To continue the recent nefarious trend of ‘crosslink to win’, here is a post from TAGN about his interest in upcoming games for 2014. Elder Scrolls Online is on there, and what Wilhelm wrote helped me realize why, despite knowing better, I’m also looking forward to the game.
The quote in question:
I guess that the key here is that I cannot imagine that the developers of this MMO could be so daft as to create a game based on the Elder Scrolls franchise without looking deep within themselves to ask the most important question: Does it capture even a bit of the essence of the series? Because that is the vital ingredient here, the winning proposition, the thing that would make people knock over their grandmother to grab a copy of the game. If they can come up with something that feels just enough like Skyrim, but lets me play with my friends, then they will prevail, as the only issue I have with Skyrim is that I cannot play with my friends.
First, how incredibly sad is it that a game with the Elder Scrolls IP has people hoping beyond hope that it will play something like an Elder Scrolls game? Think about that. It would be like EA releasing the next Need for Speed title, and the main concern on every blog is “gee I hope I’m able to drive a car”. Yet that is basically what is going on here (and already the graphic style is not Skyrim, so -1).
MMOs might be hard to make, but love of god are the current crop of developers going overboard on proving that.
“So Syn, why the hell are you still interested in this game, idiot”.
Because I’m an addict.
If I’m not playing an MMO I’m not happy in my gaming life, and much like an addict, I’ll eventually reach near rock-bottom and start shooting heroin into my veins because hey, maybe I won’t die this time. That’s basically ESO for me. (Rock bottom is playing WoW, and I have a feeling that might happen should ESO suck as expected and Warlords not completely panda itself. This however is heavily reliant on being able to con… convince a few fool… friends to come along.)
Hardcore Casual 
Can probably count this fool in for a solid 0-3 months.
+1!
At first I had that concern too…will it feel like skyrim?Oblivion? Then I asked myself: Did wow felt like warcraft strategies? Wow created an MMO and the only similar thing with their single player games was the lore, the iconic heroes and some locations (arathi highlands, e.t.c.). Yet it did have a big success.
ESO will have the lore, the iconic heroes and the locations too, and will play much more like their famous single player games than wow did.
The conclusion I personally came up, is that ESO success or failure will have nothing to do of how similar is with the single player games, but how much quality has as an MMO.
I don’t know if many people actually care about the iconic heroes and locations of capital-T.E.S. The Elder Scrolls.
I dare anyone to actually name an iconic hero from the Elder Scrolls other than the player character. This isn’t as hard as I’m making it out to be (if you named one or all of the Daedric Princes, fair enough) but maybe you get my point.
Also, the games could be set anywhere and people would eat it up. Look at sci-fi Oblivion/Fallout 3; it was set in a green-tinted gravel pit with one of the stupidest storylines in recent memory, and people prefer that to New Vegas, the one that was actually good. No, none of the preceding was opinion, it was entirely objective and factual, why do you ask?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the setting, particularly the Daedra, but I was a big fan of Warcraft’s lore too, at least until Blizzard started hiring the next-to-best fanfiction authors they could find for WoW. But the setting isn’t what made the Elder Scrolls popular, especially not with xXJoe the GamerXx. What made it popular was a world where you could, in principle, be some kind of big fantasy hero doing whatever he or she wants, where you could accidentally kill a shopkeeper, intentionally kill a shopkeeper, then drag their corpses together so it kinda looks like they’re groping each other’s asses.
WoW’s lore wasn’t what made it a success either, of course. At no point did the strategy games have an audience of 12 million. WoW succeeded by perfecting a game that it turned out 12 million people wanted to play (concurrently). My exhaustive search for the first result on Google says Skyrim sold 20.2 million copies, nevermind pirates. But TESO isn’t a perfection of that game. It’s kind of the opposite.
Er, in other words, I agree with your last point. But I don’t think TESO has much quality as an MMO.
I will miss the hundreds of mods a lot more than being able to kill a shopkeeper :). But I get your point…it will not have the freedom of Elder Scroll games…not only you cannot kill the shopkeeper but you are actually restricted to specific zones on the map because of your race/level…
But we know little things by now..and we cannot conclude if it has or not quality. Signs point that it has not, but one can only hope…
Why don’t you play DF:UW before snorting heroin or loggin into WOW. You’re an MVP after all.
Because DF:UW doesn`t deserve to be played.