Elder Scrolls MMO Announced

[Hammock Parties]

Making MMOs just stretches developers too thin.

There's no room for actual good story content, although I feel like SWTOR came closer than most.

MMO genre sucks. It's only real value to me has been being treated to exploring vast worlds. That was what LOTRO was to me, a giant "ooh look I read about that in the book" sight seeing trip.

[hometeam]

Originally Posted by Pam Oliver's Forehead

Making MMOs just stretches developers too thin.

There's no room for actual good story content, although I feel like SWTOR came closer than most.

MMO genre sucks. It's only real value to me has been being treated to exploring vast worlds. That was what LOTRO was to me, a giant "ooh look I read about that in the book" sight seeing trip.

Guild wars 2 still reigns supreme as the pinnacle of MMO achievement, and even it could be improved on.

[Javabean]

Originally Posted by hometeam

Guild wars 2 still reigns supreme as the pinnacle of MMO achievement, and even it could be improved on.

I enjoyed GW2 -- I remember playing it with you for a little while, even -- but I don't think it reigns supreme at all. It had huge issues with end game content at release, and their updates over the past year have focused on the "living story" changes.

In other words, they released an MMO that failed at the biggest strength of MMOs, and going forward they're focusing on the biggest weakness of MMOs. Sun Tzu would not be impressed.

I'm happy they're trying to blaze a new trail, and I hope some of their innovations are carried over into new MMOs. But the changes I liked the best were the smaller iterations they made on genre, and the two biggest risks they took were failures.

[Javabean]

Originally Posted by Pam Oliver's Forehead

Making MMOs just stretches developers too thin.

There's no room for actual good story content, although I feel like SWTOR came closer than most.

MMO genre sucks. It's only real value to me has been being treated to exploring vast worlds. That was what LOTRO was to me, a giant "ooh look I read about that in the book" sight seeing trip.

MMOs are not the best video game medium for telling stories, primarily because one player's story cannot influence or generate truly dynamic world changing events without restricting other players' stories.

But what they do excel at is providing challenging team-oriented PVE scenarios. PVP games can offer more dynamic encounters but are ultimately restricted by the pervasive assumption that both sides must be balanced for a "fair" fight, whereas a PVE game can continually ratchet up the difficulty of an encounter by making the enemy cheat.

Some MMOs choose instead to provide mobs that are just giant bags of hit points, but the MMO developers who design more tactical scenarios provide the most challenging and complex group content gaming can offer.