TES Online - not standing out from the crowd

So The Elder Scrolls Online has been announced, and I reckon I must have went through the whole Kübler-Ross model. ZeniMax have followed the carrot on a stick to the MMO genre. I suppose it’s far better than going CoD and just making a TES with multiplayer (I’m looking at you ME3 and Bioshock 2). Now that I’m in the acceptance stage, I can see the great potential this game could have.

I suggest a read of Mike Fahey’s Five Things I Want to See in TES Online, it actually makes it look like it could be really good if they just stick to what makes TES and Bethesda single player games great. However I’ve read that it isn’t going to be like this, it going to be third person, have activated attacks (no real-time combat), instances (not that bad) and cartoony graphics. The more you follow this creed the closer you get to World of Warcraft territory and it loses it’s identity.

From a money perspective, the execs probably thought this is a great idea, TES has a huge following and an MMO could be really successful. They also said that about Star Wars The Old Republic, and while that’s not doing too bad, you take away the story elements from that game it’s just repetitive pressing of hotkeys and going on fetch quests while aping the mechanics of WoW. I like WoW, I’ve played it a lot, but I’m not keen on MMOs, it just that WoW does it so well because Blizzard have had so much time to tweak it and add features it’s a great experience.

I will reserve further judgement on TES online until more details have been shown, I just think it’s a waste to make such hefty design decisions and not have the balls to do things differently or just respect the single-player nature of the series.