The Elder Scrolls Online Pay A Monthly Fee To Play

The Elder Scrolls Online Pay A Monthly Fee To Play
The Elder Scrolls games are all about allowing the player to go where they want, be who they want, and do what they want. We feel that putting pay gates between the player and content at any point in game ruins that feeling of freedom, and just having one small monthly fee for 100% access to the game fits the IP and the game much better than a system where you have to pay for features and access as you play. The Elder Scrolls Online was designed and developed to be a premium experience: hundreds of hours of gameplay, tons of depth and features, professional customer support – and a commitment to have ongoing content at regular intervals after launch.

This type of experience is best paired with a one-time fee per month, as opposed to many smaller payments that would probably add up to more than $14.99/month any way.

The general manager of Zenimax online confirmed monthly subscriptions for the eagerly-anticipated game during a pre-Gamescom interview with German site Gamestar. Players will purchase the game, which comes with 30 days free, after which they’ll pay a monthly fee of $14.99/€12.99/£8.99.

Why a subscription? Here’s what Firor told Gamestar:

He could have just said “It’s The Elder Scrolls” and been done with it. Kudos for going the extra mile, Mr. Firor.

Putting an end to speculation that the massively multiplayer entry in Bethesda’s award-winning role-playing franchise would be free-to-play, Zenimax Online’s Matt Firor has confirmed The Elder Scrolls Online will follow a subscription-based business model.

Publishes dungeon-focused Elder Scrolls AMA

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Have questions about dungeons in The Elder Scrolls Online? ZeniMax has answers, at least to a few of them. The firm has published a new Ask Us Anything on dungeons that gathers together various community queries in a single post.

In a world of ESO, dungeon is a terrorist and interesting places,Hit the links below to learn the answers to things like whether or not ESO dungeons will be linear like most of their single-player Elder Scrolls counterparts and whether players will be able to wander into solo encounters in the multiplayer game. As for this last bit, ZeniMax says that the answer is basically yes, after a fashion. “Certain rare locales will just be for solo players, and some dungeons are meant for groups made only of people you choose to go in with. Most locales, however, will be accessible by everyone.”

Also of note is the decision to dispense with dungeon lockout timers. “We don’t currently have any plans to use lockout timers. You can run through a dungeon as often as you like,” the company says.

Story and pvp/pve combat if that’s all you require than ESO is great. If your looking for an immersive challenging game you won’t find it here. If your like me and have tried and quit every mmo since around 2008 after a few weeks or a couple of months you can expect the same thing with ESO.

I’ll wait for Archeage and until then enjoy Skyrim and FalloutNV modded with around 100 realism and immersion mods. Just hit 1800 hours in Skyrim.

 

TESO rogue is introduced

scamp

From real life to virtual game world, rogue are always available, the rascal can’t be afraid, afraid rascal have culture, if the game in a very strong ability of rascal, what should we do, in a world of ESO is such a thing happen.

The world of Elder Scrolls is filled with colorful, fantastical creatures, and The Elder Scrolls Online is no exception. In the latest edition of Creating ESO, the team at ZeniMax Online details the mischievous and dangerous scamp, a small Daedra who will be familiar to players of Morrowind and Oblivion.

Scamps can cast fire-based spells and have their own special language. And despite their small size, they are menacing foes for Tamriel explorers caught with their defenses down. You can see the scamp in action after the break.

I love the way the scamps carry themselves. It’s a subtle difference but it makes them look much more menacing than they did in Morrowind and Oblivion.

Granted, in those games they’re not really supposed to be menacing, but still.

 

TESO:Ask Us Anything talks roleplay

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Role play will be the key to the development of future games, TESO is how to deal with this problem?

ZeniMax Online’s latest The Elder Scrolls Online dev blog contains a few tiny tidbits for lovers of roleplaying. In the Ask Us Anything post, ZeniMax confirmed that the US and EU will have separate servers (though players can choose where they want to play), animated emotes are already in the game (with custom emotes possible via “/emote”), and that characters will have the option of walking instead of running.

More specific to role-play lovers: ZeniMax has no plans to give players a place to write their own backstory, but noted that TESO’s add-on system will be flexible enough that the community should be able to come up with something. Players will also have access to privacy settings including an invisible mode that shows them as being offline.

Finally, the studio hinted at what types of weather players should expect to see while hanging out in Tamriel:

From snowstorms in Skyrim to rain showers over the moors of Glenumbra, you’ll experience lots of weather as you explore — through the day and night — in ESO.”

Right now, I’m watching from afar on this one.  As much as I’d love to see the same level of depth from Skyrim put into an MMO, Zenimax can’t seem to make up their mind about what they are doing with this product.

ESO, PS4 at expo 2013

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This year’s London expo will be a feeling feast, more and more outstanding game will appear in this exhibition, we will see the PS4 version of the elder scrolls series.

Going to be in London at the end of September? Drop by the Eurogamer Expo and you just might get some hands-on time with the PlayStation 4. What hasn’t been confirmed yet? Exactly which titles will be playable at the show. We’ve got our fingers crossed for The Elder Scrolls Online, ZeniMax’s upcoming fantasy MMO. UbiSoft’s The Crew and Turbine’s Infinite Crisis are also confirmed for the PS4 but not for a demo just yet, according to a new press release.

The Expo starts Thursday, September 26th, and runs through Sunday, September 29th. Super passes and weekend tickets are already sold out, but Thursday and Friday tickets are still available on the official event website.

The difference this time is the ‘cloud server’ infrastructure is actually robust enough to support actual multiplayer in a console system this time, and with the PS4 / XB1 machines on the consumer side, the days of console MMOs are basically here.

I expect Sony to have EQNext for PS4, and we’ll see what MS does with XB1… maybe “world of Halo”  😉

Hopefully there will be keyboard/mouse support on these systems that makes that option possible.

 

Every minute of the elder scrolls online analysis

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For the elder scrolls images of a lot of people praise others vilified, but becoming a MMO game, how about it, we made 20 minutes on this test.

They say you need to see it to believe it, so cozy on up to the following gameplay video of The Elder Scrolls Online to judge whether or not this upcoming MMO belongs in the same league as Skyrim. The video’s commentators believe it does, and they spend over 20 minutes analyzing the game’s NPCs, lighting, dungeons, and voice-overs.

There’s also significant discussion (but no related visuals) about TESO’s character creation, which the commentators say is not in the same league as most MMO systems. Check it out after the break!

It is not hard to see the success of a game from each detail, this TESO do very well, if you want to better play the game so you can focus on our website.

 

New ESO video shows off gameplay

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Has been the elder scrolls series is the picture very good game, this version is now highlighted various effects.Have you been itching to feast your eyes on actual The Elder Scrolls Online game footage from the eyes of a player, but you haven’t managed to find your way into the Bethesda offices? Thanks to Marty Sliva and Caleb Lawson of IGN, you can; the pair had the opportunity to jump in and play a couple hours of the upcoming fantasy MMO and created a video with some highlights of their adventures.

As a non-MMO player, Lawson described the draw to the game and an Elder Scrolls fan. He noted that it felt like being back in that world, from Daedric quests to being dropped into Oblivion. Sliva added, “[TESO] captures that same sort of spirit of exploration and adventure of Skyrim and Oblivion, but there is this great MMO attached to it.”

Lawson also shared that developers stated that hands will be added to the game to give the first-person experience even more of a Skyrim feel. Hear more of their thoughts and see the gameplay in the video after the break.

Or maybe newsboys don’t have the luxury of spending all their time playing one video game. Or their are other games they’d rather spend their time playing.

 

The ESO dev blog profiles the flame atronach

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The elder scrolls and artist now have a lot of loyal players.There’s a new Elder Scrolls Online dev blog floating around the game’s official website. It’s all about flame atronachs and how the dev team at ZeniMax is going about creating them.

“Comfortable in both melee and at range, the flame atronach can lob deadly balls of fire, and it radiates a continuous burning aura, making it quite dangerous at any distance,” the dev blog explains. There’s a bit more verbiage about the creature’s sound design as well some screenshots, concept art, and a quick in-game video. You can see this last bit after the cut.

Flame atronachs are nice but are technically the weakest of the lot, at least as far as Skyrim is concerned.  i still like ’em though, but if you’re gonna be a vampire I would highly recommend a storm atronach instead.  Fire hurts!

Massively’s hands-on with TESO

Going handson with The Elder Scrolls Online

Last week, I ventured forth from the subtropical paradise (read: sweltering wasteland) of the Florida panhandle to the frozen northern wastes of Maryland to visit the studios of ZeniMax Online to spend some time with the studio’s premiere foray into the MMO space, The Elder Scrolls Online.

The Elder Scrolls Online has caused quite a clamor since it was first revealed back in May. Since then, everything has calmed down, everyone is discussing everything reasonably, and… I can’t keep a straight face. In reality, MMO gamers are deeply divided about TESO, and some vocal potential players are most displeased to see the venerable sandbox world of Tamriel being reduced to yet another themepark MMO experience.

So after about four hours of hands-on time with the title, I’m here to answer some questions. Have the folks at ZeniMax run The Elder Scrolls off the rails, or have they just taken it in a bold, new direction? Join me after the cut and I’ll tell you what I think.

Let me first answer the question on everybody’s mind: Does it feel like an Elder Scrolls game? It does, mostly. The game’s art team has done a fantastic job of recreating the kind of beautiful scenic vistas that players have come to expect from the series, and it’s clear that much attention was paid to keeping the world consistent with previous games. I was delighted to notice that the very same unique Nord urns I had looted the crap out of in Skyrim were scattered around the various tombs and barrows I explored in TESO. Of course, TESO deviates a bit from the previous titles in the series, mostly by necessity, but I’ll get to that later.
Going handson with The Elder Scrolls Online

For my time with TESO, I was able to play only the Ebonheart Pact faction, which is made up of the Dunmer of Morrowind, the Nords of Skyrim, and the Argonians of Black Marsh. Being the filthy elf-lover that I am, I went with the Dunmer. The two classes available in this build of the game were the Dragon Knight and the Templar. The Dragon Knight was described as a front-line fighter with reality-altering magic, while the Templar was more or less what you’d expect from a class called the Templar: magic, support, that kind of thing.

Now, TESO does character building a bit differently than most games in that any class can wield any type of weapon and wear any type of armor. In addition, all characters have access to a common “pool” of abilities granted by increasing skill in particular fighting styles (one-hander and shield, dual-wielding, two-hander, etc.) plus an additional pool of abilities granted by investing points (awarded upon leveling up) into one of your three main stats: health, stamina, and magicka. For instance, I invested most of my points in the stamina stat, thereby unlocking a passive sprint speed bonus and an ability that granted me health and stamina after I killed an enemy. Because of this system of progression, a player’s class really dictates only the class-specific abilities he unlocks as he levels. So with that in mind, I chose the Dragon Knight because the description mentioned altering reality, and I’m a sucker for the Alteration school of magic.

My Dunmer began his journey in a remote island northeast of Skyrim known as Bleakrock. Off the coast of the isle, scouts had spotted approaching ships thought to be an invasion force of the enemy Daggerfall Covenant (consisting of Bretons, Orcs, and Redguards). It’s worth noting that this starting experience begins at level 2 after Molag Bal has stolen my soul and all that good stuff, but that opening segment of the game wasn’t available to us. At any rate, my now-soulless Dark Elf was assigned the task of searching Bleakrock for missing villagers while the rest of the village prepared to evacuate. With my goal set for me, I sallied forth into the icy mountains of Skyrim.

Going handson with The Elder Scrolls Online

If you’ve ever played an Elder Scrolls game, TESO’s controls will be immediately familiar to you. WASD moves your character, the mouse controls where you’re looking/aiming (no tab-targeting here, folks), spacebar jumps, shift sprints… you get the idea. The combat controls are also taken directly from previous TES titles. Clicking the left mouse button will swing your weapon, whereas holding it down will charge up a power attack and holding right-click will block incoming attacks.

So while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about combat. I mentioned earlier that TESO varies from previous titles in a few ways, mostly by necessity, and combat is one of those ways. It’s obviously very difficult to implement the combat of, say, Skyrim directly into an MMO. And honestly, I always thought that combat was one of the series’ weaker points. As a dual-wielding character in Skyrim, I got very familiar with the “strategic” combat style of running up, spamming power attacks, and backpedaling furiously. Maybe it’s just me, but I never found it terribly tactical or exciting. TESO captures the spirit of the series’ combat in a way that is better-suited to an MMO environment, and in my opinion, considerably more engaging.

The closest comparison I can draw to an existing combat system would be Champions Online, but it has a few twists of its own. One of the features I thought was pretty awesome was the finesse system. During each fight, you’re rated on your combat prowess based on how efficiently you take down your foes. For instance, enemies will periodically charge up power attacks that can be blocked by holding down right-click. After the player blocks a foe’s power attack, the enemy will briefly be “exploitable,” which means that performing a power attack on that enemy will do major damage and knock him to the ground. Properly blocking attacks and exploiting enemies will earn you finesse points, which serve a few different purposes.

Going handson with The Elder Scrolls Online

First, you’re granted an experience bonus based on your finesse score, and if the score is high enough, you will also be given a loot chest that can contain shiny new gear. Secondly, finesse points charge your ultimate ability, the first of which is unlocked at level 5. My Dragon Knight’s first ultimate ability (I was told that players can unlock different ultimates as they progress through the game) was called Dragon Armor, and when activated, it gave me a sweet set of spiky armor that caused fire damage to any enemies within proximity. All of the abilities I was given access to had pretty high “wow” factors. My personal favorite was Fiery Reach, which shot a flaming chain to my target, pulled him to me, and stunned him momentarily so I could take my leisurely time in laying the smack down.

Overall, the combat has a strong action flavor and flows really well. Taking on a group of enemies and surgically blocking, retaliating, and using abilities while watching your finesse score rise has a way of making you feel like a badass. Unfortunately, the combat suffers from an incredibly finnicky targeting system that can make fights involving multiple mobs and/or ally players somewhat frustrating.

In essence, you can attack or use abilities only if your targeting reticle is currently over a valid target, so if you and three of your best buddies are going to town on some hapless zombie, it’s pretty easy for abilities to simply not trigger because your friend’s attack animation put his pinkie finger in the way of your targeting reticle. I’m admittedly a bit disappointed that there’s no real-time hit detection, so you can’t simply swing your sword and hit the enemies in the arc of the blade, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to dodge incoming projectiles. I can understand why those things can be problematic to implement, but the current targeting system needs a great deal of work.

Another thing that long-time players of The Elder Scrolls are surely familiar with is robbing entire towns blind by looting every last wheel of cheese from the poor townsfolks’ cupboards. Those players will be happy to know that this capability returns in TESO but in an understandably more limited fashion. While every single urn and crate isn’t lootable, many are. And unfortunately, no, you can’t put a basket on a shopkeeper’s head and then rob him blind. In fact, most of the containers I came across contained crafting materials, which were useless to me because crafting hasn’t been implemented, but the devs assured me that crafting will be quite valuable in the finished game.

Going handson with The Elder Scrolls Online

One thing that really stood out to me was TESO’s quest design. You always hear people talk about how they want to nix the kill-ten-rats style of quest design, but TESO is actually taking strides in that direction. While there were a few kill X mob quests, most of the quests I encountered weren’t so tedious. The moment I noticed the change in design happened when I was given a quest to free some members of the Fighters Guild from spider webs in a cave. In any other game, there would be a number of generic “Wriggling Web” NPCs that I’d have to destroy, and some of them would contain enemies I’d have to fight, while others would contain nothing at all, and I’d end up searching 20 webs before I found the three people I was looking for.

But this was not the case at all. Instead, all of the webbed NPCs were the guild members I was looking for (and I’m fairly positive it wasn’t just some fluke of the RNG), and the combat of the quest came simply from fighting the nearby spiders as I searched for the trapped folks. The game also attempted to put a more entertaining twist on the kill X mobs quests it did have.

One that comes to mind is a quest in the Bal Foyen area of Morrowind that had me throwing netch eggs at Daggerfall Covenant troops to cause nearby bull netches to attack them. Overall, I noticed that I wasn’t constantly looking at my quest tracker, wondering when I’d complete this stupid objective, and I wasn’t fixated on my XP bar, either. It also helps that the game actively encourages exploration with out-of-the-way points-of-interest that can contain shiny loot or interesting side-quests, which mimics the time-honored Elder Scrolls experience.

I also had the chance to experience some of the game’s group content in the form of a public dungeon known as the Crow’s Wood, set in a plane of Oblivion. The surreal flavor of The Elder Scrolls’ outer planes was well-captured by a series of quests involving talking crows, giant bats, and a sorcerer’s deal gone sour. That last one is of particular interest because it served up an interesting moral dilemma.

Going handson with The Elder Scrolls Online

Long story short: A sorcerer made a deal with a hagraven that involved the hagraven’s granting the sorcerer arcane knowledge under the condition that the sorcerer spend the rest of his (presumably unnaturally long) life with her. Surprising absolutely no one, the sorcerer tries to renege on his end of the deal, and it’s up to the player to decide how things play out. Do you force the sorcerer to keep his part of the bargain or free him from the hagraven’s bondage? Or maybe you just kill ’em both because you can’t be bothered with such silly trifles. Personally, I made sure Mr. Magician upheld his word because I don’t like a double-crosser and anyone who’s making bargains for eldritch power is never a good sort.

Group combat against champion monsters was satisfying aside from the combat targeting quirks I mentioned earlier. The champions present a reasonable challenge that requires a bit of strategy, but of course the loot they drop is usually worth it. I wasn’t able to go up against any bona fide bosses, but if the champion mobs are any indication, players should expect fights that rely on quick reactions and high mobility to survive.

One of the last bits of TESO I got a look at before my playtime was over was a Dark Anchor. Dark Anchors are anchors sent by Molag Bal from his plane of Coldharbour in an attempt to pull Tamriel into his domain. Of course, we can’t allow that to happen, so players are able to destroy these Dark Anchors in a public-quest-style encounter. All players have to do is run up to the Anchor and get to killin’. All players in the area will get credit for helping to send the Dark Anchor back to Molag Bal, and destroying Dark Anchors will earn players favor with the Fighters Guild. While I took down my Dark Anchor solo (we had about five minutes left, so everyone was running around like a madman), I can see them being a fun distraction but not much more than that unless the difficulty ramps up immensely when more players are participating.

Ultimately, I left my time with The Elder Scrolls Online feeling considerably more optimistic than I had expected. The team at ZeniMax Online has done a great job so far recreating not just the world of Tamriel but also the feeling of an Elder Scrolls title. A few small quirks aside (and really, it’s pre-alpha; I didn’t go in there to nitpick bugs), TESO is shaping up very nicely. If you’re one of the folks who thinks that what ZeniMax is doing to The Elder Scrolls is tantamount to blasphemy, I urge you to fight back the rage and keep an eye on this game because it may end up surprising you as it surprised me. If you’ve got any questions or if you’d like to question my loyalty to The Elder Scrolls, feel free to speak up in the comments and I’ll answer everything the best I can.

 

TESO updates its site and adds a story page

Thriller!

The Elder Scrolls Online does not want for backstory. If anything, its biggest obstacle is the surfeit of backstory presented over the course of five games, enough so that even setting the game during a previously unexplored time can cause issues. So it’s not surprising that along with a massive overhaul to the official website, the game’s team has put together a new story page providing series fans with a solid set of information to place the upcoming game in the context of its fellow installments.

Seeing that page may still not entirely comfort longtime fans of the lore, which is why the site has also provided a new article explaining how the team at ZeniMax Online Studios is handling writing for TESO. The short version is that the game has intentionally been set in a time period during which players have plenty of space to shape the world without derailing future parts of the game, and the team has been working very hard to keep the lore of the new game in line with past and future developments.

This is why I say wait before you pass judgement, When this game was first announced everybody was “OMG WOWSKYRIM LOLZ” and its going to blow ect.. Now the opinion has flopped most people are positive about it. All it took was a little alpha game play info… not even footage lol. I personally wish the best for all MMO’s and give encouragement through feedback. If I have concerns I make them constructive.  I’m sure the developers have people who skim all these gaming sites for feedback on their games and all that negative feedback back when they revealed the game had to hurt the teams morale. I mean there is nothing you can do with “YOUR GAME IS GOING TO SUCK!” But a simple “I’m concerned with the skill system” Well they can work with that.

I guess you could call me an “MMO hippie” and this is why I am poor I buy every MMO lol. Even if they cost 60 bucks and I only get a month out of them that is still more time and enjoyment than I usually get out of a console game of the same cost, so I’m cool with it.