/2011/10/09...de-of-camelot/

Utnayan_sl said:

What is funny is back in 2008 it was a WoW clone. In 2009/2010 it was an SWTOR clone. Not sure what they wanted to accomplish the third go around, and now I think they just decided we better fucking do something before Zenimax pulls the plug. So now it is a WoW/SWTOR/GW2 clone on mega server technology.

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Let's be fair here. If you were building a MMO with a 300 million dollar budget and you saw games like WAR and SWTOR and AOC crashing and burning, would you keep steaming ahead or would you make adjustments?

I'll tell you what totally blows already about TESO's PvE content. 2/3rds of it is permanently locked off to you the player behind lame faction walls. To see all the PvE content you will have to roll a different toon for each faction.

Utnayan_sl said:

Obviously. You wanted some insight as to the stop/starts. And here lies Firor's problem. If he would have made his own game rather than copy others, maybe they wouldn't have had 3 stop starts and blown millions of dollars.

The $300 Million dollars doesn't fund TSO entirely. It's spread out among other games incluidng what was to get Zenimax Online off the ground.

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Not looking at what does and doesn't work in other games and and ignoring what ideas have been tried and failed isn't a great idea either.

Did they really restart several times though, like they had no real game plan in the beginning and have just been kind of making it up as they go?

Paul Sage is an idiot, don't bother listening to anything he says.

Zhaun_sl said:

Not looking at what does and doesn't work in other games and and ignoring what ideas have been tried and failed isn't a great idea either.

Did they really restart several times though, like they had no real game plan in the beginning and have just been kind of making it up as they go?

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Rumors and small hints about an Elder Scrolls MMO being in the making have been around for many, many years. And the best they have to show so far is a cgi trailer and a tiny bit of "gameplay" footage which looks pretty damn bad for a game that's supposed to release this year. That is another thing really, if people say "oh i looks alright to me". Get a grip, it's 2013 and the stuff we've seen looks like shit.

bytes_sl said:

Rumors and small hints about an Elder Scrolls MMO being in the making have been around for many, many years. And the best they have to show so far is a cgi trailer and a tiny bit of "gameplay" footage which looks pretty damn bad for a game that's supposed to release this year. That is another thing really, if people say "oh i looks alright to me". Get a grip, it's 2013 and the stuff we've seen looks like shit.

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They been making Teso for almost 7.5 years, not jokeing and frankly it shows, the graphics they once thought might be acceptable are now since 2008 looking like warm ass, really bad console port from old 1st generation consoles.

Tortanic Trailers looked fucking epic, most of us all said at the time, we pay for full movies made of just that shit, and they would be way better then emo-fied Lucas movies.

To be fair, having played at ton of TOR this past year, it was 1000X better than that shit Lucas passed off as the prequels. Hell, for all its issues, I'd still say TOR was a top 5 Star Wars game. TIE Fighter, Rogue Squadron, the two Battlefronts and TOR are probably the best Star Wars games of all time. Again, lots of shitty Star Wars games.

Edit: holy shit I forgot KOTOR 1 & 2. Top 7 then after those. Forgive me.

Utnayan_sl said:

Obviously. You wanted some insight as to the stop/starts. And here lies Firor's problem. If he would have made his own game rather than copy others, maybe they wouldn't have had 3 stop starts and blown millions of dollars.

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Well, I'm not privy to the insider info you have, so I can only speculate. I know that many times when I've played a new MMO, I'd ask myself, "Why don't they have X? Don't they look at other MMOs and see what works?" Now, yes, I think a designer should have lots of his own ideas, but I also don't believe in reinventing the wheel. A simple example: In DDO if you receive a /tell, you get a 'ding' sound, so you know to look down at your chat box. How many more modern MMOs have you played that don't include such a simple feature?

If the 'stop/starts' you describe are a result of Firor seeing something go terribly wrong with a major MMO release (WAR, SWTOR), and redesigning some features of his product to avoid those mistakes, or even seeing something really awesome (Tera style combat), and tweaking the system in TESO to take advantage of those ideas, then I can't really fault him. I might do something similar.

Let's also not forget that they began work on TESObeforethe huge success of Skyrim. Could one of those 'stop/starts' have had something to do with making sure they didn't piss off or alienate the millions of Skyrim fanboys?

Also examine the idea of a 'stop/start' - are we talking completely redoing the game? Probably not - probably more like redoing a system here or there. I doubt they had to scrap art assets, voice acting, or work on the game engine or network code.

Maybe I'm wrong - at this point I'm basically playing devil's advocate to you. Like I said, I don't know people working there, like you apparently do.

Utnayan_sl said:

The $300 Million dollars doesn't fund TSO entirely. It's spread out among other games incluidng what was to get Zenimax Online off the ground.

Regardless, Firor wasn't the hero of DAOC. Rob Denton was. Firor just doesn't belong in any management role what so ever.

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I just got that $300 Million # from the FAQ on the ZOS website. It's been there since around 2008, I think. At least I remember someone from VNboards linking the site back when I used to frequent the DAOC forums...

How are you paying for this?

ZeniMax Media recently announced a $300 million investment from Providence Equity Partners, and of course the massive success of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 only adds to the assets that helped fund ZeniMax Online. Suffice it to say, we're covered.

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Blackwulf_sl said:

Let's also not forget that they began work on TESObeforethe huge success of Skyrim. Could one of those 'stop/starts' have had something to do with making sure they didn't piss off or alienate the millions of Skyrim fanboys?

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Skyrim wasn't the first hit for Bethesda.

Holy shit.. that chick is pretty damn good.

ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl said:

I'll tell you what totally blows already about TESO's PvE content. 2/3rds of it is permanently locked off to you the player behind lame faction walls. To see all the PvE content you will have to roll a different toon for each faction.

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I don't understand this decision at all. Why not leave all the PVE content open and wall the RVR/PVP into a separate area. As good a design as Frontiers was initially, the PVE decision to wall off content was equally poor. Essentially, make the world similar to how it is in Guild Wars 2.

Also, let races and factions be segregate. Allow there to be three factions, but any race can ultimately belong to them. There are limitless design opportunities for ranks, perks, and advancements based solely on gaining points for ones faction. Copying DAOCs PVE setup, if that is what TSO is doing, really is a terrible decision and I hope that's not the case.

edit: Amazed Lum the Mad is still around.. Maybe Ut is Lum? That'd explain so much.

Bro, you can't let players make decisions, have you SEEN World of Warcraft's numbers????

I never minded the walled off pve content in daoc. It made each realm different. It made them FEEL different. It attracted a slightly different type of player. And in a RvRvR pvp game that's an important thing to do. With shared content you get more of a Zek than a Dred. It's a different flavor.

Now if you only have 1 game worth of content, and split it 3 ways yeah sure it's a practical problem. But you toss some basic acceptable content (x3) into the game, then you make shared content that's contested. I don't see the problem with that, beyond the unfinished hibernia problems. I see that as a good idea really.

Being able to pull it off. Yeah, well, probably not.