With so little details revealed in regards to Zenimax’s upcoming Elder Scrolls Online, many are wondering if the game will stay true to MMO video games or not.
In an interview from Game Reactor last week Matt Frior of Zenimax, the game director said their views on the Elder Scrolls Online. If you are hoping for ESO to be a replacement to Star Wars: The Old Republic or World of Warcraft, you will be disappointed as ESO is looking to be more of a co-op game than a real MMO.
Here’s what Matt has to say about the issue:
“This is more a multiplayer Elder Scrolls game than an MMO. [You’ll see] very limited UI, nice and clean, not a lot of bars,” Firor explained. “The combat system is very much action-based. It’s also soloable, you can solo almost the entire game. We wanted to get Elder Scrolls players who were unfamiliar with online games and MMO terms to get in, play, have fun and get introduced to the multiplayer aspects.”
Calvin
June 6, 2013 at 3:36 PMI’m sure some will complain, but as an ESO fan, this is music to my ears.
andrew
June 6, 2013 at 5:51 PMThis is so incorrect; first off there has been a wealth of footage released of this game,some of it actual game play from players who have illegally recorded it. pax east was a good example of that. but aside from these recording. Paul Sage(creative director), when asked about crafting, went into a long description of what the dev team aims to accomplish with this game and said that he wants the crafting to bring people together and have it be a big discussion point within the community . That sounds like an mmo to me.
Furthermore they are calling it an MMO not a co-op or multi-player game.
They have a crafting system, a trade system, GUILDS, five man dungeons and a big PVP system that allows up to 200 players on screen at one time.( how is that not an MMO in every way?) they have also said that although they will not be playable at release they plan on introducing the first raid not long after.
Jack
June 7, 2013 at 3:41 AM@Andrew
SWTOR had ALL of those features as well and it most certainly felt more like a multiplayer game than an MMO. Personally, I hope that ES online feels less like a traditional MMO. The loneliness is part of what made the ES series so beautiful.
Sean
June 7, 2013 at 3:27 PM@andrew
I have a beta pass and have put about 300 hours into ESO right now and I can confirm this is definitely an MMO.
andrew
June 7, 2013 at 3:53 PM@ Jack
SWTOR’s pvp system alowed up to 200 players on screen at once?
No it didn’t: wow’s servers crash everytime the Iron Wolf Clan invades stormwind city on the bleeding hollow server, and thats not even 200. 200 players all on screen at one time, perfect frame rates and no server lag sound rather MASSIVE to me. in fact i think 200 players on screen in an on-line multi-player environment classifies a ‘massively multi-player on-line’ game right there.
I like the way ES games have been in the past in every way. I have played everyone of them: I am as big a fan of ES as anyone could be, and i’m not entirely sure I think it will be a great MMO(mostly because the Dragon Knight class(DK… sounds like wow)) but that doesn’t mean im going to lie to myself about what the game is going to be. just because you WANT an elder scrolls 6, a secession of skyrim, or a more multi-player style game wont make this anything other than what it already is. Zenimax was developing an mmo for the last , (i think it was 6? )years, and calling it that,an mmo; they are not just going to all of a sudden change the entire plan to a multi-player one. how would they charge ppl to play multi-player? I suppose they could but the revenue stream wouldn’t come close to that of an mmo. The only reason JustPushStart’s Mark Fajardo even wrote this was to to cash in on some of the ESO hype and draw some attention to his articles ( which is OK to do in my book, it works.)
Lastly this interview was nowhere to been seen on the official website and neither was anything else regarding this crazy shift from mmo to co-op, so just from that i gather we can disregard this information.
Mark Fajardo
June 7, 2013 at 4:50 PMSo you think what Matt said in an interview are all lies? I think if there’s one person we should believe, it would be him since he’s the director of ESO.
Also, I don’t really see this as a real MMO. Matt is right, ESO feels more of a multiplayer game. If you have played SWTOR, you will know what I’m talking about. In SWTOR, you can solo it all the way through the end. There are co-ops that you can do but it will be through instances, aka heroics and flashpoints in SWTOR. Raids, not sure if there will be more than five but we will have to see until next week.
We should have more concrete information next week as we cover E3.
@Andrew
Don’t assume that I wrote this article to cash in on some of the ESO hype. We don’t make up stories on this website for the sake of ‘cashing in’. We are an established site with reputation to all publishers and developers. The multiplayer aspect that Matt said in this game might be really disappointing to fans but it will not be as bad you think. Look at SWTOR, it’s a multiplayer game and it’s not bad at all. Again, don’t expect ESO to be a full-pledge MMO because it will not be.
andrew
June 7, 2013 at 5:12 PM@mark Fajardo
I’m saying we can write something to seem anyway we want.
And if you actually listen to what Matt is saying in that interview he is basically just talking about the UI being not like a traditional MMO. He is not saying that this is not an MMO. To gather that from what he is saying would require us to ignore the context in which he said it.
The guy that was interviewing was giving him that opportunity to tell ppl that this is more than a traditional MMO that is full of Cooldowns and spell rotations.
And as a follow up question: Do you think everything else that has ever been said about ESO was lies?
Because what you titled this article as leads me to think you might.
.
andrew
June 7, 2013 at 5:23 PM@ matt
some other guy just commented and said it is a straight up MMO: said he was in the closed beta. I don’t personally care what it is because I just love the idea of another ES game. for you to clam this is not going to be a full-pledge(did you mean full-fledged?)mmo leads me to believe that you too must have hands on experience with the beta. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player online RPGs by the number of players, and by the game’s persistent world (usually hosted by the game’s publisher), which continues to exist and evolve while the player is offline and away from the game. ESO is absolutely an MMO. Maybe not an mmo with 40 actionbars, and maybe an MMO that has the epic solo feel of a single player, but it is in all ways that an mmo is an mmo, an mmo.
andrew
June 7, 2013 at 5:33 PMMark**
Mark Fajardo
June 7, 2013 at 6:06 PMhis point was, ESO will not be the traditional MMOs we all see today (WoW, SWTOR, Guild Wars, etc).
It will be an Elder Scrolls game with multiplayer online where you can team up with people to do dungeons. Of course, it will be an MMO because there will be people running around on your map but when you do dungeons/instances, it will just be you or with the group you have.
Think of ESO this way.. a Skyrim game with the ability to play with other people.
andrew
June 7, 2013 at 6:13 PM@mark Fajardo
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was saying.
Mark Fajardo
June 7, 2013 at 6:23 PMyep, therefore ESO is a multiplayer online game rather than the MMOs we all see today.
When we all say MMOs, we think of World of Warcraft, action bars, cluttered UIs, the use of mouse, macros, etc. ESO will not just be a clone of other MMOs we see today…
So can we call ESO an online multiplayer game? Yes.
Can we call ESO a MMO? Yes because its a massive game where we can interact with a lot of people but No at the same time because it does not have any of the MMO qualities we are all familiar with. In the end, ESO is an Elder Scrolls game with an added multiplayer.
andrew
June 7, 2013 at 7:07 PMWell those UI aspects of an MMO that we are familiar with are not what classifies an MMO. It has all the aspects of an MMO that make MMOs, MMOs. It really has a lot of features that we are familiar with, like I said in my first post on the topic:trade systems, crafting, massive PVP, co-op dungeons, etc.
Lets just analyse this for a moment: the user interface of the the original Final Fantasy RPG (released in 1987 by Square Enix (formerly Square)) was vastly different from Morrowind, yet Morrowind is still classified as an RPG.So from this we can gather that a difference in the UI is not sufficient to change the classification of the game.
So yes, we can call it an online multi-player, but we can call all MMOs online Multi-players. And we can for certain refer to ESO as an MMO because it meets the classification perfectly, and at no point can we say that ESO is not an MMO as a result of that prior mentioned classification.
What we can say though is that ESO is not the same as WOW or SWTOR.( With that said, WOW is like 9 years old, So we would be in hard shape as ESO fans if we couldn’t say that.)
I think it was the very first interview I ever watch with Paul Sage (I think it was) that he actually said he didn’t want this to jut feel like a ES game with added multi-player tacked on it. I think a lot of devs would argue with the statement; ESO is an ES game with added Multi-player. that kinda demotes what ESO is trying to be.