oudeis on 21/1/2010 at 12:14

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According to this (http://www.duckandcover.cx/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23626) forum thread, Bethsoft's recent court filing in its lawsuit against Interplay inadvertently revealed that it had been working on a 'World of Warcraft-type' MMO since 2007. The documents have since been revised but another site is (http://www.vg247.com/2010/01/20/source-bethesdas-elder-scrolls-mmo-missed-its-2009-reveal/) reporting that they have confirmation that Bethsoft is indeed working on an MMO set in the world of Tamriel, and would have announced it last year but for the legal battle. If this turns out to be true it will be the best gaming news I can remember reading.


I've been waiting for this shoe to drop for (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=115474&highlight=elder) some time now and have given it a fair amount of thought since then. I've come to the conclusion that in order to have a practicable game and gameplay they would have to make some fundamental changes. Here's my reasoning:
* Game- Achieving class balance has been an ongoing and probably irresolvable problem for other developers. Even a game that stresses simplicity of design as much as WoW is constantly deluged with complaints about fairness and imbalance. If Blizzard, with their enormous resources, can't come up with a solution for nine classes there's no way Bethsoft will be able to do it for (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Classes) twenty-one. To keep the devs from having nervous breakdowns they are going to have to lose some classes. I personally have a hard time seeing the difference between a Battlemage and a Spellsword, so those would be my first candidates for streamling/consolidation. The list of skills, likewise numbering twenty-one, will likewise need to be reduced. They will also need to make significant changes to character creation and progression, for the reasons below.


* Gameplay- A multiplayer world with cooperative and/or competitive aspects will need precisely-defined class characteristics. Consider: in the single-player Elder Scrolls games, you can have a low-level non-combat character with maxed-out combat skills or a wimpy combatant with the power of an Archmage simply because those skills are not considered part of the class, and thus have little impact on levelling. Now try to imagine how you are going to recruit or join a group online when you have no way of immediately discerning and categorizing the strength and focus of the other characters. When you add PvP into the mix it gets even worse. How much do you think the newb-ganking douchebag with his badass Warrior is going to complain when the squishy from my first example turns out to be Conan in a cassock? Players are going to expect defined skills from defined classes at defined levels. Customized classes?- forget about it. Gone will be skill-progression based levelling as well. Hello, XP!


These are just a few of the problems Bethsoft will face getting this behemoth to fly. What about world geography? It's impossible to compare the two worlds but I have a feeling that Tamriel is a lot bigger than Azeroth. They are going to have a staggering amount of content to create. Also, they've always prided themselves on making their games look pretty. That means raising the hardware bar for gamers, which translates directly into reduced player base and thus less revenue. There's also the matter of bugs: I haven't really had a problem with this because I bought Morrowind and Oblivion at least two years after they came out, but judging from the number of community fixes (and complaints) Bethsoft could have done a much better job of quality control. They also could- and should- have continued the patching process long after they stopped. They were able to get away with this because those were single-player games with a rabid fan base but there's no way they'll be able to do this with an MMO. If they don't up their game, figuratively and literally, they'll end up flushing tens of millions of dollars down the toilet.

With all this though, this one has me really excited, the more so because if the sources above are correct we could be seeing it in less than two years. I've always wondered what the lands outside Mournhold looked like and now I may get my chance to find out. :thumb:

gunsmoke on 21/1/2010 at 15:09

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Oblivion was extremely colorful, bright, and gorgeous. The only use of 'brown' was really only the underground caves or in the dirt hut part of town. The countryside tended to be full of rich, vibrant greens flecked with a nice variety of very colorful and diverse plant life. Gorgeous. Especially so when the sun was rising or setting, or when you hit the Shivering Isles. Mania (the northern side of the Isle) is like the Azure coast (?) area of Morrowind, with the giant fungi, cranked up to 11.

I'll grant you that morrowind was depressingly brown, but to be fair it was probably intentional. I mean the whole island of Morrowind has an aire of oppression/depression and feels like the '3rd world' of Tamriel. With the heavy, religious influence over the province, the slavery, the vast amount of the land mass consisting of unuseable land (like the fact that a HUGE volcanic mountain occupying the entire middle of the continent, the swaps, rocky terrain, etc..., the underworld, drug trade, smuggling, corruption are all completely out in the open. I think the colors held true to the feeling or even the fiction if you will.

Haven't play more than 3 hours of Fallout 3, and only made it to Megaton, but it seemed much more grey than brown. That was the color that burned into my brain when I logged off of it.

mothra on 21/1/2010 at 15:53

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yeah, FO3 was mostly brown and grey. shudder. ppl got payed to design this and others got payed for nodding to them. must have been the same guys that are now on the DA:O design team. another epic fail - and I like DA very much, but like FO3 it fails so hard in its visuals (and I am not talking about the quantity of polygons, more the artistic vision behind it). But I'm just too harsh, Bethesda still managed to surpass anything Bioware has done on ME1. ME1, a game looking like made on a lego fractal generator crossed with an Battlestar Galactica fanbook. I don't know how Bioware always manage to stay so...........boring and safe in their design.
Well, it certainly never had enough impact on me to NOT play the games (DA is just awesome, ME2 could be) but they certainly lag behind considerably compared to...say.....a game like ZenoClash, theWitcher, Risen or even ModernWarfare in its fidelity, detail and fitting design. Just putting alot of crap on the screen doesn't help much (FO3) or not putting anything out there at all neither (DA).

DDL on 21/1/2010 at 17:34

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They could've put green everywhere: after all, everyone knows radioactive stuff glows green, right?

SCIENCE.

Phatose on 21/1/2010 at 17:50

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It will likely be pretty, but fundamentally awful. Bethesda's game mechanics, especially in the elder scrolls series, are not merely bad, but are typically so poorly thought out you have to wonder if they were even trying.

Let's be blunt here - unless they're going to let the modding community fix their MMO, they have no quality control at all.