[MfA]

I've had the questionable pleasure of doing ladder/tournament PvP in a game without automated support ... between the griefing and (perceived) referee bias it just doesn't work very well.

[Lille]

What i wanted for Elder Scrolls Online was Morrowind/Skyrim but with a few thousand players in the world with me (the world would obviously need to be bigger).

What they seem to be doing is something like DAoC in Tamriel, which i guess could be good if they do it well. But not really what people have been asking for.

[RobertR1]

Skyrim sequel should be like Fable 2 Orbs. That'd be sick. Trade/Drop in to play, etc. I loved that bit about Fable 2.

[Grall]

There's some general information on the play mechanics of TESO here, regarding how aspects of the online game works compared to the single-player TES predecessors:


One thing this video revealed to me is that there will be three factions of the game, and players will be locked out of the other factions' lands. Thus, if you're a Bosmer, you won't be able to visit Skyrim for example. This will be a total dealbreaker for me personally. I could never adjust to such artificial limitations in gameplay. Not after having played WoW for so many years and roamed freely over huge continuous landmasses. This speaks to me of a seriously borked experience.

[John Reynolds]

Those 3 factions are very DAoC-ish, and guess who the lead designer for ESO is. No doubt there's also going to be neutral battlefields that the three factions will fight over.

[MfA]

In the end I think DAoC was a bit of a fluke really (as was Planetside). 2 or 3 factions is almost irrelevant in PvP, the shifting alliance thing just doesn't happen often enough to be relevant ... even when it does it's still just a never ending tug of war with even less of a sense of achievement than the ephemeral one of moving up a step on the gear grind ladder. The future is sandbox ... the first developer/publisher to throw real money has a chance at making the next WoW, everyone else is making niche games or games which have to generate most of their money on box sales and the first few months of subscriptions from bored WoW players in between expansions.

PS. I do like the instanced server with intelligent player placement though, so much better than the classical server model.

[Grall]

Originally Posted by MfA

PS. I do like the instanced server with intelligent player placement though, so much better than the classical server model.

It's a far better concept really, in theory at least. One question I would like explained is how it deals with latency rising from physical distance from the server. In north america it might not be such a big deal as there's few borders to deal with and well-developed infrastructure, if you place your server farm in a central location latency won't be terrible for anyone in most cases, except maybe hawaii perhaps (or puerto rico...)

However take europe for example, you would by neccessity need a second server there, as cross-atlantic access adds several or maybe many hundreds of milliseconds of additional round-trip latency and that would make the game unplayable. WoW is pretty forgiving for an online game due to almost all skills being locked to a global cooldown, but if you're pushing 3-500ms ping or more it just isn't fun to play anymore. I can't imagine other MMOs faring all that much better either.

Also, europe is made up of upwards of 50 nations (yeah, crazy, I know!), with such clutter there's huge numbers of networks and ISPs involved with delivering internet packets. Additional issues may arise from that.

Now, EVE Online seemingly uses one single game server for everyone, worldwide, and I assume that server farm is located on Iceland so it seems this concept is doable, but EVE is a fairly small game. It's only recently that they cracked what, 250k subscribers? It might not be so easy for a game targetting a million plus, and knowing Bethesda, they're sure to want to hit those numbers.

[swaaye]

I think the world needs a regular TES with ~4 player coop capability. The community has been trying to hack it together for every game since Morrowind.

[Grall]

Ha, with the MMO on the horizon that'll never happen. They'd never compete with themselves like that.

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Grall

Ha, with the MMO on the horizon that'll never happen. They'd never compete with themselves like that.

yeah you're dead on there.

[eastmen]

I really miss ultima online. I was hoping this would be more like it. WoW and its spawn don't interest me in the least. So boring .

[Grall]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDHa-...layer_embedded

A description of the three alliances in ESO by a dude in badass white hair.