ELDERSCROLLSUPDATE

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.

Have you been searching for a way to represent your favorite fantastical faction? Put down the stencils and spray paint: The fine folks behind The Elder Scrolls Online have seen fit to provide you with Twitter and Facebook avatars representing the Ebonheart Pact and its constituent races. Bear the crest of the Pact, Argonians, Dark Elves, or Nords with pride! While you’re at it, you might ogle the fancy concept art that accompanies the avatars.

If the Ebonheart Pact isn’t your fantasy consortium of choice, maybe you simply don’t know enough about it. In that case, an upcoming Q&A about the Ebonheart Pact may be just the thing for you. The TESO dev team is starting a bi-weekly Ask Us Anything Q&A to address questions about the game and its development. Each of the Ask Us Anything sessions will focus on a specific topic, which the team requests you keep in mind while thinking up your “anything” to ask. For the inaugural Q&A, which will go up next week, you can ask whatever you like about the Ebonheart Pact. You can find more information on the official site or submit questions through the official Facebook page.

I hope the developers allow players to break ranks with their forced faction at some point and join another. They could probably make players have a severe penalty that makes it take longer for a faction traitor to advance in their new faction or something along those lines.

Some of these faction pairings seem to go against the absolute hatred that most of the groups have (well I guess it’s “had” now) for each other, to the point that they would much rather be annihilated than work with one another.

If anything, the ZeniMax team should  make a set of characters that will be the “face” of each faction and prominently display them constantly until their release date so that players not familiar with Elderscrolls can get can get something to associate with each group. Showing the leaders are fine, but having some stories of rank and file soldiers dealing with these pacts could help in clearing up the reasoning behind these faction pairings.

Last month we flew to Maryland to report from The Elder Scrolls Online’s first press event. While we were getting some hands-on time with the title, we were also watching a nine-minute video that ZeniMax put together in order to introduce the game to a wide audience.

Today the firm has published the clip for the first time, and it features a mixture of fly-through footage, talking head interviews with creative director Paul Sage and lead designer Nick Konkle, and snippets of PvE and PvP gameplay too.

See for yourself after the break.

Pour a tall mug o’ mead, my friends, and prepare to be entranced with the tales of The Elder Scrolls Online. ZeniMax’s scribes have crafted a particularly cunning tale of Jorunn the Skald-King for you to enjoy.

As Jorunn is one of the key figures in TESO, we figure it’s a good thing to keep tabs on him and his history. The short story tells of his upbringing and ascension to the throne of the Ebonheart Pact. The team indicated that we should expect two more stories covering the other faction leaders.

Give the short story a read and let us know whether this man is the type of fictional character that your fictional character will swear fealty to or not!

Nords and Dunmer in one alliance (oh and with the color RED) will likely produce the most populated faction in the game. I usually play Redguard so I may be play that, but Ive got the feeling the Dominion is going to be left with the lest players. Sure there are elf lovers, but not enough to counter dark elf lovers.

The Elder Scrolls Online spotlight has shifted away from the Ebonheart Pact faction and is now shining most brightly on the Aldmeri Dominion. The first part of a new community Q&A peppers the devs with questions about this player faction and how it differentiates itself from the others.

The playable races of the Dominion are the central focus of several questions. Players have the choice of the Wood Elf, High Elf, and Khajiit races. The latter feline humanoids may prove to be quite popular, although the devs say that there will be only one subset of the race — the Suthay-raht — available at launch. The team isn’t avoiding the issue of the Wood Elves’ cannibalism, saying that players should find mentions of it while exploring.

Both Elf races will be getting plenty of story love: “We’ve made sure that this kind of lore about the Elves will be included in the game — in plenty — in all the classic ways cultural lore is delivered in the Elder Scrolls games: quest dialogue, conversations with NPCs, lore books of all kinds, music, item crafting, and so forth.”

The lands covered by the Dominion are touched on in the Q&A as well, including the vast jungles of Valenwood and the stunning beauty of High Elf cities.

TESO should be an amazing and innovative game to come in the MMO jungle. I’m not sure the ‘name’ Elder Scrolls is enough to keep another fantasy game even with low-breathing in the satured market. Leveling, skilling, socketing, refining, crafting, dungeoning, farming and grinding belong the old formula…. covered with epic music.

Are you looking forward to seeing what happens when the developers at Bethesda finish working on The Elder Scrolls Online? Are you unsure how the game’s Skyrim-based combat will work when accounting for lag in your aim? Do you have a fear of having everyone grouped on a single server? If you answered yes to any of those questions, it’s probably a good idea for you to take a gander at the video below the cut, because all of those questions are based on misconceptions that the video aims to correct.

The fansite Tamriel Foundry has put together a short video hitting several of the most common misconceptions about The Elder Scrolls Online, explaining both the inaccurate belief and the truth of the matter. This covers everything from the actual developers (Zenimax Online) to the changes to the combat system (you won’t be actively aiming, with the game instead establishing a soft target lock on your selected target). Even if you think you know all there is to know about the game already, it couldn’t hurt to sit and watch — and maybe have a few mistaken ideas cleared out.

Ok so let me get this strait. The game is all on one big mega server, claim it’s open world, but there is going to be phasing? Meanwhile you are unable to travel to another factions territory? Sorry but thats not open world. Thats a MMO like SWTOR that is completely instanced with no open world pvp. (No thanks)

Secondly the Lore they created for this game is completely and utterly reversed to the original Elderscrolls games. High elves of the Aldmari Dominion hate wood evles, and see all other races as inferior or as slaves. So why are Khajiit a part of the Dominion? Khajiit were used as slaves and seen as animals in the Dominion.

Conclusion, it’s nice you guys debunked some of the nonsense going around but it still seems with the features in place they have right now, I don’t think people will be impressed. People who have been playing MMORPG”s like myself are sick and tired of playing instanced MMO’s. I don’t even play them anymore because they are a waste of time and money. ESO is not an open world game. it is a themepark, instanced mash-up redundant copy of everything else (World of Warcraft, Rift, Everquest 2, Warhammer Online, SWTOR) that has been redone over and over for the last 13 years. Please prove me wrong

Cheers

So ZeniMax released a spiffy teaser vid for The Elder Scrolls Online last week. The six-minute clip had it all: dank dungeons, luscious locations, and enough daredevil gravity-defying combat to fill an entire summer’s worth of action films.

The only problem, to hear some folks tell it, was that none of the thrills, chills, and gratuitous violence on display will be possible in the finished game. The video was a cinematic, you see, and even though there’s a decent amount of TESO gameplay footage floating around the internet already, the trailer served as something of a rallying cry for fans who’d rather see the cinematic’s budget go toward a gameplay trailer.

What say you, Leaderboard readers? Are MMO cinematics an awful waste of development dollars or do you enjoy them for what they are? Settle the score once and for all after the cut.

Ever wish that you could put to rest a long-standing MMO debate once and for all? Then welcome to the battle royal of Massively’s Leaderboard, where two sides enter the pit o’ judgment — and only one leaves. Vote to make your opinion known, and see whether your choice tops the Leaderboard!

Leaderboard: Cinematic trailers – awful or awesome?Awful    413 (35.9%)
Awesome    736 (64.1%)

This is a beautiful cinematic, with wonderful attention to detail (see that elf woman’s face! OMG! Gasp!) and wonderful atmosphere and camera work.

I watched it a second time just now to take note of the things that a) Are not standard content for the current generation of MMOs, and b) I want to see in the game somehow, and c) are interesting. Here’s my list as I see it:

– True environmental darkness (hopefully not just a specific dungeon mechanic)

– Magic (/tools) are needed to light darkness

– Diseased wolverine things (we saw them, now we expect them)

– Sieging, with siege weapons (that hopefully matters and we have control over in important ways).

– Climbing ropes (hopefully player-set climbing ropes), incl. swinging horizontally/vertically on ropes.

– Combat/skill use (magic/physical) while climbing

– Showed the city from Oblivion?

– Very long ranged sniping

– Being able to make bridges (hopefully player-set)

– Being able to destroy bridges (and have consequences)

– Meaningful acrobatics

– Tunneling

It’s hard to say much more about the game because of the absence of script/dialogue/lore. How much can we infer from the plot of this video that could not be conferred to most other fantasy MMOs? What was exclusively revealing from this video? As far as I could tell some three people are in conflict. Not particularly revelatory.

If they showed us these things, and they don’t make their way into the game, then are they relevant to Elder Scrolls Online? In such a case they don’t present themselves in TESO, then this video wouldn’t have validity to TESO. In that case this video would be equally valid for Neverwinter, Guildwars 2 (excluding elf ears), Archeage, Everquest, and so on, and would have achieved more good for the genre than the game.

To answer the question, I don’t think the dollars are spent usefully when the trailer tells so very little about the game. Compare it to some trailers for MMO games like Final Fantasy, WoW (excluding MoP?), and Rift. Even Guild Wars 2 cinematic trailer said very little about gameplay and content, but told lakes of lore and story.

Zenimax Online and Bethesda Softworks were feeling generous on this Valentine’s Day by giving us a bit of a peek at some concept designs for heavy armor in the highly anticipated Elder Scrolls Online MMO.

The armor concept shows off High Elven, Nordic, and Breton heavy armors.

In addition, the developers celebrated one million Likes on their Facebook page by releasing a short tribute video. And speaking of videos, one more from the TESO team: the eleventh edition of “Developer Question of the Week” features UI designer Kristy Keaton. Check out all the new goodies over at the game’s Facebook page.

 

Going to Gamescom this year? If so you can get your hands on a playable demo of The Elder Scrolls Online. ZeniMax is bringing its MMO fantasy opus to Cologne for Europe’s largest gaming con from August 22nd through August 25th.

ZeniMax’s website update says that Gamescom is its first Euro convention, but it’s certainly not the last. Further details about TESO’s 2013 event docket are forthcoming.

No one is debating their financial status, that isn’t being called into question at all.  What I and others would like to know is why the playthrough’s that we are seeing at gaming conventions isn’t indicative of how the actual game plays.  Until we see the FULL game at conventions (wildstar did that at Pax), instead of just these little glimpses of how the game could be.  We will continue to have doubts.

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!