Elder Scrolls Online

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Lagrangian
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Good news, the MMO is set in the past:
The Setting

A stolen soul. An undead army rising. A quest to recover that which is uniquely yours. Only you can save the world from the evil machinations of the Daedric Prince, Molag Bal, and the first known necromancer, Mannimarco.

The Elder Scrolls Online is set in Tamriel's Second Era, roughly 1,000 years before the events in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the coming of the Dragonborn, and just before the rise of Tiber Septim, the first Emperor of Tamriel. Three Alliances have emerged across the continent, each struggling for supremacy over the land. As these great powers battle one another for control of the Imperial City - and with it all of Tamriel - darker forces are moving to destroy the world!

So the TES franchise can continue to forge ahead.

Some other stuff:
A World to Explore

Journey across the far reaches of ancient Tamriel for the first time since The Elder Scrolls: Arena. From the mountains of Skyrim, to the mysterious lands of Morrowind, to the sprawling metropolis of Daggerfall, experience the wonders of the world a millennium before the events of Oblivion and Skyrim.

A Battle for the Throne

Three alliances are vying for the throne of Tamriel, in a massive player-versus-player war. Lead your guild, your alliance and your friends, in an epic three-way strategic battle of territorial supremacy and siege warfare for control of the Imperial City.

Join the Ebonheart Pact, The Aldmeri Dominion, or the The Daggerfall Covenant and join the battle to control all of Tamriel. To the victors go the spoils of the war and the throne of the Emperor!

I caught some glimpses of the faction descriptions at E3 via the Yogscast interview.
The Daggerfall Covenant--an alliance of the trading powers around Illiac Bay: High Rock, Sentinel, and Orsinium
The Aldmeri Dominion--some type of unification between "elder races" in southwest Tamriel.
The Ebonheart Pact--will be an "unlikely alliance" involving the Dark Elves of Morrowind.
 

Shenanigans!

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So what did people think about the new trailer? It was pretty sweet, but for the first time ever, insta-kill throwing knives really bothered me.
 

Kyla Laufreyson

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I signed up for the beta. I'm a bit iffy on this whole thing, but I do love TES and it's worth a shot, right?
 

Kyra Wright

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I'm iffy on it as well. I love TES, but I rather doubt that this will work well in MMO format. Nonetheless, I signed up for the beta.
 

TroyJackson

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The only MMO I might be willing to play is a Fallout one, and that has been quashed, soooOOoOooooo...

I love TES universe, but MMOs take up a ton of your time.
 

ArachnePhobia

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I've never actually played an MMO before (I know, I know...), but I'm giving this one a longer look than usual. It's not just that it's TES. It's that it's TES and they have implied Mannimarco shows up at some point. If only it had remained relatively Necromancer-free, I could've easily ignored the whole thing...
 

efkelley

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That was an interesting video.

My take on these:

One - First Person. meh?
Two - Moving objects and rampant theft. Well that won't get at all annoying when some guy decides to stack 10,000 cheese wheels on a newbie NPC. :p
Three - Fully Voiced. Hmm. Well, that can cut both ways, especially on additional playthroughs.
Four - Missed it, I think.
Five - No cooldowns. Okay now that's neat.
Six - Stealth for All. Interesting! Except that it does break pvp. Turns into a Klingon vs Klingon match in STO, where everyone is cloaked and stays that way for ten minutes.
Seven - Combos. Ah HA! Now we're talking!
Eight - Graphics. Yep. Very nice.
Nine - The whole world is explorable. Cool. And well, yeah, kind of has to be. I mean, why make areas you can't explore?
Ten - Tri-Faction PVP. Well. Yeah, that can be cool, but I need a lot more data. Dark Age of Camelot did this and had significant issues at times. Guild Wars does it reasonably well, but there are still issues.
Eleven - Non-linear gameplay. Yep. Nice.
Twelve - Books. Yeah, that can be nice. And a mage guild quest from collecting? Okay, sold.
Thirteen - Compass is back. ??? Eh? This is a thing?
Fourteen - Essentials-based UI. Yeah, if they use the GW2 model, it'll be great.
Fifteen - Advanced AI. Sure. Could be nice. I like that they enemy will use combos. We'll see, but I'm hopeful.
Sixteen - Self-Defined Classes. We'll have to see how that works. Often this leads to FOTM issues.
Seventeen - Mix & Matched armors. Again, we'll have to see. Gear is usually central to an MMO endgame. If they can break this mold, I'll be very impressed.
Eighteen - One Server. Yep. Good. Instanced, which is fine by me.
Nineteen - Playing with Like-Minded Gamers. An interesting concept. It weights instances this way. That's very interesting.
Twenty - Large-scale Battles. Yeah, kind of essential. Hopefully they did it a little better than GW2.
Twenty-One - Kill Cams. Ha! Fun.
 

Kyra Wright

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I may be alone in this, but I groan inwardly whenever I see that a game is fully voice acted. I'd rather read than have to constantly click through dialogue. Definitely not a selling point for me.

Some of the points in that video do interest me. No cooldowns, freedom of exploration, organic quests, books, self-defined classes, mega server, and playing with like-minded gamers have me intrigued. Ultimately though, I've had a few too many disappointments with MMOs over the last few years to get too excited over any of this at this stage.

Here's what I really want: something different than the tank-healer-dps holy trinity. I'm hoping that the self-defined classes will take care of that. Secondly, I really want to see other MMOs do what Dragon Nest does, and have scalable dungeons. DN is the only game where I spend the majority of my time in dungeons, because I can go into them without a group if I want. If I want to try out a higher difficulty, I can go it alone or get a group, but it's not a requirement to clear dungeons. I'd love to see something similar in other MMOs.
 

efkelley

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Agreed on all points there. I'll wait to see how all this falls out before getting antsy.

Scalable dungeons would be fantastic.
 

Maxinquaye

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I don't have views or comments about everything in that video, but here are some immediate concerns.

# One – as long as it's like in Skyrim where you can choose third or first it doesn't matter. It will coalesce into third anyway because third has the benefit of seeing what is behind the character you're playing. It will be necessary for pvp and stuff. The advantage of third person is too great to indulge in first person.

# Two – I like the rampant theft, and I wish that Zenimax will take a leaf from CCP in that they don't interfere with how players play the game. As long as it's not harassment, the devs should take a hands off, and let the players wear the white or black or grey hats as they see fit. I mean if you worship the Daedra, and sacrifice babies at dawn in order to get Mehrunes Dagon's favour, you're not going to be that bothered about lifting a cheese roll from the street merchants, are you?

# Three – Well, I agree that the second playthrough means clicking through voiced communication. Jarl Barlgrufs ramblings in Skyrim for instance is an annoyance by now. Get to the point, I've heard it all before, and go climb those damned 7000 steps if they're so important to you and if it will shut you up. :D

# Five – I don't understand and can't see how no-cool-downs would work. It would mean hordes of twelve year olds carpet-bombing whatever variant there is of Goldshire or starter areas with fireballs for lulz. Unless they only mean it in raids. But that seems to add a complexity and a departure from TES.

# Six – I always end up playing a stealthy character because it's more challenging NOT to kill everything in sight. A bit of Calm here and there lets me get to say a bandit leader that I have to kill. My only concession to blood-thirst is that the undead must all die. One reason to LOVE Dishonoured. Imagine sneaking into an RP pub somewhere, and casting Fury while invisible. The hilarity. Yes, I suspect that I'd be part of the horde of twelve-year olds.

# Seven – Combos are nice, but I'm generally bad at them, which is why I like stealth. That means I get to control the application of violence.

# Nine – What I think they mean is that there will be no shards. The world contains the players, and the players make the world. So, to “explore the whole world” one should have access to all the other players. That's not what they said in the film, so I'm a bit miffed that this bit of hype is included. If you're separated from other players, you're sectioning off bits of the world from exploration.

# Ten – I'm not so interested in faction PVP as I am in pickpocketing, assassination, and fighting players in the world. If I can, on the spur of the moment, attack someone in Hammerfell or High Rock or Whiterun, I'll be happy. If I have to go somewhere else to arbitrarily beat on some flagpost three times in order to be selected for a team... not so much.

What remains to be seen is how the economy will work. Will be be a robust, player driven crafting economy, or will it be a nonsensical one like in WoW? I want an economy where I could craft every item in the game, and sell it on the market for profit, and I hope that NPCs would limit themselves to selling crafting recipes and such.

Also, the death penalty. A bit of running about before getting everything you lost back, or a more severe death penalty like losing all your gear, having to replace it yourself?
 

efkelley

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On the theft, I just have a feeling that most phases will get stripped bare in minutes. I don't mind it too much. But, moving of objects could get really aggravating, ala the 10,000 cheese wheels stacked on my NPC.

On no cooldowns, TES is like that right now. I can spam fireballs until I'm out of mana. Or do power attacks until I'm out of stamina. Essentially, any ability you have you can do. But, you might not want to. For instance, Fireball takes a bit of mana. If I only just learned the spell, I might not have the mana to cast more than two. But the next step down, firebolt, that one I can cast all day. I'll get more bang for my blue bar using firebolt. The commentator was right that in most MMOs I spend a lot of time watching my cooldowns instead of the action. So, this change towards resource management over ability management might be interesting.

On the one server thing, it's going to have what they're calling 'phases'. Take Whiterun. If there are ten players in Whiterun, we'll all be able to see each other. If there are 1,000 players, that would be a bloody mess. So, it'll split Whiterun into Whiterun #1, Whiterun #2, etc, with 100 players each. You and I may both be in Whiterun, but you'll could be in Whiterun #7, and I'm in #4. We'll be able to meet up by changing to the same phase.

What they're further doing is dividing us up based on the weights we give to various gameplay aspects. Call it PVE, RP, PVP, and Crafting, and rate them 1 to 10 with 10 being very interested. My profile would look like this:

PVE 10
RP 7
PVP 4
Crafting 8

I'll find myself entering phases with people of similar profiles. That way, I'm less likely to run into PVP fanatics talking about stuff that doesn't interest me, and more likely to hear about a raid forming up or a lore discussion or a tradeskill discussion.

On PVP it sounds like the only 'world pvp' will be in the central zone. Which I prefer, in all truth, but then as we saw, I'm not a big PVP fan in my MMOs. Also, I really think the 'everyone can stealth' thing is going to make trouble for them.
 

Maxinquaye

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Well, the answer to the sneaking thing is that apparently sneaking will use stamina.

http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/news/post/2013/04/19/ask-us-anything-alliances-at-war
How will stealth/sneak be implemented into PvP and how will players detect a sneaking opponent? – By Cameron Neilson

There are a few different ways you can detect sneaking opponents. For example, a player who’s sneaking is revealed upon taking damage. There are spells that can detect opponents who are trying to sneak around. It’s also important to remember that sneaking uses stamina, and you really don’t want to be out of stamina going into a battle.
 

efkelley

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That's good! Should prevent a number of problems.

While this game still has some baking left, I'm liking the smells coming from the oven.
 
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