Three Questions For Elder Scrolls Online Fans

Written by: Jason Winter (@winterinformal) | March 19, 2013 4:12 pm

Three Questions For Elder Scrolls Online Fans

47 Comments

By now, you’ve probably checked out the Elder Scrolls Online coverage at various places around the Internet. While the coverage has answered some questions, it’s raised several more, and we’d like you to chime in with your thoughts on the following topics:

Are divided factions a good idea?

In his article, Richie Procopio comes at the ZeniMax Online Studios dev team, Paul Sage in particular, with a very pointed query about factions. The response wasn’t exactly what he was hoping for.

I wonder, however, whether it’s necessary to segregate the population at all provided folks are in the non-PvP areas. I understand ZeniMax’s desire for players to feel attached to their chosen alliance, but it seems clunky to allow people to cooperate only after they’ve reached max level.

It’s a valid concern (and one that I’m prepping an entirely different article for). Is it worth dividing your player base for the sake of story and lore?

Do you think you’ll find it hard to keep your friends together if you can’t play together until you reach max level? Or are you OK with ZeniMax “forcing” you to make characters of the same faction in order to play together throughout your leveling experience?

Do you like the idea of no cooldowns?

As Scott Hawkes reported,

There are no cooldowns for abilities; combat in ESO is a resource based management system. Those tanks going too far in focusing on increasing their Health stat will find themselves short on Stamina to unleash damage and maintain threat due to being starved of the necessary resource.

Use of the stamina meter makes ESO sound rather like playing a rogue in World of Warcraft or a thief in Guild Wars 2. Your cooldown is limited (or nonexistent) but you have a pool that you can draw from to power your effects. When it runs out… well…

It does keep in line with abilities Elder Scrolls games, which have no cooldowns and are instead limited by mana or stamina pools, but as any veteran of the series can tell you, that just opens up potion spam to keep you in fighting shape.

Theoretically, in the MMO, there will be some kind of cooldown on potions to keep you from chugging them one after the other, but does that itself deviate from the Elder Scrolls establishment?

Do you really care about first-person view?

Now that first-person view – with hands, even! – is confirmed, the question is: So what? How much time have you spent using first-person view in an MMO? Except for taking screenshots, I’d guess the answer is “virtually none.”

Truth is, if this wasn’t an Elder Scrolls MMO, people wouldn’t ask for – if not outright demand – it here, either. People still want to play Skyrim Online, even though each passing day and reveal proves that that’s not what we’re getting.

First-person view works well enough in single-player games, where you don’t have to worry quite as much about your environment and what might be hitting you from the sides or behind. And it’s quite natural for games that require precise aim, like shooters.

I imagine that I’ll use first-person view in Elder Scrolls Online as an occasional novelty, but not during any real, dangerous fight. What about you?

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47 comments

LusitanGaming

on the factions division question, i just want to point out that even when you reach max level and venture to the other alliance zone you will only be able to see your own faction players, you will not mingle with the other factions at all. you can check the source in the gamebreaker forums its the video of yogscastsjin
- http://twitter.com/RichieProcopio Richie Procopio
  
  I specifically asked this question of Paul Sage at ZeniMax. He said once you start playing in another faction’s areas you can group up with the players of that faction, trade items, communicate and do dungeon runs with them.
  - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
    
    Definitely different. Guess, sometimes you are at peace with the other alliances, sometimes you are war.
  - LusitanGaming
    
    im not doubting what P. Sage said to you, im just point another Dev said the opposite ^^
    - http://twitter.com/RichieProcopio Richie Procopio
      
      Well now we have conflicting information. I just listened to my recording of the interview I did to make sure I what I wrote in my article is what he told me. He also gave an example where he said if I started in Ebonheart and I had a friend that started in Daggerfall….if we both hit level 50 and choose to go to Aldemeri next, then we could play together. So maybe that haven’t completely worked this out internally yet?
      - LusitanGaming
        
        lets wait for PAX east and get a proper version of this story, i for once cant see why would they block us from playing with other faction just to let us play when we get max level, it doesnt make sense, but as you pointed out maybe is not set in stone. btw thx for the articles
      - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
        
        Hmm, wonder if their are leveling zones of the opposing alliance that you cannot enter and PVE adventure zones that all alliances can quest.
  - http://twitter.com/inkthedink INKS
    
    Anyone else feel like this takes away from the faction identity? Perhaps that is not the right word. I am happy to get to see all those places for sure but talking to and working with your enemy.
    - Key Foster
      
      not really since TES has always been that way through out all the lore. some time they hate each other sometimes they band together.
http://twitter.com/inkthedink INKS

Don’t care about most of that stuff. I’ll never use the first person view. No raids Is the bummer for me.
- http://twitter.com/Luke_Malcolm Luke Malcolm
  
  No Raids kinda killed my excitement
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Depends on the term “adventure zones,” which might mean a form of raiding.
  
  It will be interesting to see the group mechanics ZeniMax puts in for large group play.
  
  Is their a limit to the size of the party? Can it support large groups with organizational and support tools?
http://www.facebook.com/danjal1987 Danjal Veskandar

The faction thing is really gamebreaking for me, as it happens the guys I play with happen to want to play Nord and Argonian (with myself prefering Dunmer)
But not being able to play together with Khajiit or such might really be limiting to the game experience and doesn’t seem very logical lore-wise.

Sure there’s always been preferences, but the difference races always had people who didn’t conform to the races. Not to mention the Aldmeri Dominion doesn’t have a lot of love going for it…
Emilio Aguinaldo

I was thinking the other day about First Person Perspective in MMORPG.
I was thinking what if the camera can bring into First Person and shows the lower part of your body and hands.
The experience would be different in my opinion.
And the camera location should match the height of each player’s character heights.
http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.hornsby.7 Jonathan Hornsby

I find the no cooldowns thing the most interesting. It is literally the direct opposite of the no resource/cool down only system used in Guild Wars 2, so after TESO releases it will be interesting to see what system players like more. Of course both will have its fans, but the feedback will be interesting.
http://twitter.com/Merex760 Chris

No cooldowns is interesting. Don’t care about first person, kinda useless in an MMORPG. I’m concerned about the confirmation that there will be no raids. Raids are a big thing that keeps an MMO from being a revolving door. Hopefully, they have a solution.
- Zederok
  
  And yet raiding is only used by less then 10% of the population of an MMO. Who ever thought that raiding shoulde be endgame should be shot. The whole ideal that I must schedule my time to play a video game is asanine and dtupid, no matter how you sell it. The day that Raiding doesn’t take coordinating, planning and scheduling is when games can start thinking about implementing them. One last thing, I have never watched a fantasy movie, nor read a book where the protaganist is 40+ people. The protaganist is always a person or small group doing heroic deeds. That is what MMO’s need to understand, just because it has the words massively in the genres title doesnt mean you play with massive amounts of people at a given time, it means the world is alive and propogated by real life beings rather then the bland uninipiring NPC’s of a single player game, having the element to form groups or interact with others is the draw of the genre not the grouping with everyone.
  - http://twitter.com/inkthedink INKS
    
    Is it hard to believe that people want challenging group content? Sure the world should feel alive but playing with a ton of other people is epic.
    - http://twitter.com/nickbedo Nick Bedo
      
      Agreed, but this needn’t be achieved through raiding. Huge world events that require some coordination from participating players would be an awesome route to take. Guild Wars 2 had the right idea with the big dragons, although the implementation has left something to be desired from the experience (e.g. the fights currently require very little strategy).
      - Tentacledpanda
        
        Guild wars 2, while a very fun game, doesn’t bring anything remotely close to raiding with those world bosses. Raiding is a way for a group to challenge themselves with skill and determination in a team environment to defeat an otherwise impossible situation. Raiding is basically the leader board for pve. That anyone can join those world boss fights and Zerg them down completely lacks the feeling of a raid. Those world bosses are epic, but they aren’t a substitute for raiding.
    - http://www.facebook.com/trevor.kidd.75 Trevor Kidd
      
      Be realistic. The most challenging thing about raids is the logistics of keeping a couple of dozen or so children, all pointed in the same direction at the same time, for extended periods. If raids were inherently difficult, they wouldn’t be put on farm mode once the dance steps are memorized.
      - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
        
        It is a novel idea of a group of children working together to achieve individual and common goals while progressing through content that gets progressively more difficult. (Yes, I know sometimes they act stupid and treat each other like dirt. Or have temper tantrums and leave with their toys. )
        
        Instead of running around the play area, randomly shooting until the world boss falls over dead or players from another team give up and go back to their safe zone.
- Superchief27
  
  See I disagree with the idea that first person is useless in an mmo. The reason it’s useless is because no one has done it right yet. But when that mmo does come around with first person done right that could be a huge industry stealing innovation.
http://www.facebook.com/brian.sperduto.1 Brian Sperduto

I hate faction systems that split people up like in WoW/SWTOR/Whatever, it’s just too hard to want to play a particular race/class but you can’t because your friends are more interested in the other faction’s races/classes. I thought that was the one thing the original EQ did right was that your race determined who in the world disliked you, but players were free to disregard it and play with whoever they wanted to. And this game having such limited race choices for each faction is going to split things up really badly, plus if some of the races have overpowered abilities, it’s going to get really silly really fast. That and from a Lore/RP perspective, I never understood why the Heroes in WoW (as an example) couldn’t look past the racial politics and do what was best for the planet. I mean, you are a hero, supposedly the best of the best, and you are stuck in a rigid way of thinking? Blech.

I have never liked First Person Melee games. I only played Skyrim because the world was so good, I just couldn’t get in to the other ES games at all, and I never completed the “main story” (whatever that actually was). Unless they do something amazing with it, I think it’ll just be a gimmick to satisfy the ES stalwarts.

I have no opinion on the resource system till I actually see how it works in practice.
http://www.facebook.com/kirzansix Mike Coulombe

If you’re an EQ baby, you LEARNED it all in first person! Because your toon’s hit box was extremely much larger than it actually looked and you kept inspecting yourself if you used mouse look cause even just releasing right click count as a right click.
LusitanGaming

on the Cooldown question, can someone confirm that skills are animation based? or you can just spam a skill till your resource is fully drain?
http://www.facebook.com/kevin.hawes.7 Kevin Hawes

“Are divided factions a good idea?” This is funny in itself. In any OWPvP game you get a myriad of people complaining about higher levels ganking them, and only the hardest core of PvP’ers come and say “That’s the thrill of it! Always having to watch your back, etc.” but.. you will always get a majority of people complaining about it.

It’s definitely a valid concern, but I feel like having the PvP open only at max, will be better off for the community as a whole.
- Revanhavoc
  
  Nailed it!
- http://twitter.com/inkthedink INKS
  
  PVP will be open from level 10 on.
- Superchief27
  
  It will be much more interesting than red vs blue I hope. I know it’s not a real time strategy, but when I am playing RTS my favorite game style is free for all and that’s what this sounds like. Hope it works.
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Richie’s original article states, ” being able to level from 10 to 50 by engaging in PvP in Cyrodiil.”
Revanhavoc

I am really excited for the First-Person view. It will increase my immersion and, as I said on the forums, it limits me having the look at my character’s butt. (Psst…He plays a dude – lame)

If I’m not mistaken, I beleive the 1-50 content is with your faction only, but when you advance to end-game content, you are allowed to group up with players out of your faction. That makes a ton of sense to me, provided there is sufficient population…Uh-oh…No I’m sure it will be fine. I’m still pumped.
http://twitter.com/Fubarbox SteveE

On first person view…I love the idea. I always played 1st person in Eq1 (not sure if any of the other angles were really all that playable). I have been greatly disappointed that this option faded from MMOs and when it did grace us with a visit, you couldn’t see your weapons, so what was the point.

When it comes to this faction split stuff….I really wish we could end this faction junk (restricted play) and move back to a hate system. I still remember laughing at group members when they would run away from the DE guard in Overthere, while I waved. In any fantasy or real world you will always have blurred lines at some point. Make a world for us, but allow us to live in it. Allow us to prove that even though we were born to a race of marauding trolls, we want to be good. Allow “good races” to sink to the treachery we know they are capable of.

For the PvP portion..If we want to group with a different faction then give us a faction hit with our own cities. Make our people turn against us and their people love us.These artificial walls grow tiring…
Vo0Do0

I like the idea of split factions… comparing Wow to GW2, I like the “for the horde” feeling rather everyone just being there haha…

No cooldowns is interesting, I like that you still have a “pool” so I think in general it will work fine. I could gear a healer to have AWESOME magika regen i spose and once depleted I could run around like a fool and in a few seconds heal again.

First person…. I feel when playing solo I will be first person and in the large group times I will most likely be zoomed out… Elder scrolls online is different from other mmo’s as it has the whole free swing thing that for me, is best in First person. but in large group situations, I won’t be paying attention to my characters attacks as much as what is happening in the battle at large.

I am hoping for raids because I do like the large group effor to complete a dungeon and its boss sort of play… I stopped playing guild wars due to it’s lack of end game rewards, cos thats just me
http://www.facebook.com/spankthismonkey Thomas Vu

To me faction division is a great idea. I remember the grand ol’ days of vanilla WoW; where I always had pride for being a member of Horde. And also, it felt great sneaking into enemy territory, with a couple of friends, starting fights wherever we could.

For example, Hillsbrad during Vanilla WoW. Few of my best memories of WoW were located there.

The no cooldowns idea doesn’t sound like it will work well. From what I can tell, the reason MMOs put cds on powerful abilities is so that a player wouldn’t just spam that one ability to make an enemy player/monster go bye bye in 2 seconds. Who knows… maybe ESO will have it done right…

Last up, 1st person view in MMORPGs is pointless if everyone else could go 3rd person. But hey, if they want to add it. Let them. I don’t like it, so I probably just won’t use it.
Superchief27

Commenting on First Person View: Yes it is quite the expectation of everyone who has played an Elder Scrolls game. Is it required to make a successful game? No, just look at a few current mmos. It is an expectation however because so many players like that feel very much, no one would have brought it up if it wasn’t. It’s the hack and slash or cast and throw type of first person which is UNIQUE to Elder Scrolls, set very far apart from standard first person games like Battlefield and Call of Duty.

It was getting really good when Oblivion rolled out, and in Skyrim it was refined it to a crisp instinctive mode of play. It asked the player to physically learn how to swing a sword in game, learn how/where the sword would land, learn the best time to block or shield bash (when an enemy is in mid swing). The screen jarring when you take a staggering blow or an unblocked attack. And wow lets not forget the amazing spell effects that you can see being formed in your own hands. Personally I thought the healing spell from Skyrim was quite impressive, along with the damage wards. Shooting a bow and arrow instead of seeing your character auto-shoot is also a game in it’self.

I think what many players are concerned about is if the decision to not have first person view was made for the right reason. I don’t know the best answer to that, but I know the wrong reason would be because all the other gaming companies are doing it. Just because “it’s the thing.” It’s certainly not, every player out there is looking for uniqueness and depth. Immersion. Only the developers can answer that to themselves if it was a good idea, most of us won’t find out until launch.
MMO_NewSkool

Divided factions sucks in every way… its the worst artifical invisible wall in any MMO yet. so many other powerful ways we will feel attached to our faction. this is a horrible immersion and gameplay breaker.

Resource management.. yes please. i love this idea because it makes you plan your character more, allowing for more interesting builds other than the standard dps stacks strength, mages stack intellect, tanks stack health boredom. combat will be tension filled again for melee classes as you dont have some endless pool of power to attack forever. love this. and of course it opens the door for support classes and hybrids to fill an important role during combat.

first person is awesome and i will use it almost exclusively during soloing/exploring. but not for pvp, and sparingly during group situations like dungeons.
Golden_Pantheon

The problem is that the game is zoned. It might easily mean the demise of TESO. Zoned MMOs feel very intrusive and disruptive with their constant loading screens. I don’t understand why developers still choose to do this in 2013. Don’t get me wrong, the game might still be fun to play, but zoning is very alarming for me when it comes to the direction of the game. Elder Scrolls games have always been about immersion, and fit the MMO genre perfectly. Yet they go ahead and implement a plethora of loading screens everywhere. Let’s just say I’m disappointed. I can’t know if they did it out of ignorance for the MMO market or it was a conscious design choice, but I dislike it.
http://twitter.com/LisaAkari ❀ Lisa ❀

I want this game to be as much like the Elder Scrolls games as possible, but online with friends. The recent news about first-person…everyone wants that option and third person. Sorry, that’s just how it is. I want to see housing. I want to go in friends’ homes and see what they’ve done with it. I want to decorate with my weapons and herbs and books. This is my main deciding factor as to whether or not I’ll stay with the game. Implementing it at some point early on (even if not right at first) would be a very smart move. I love dungeon diving as much as the next person, and exploring, etc. I can’t wait to explore the Morrowind content here, since I never played that.

I hope pvp is an option. I know a lot of folks who won’t play if it’s PvP. We’ve all left those games. PvP needs to be an option. Most of us love this series because it’s relaxing, for the lore, the housing, the exploration, the cool beasties. Not for ganking.

If you want to keep people paying and playing think *housing….*
- Key Foster
  
  I am all for TESO housing, good say.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1152922458 Chester Kottek

I have no opinions on the first two concerns. To me, they’re things we’ll have to find out about when the game’s in beta/retail. The issue of the first versus third person camera though, I have an opinion on.

According to the ESOTR podcast, TESO’s third-person felt exactly like Skyrim’s. If that’s the case (or if that continues to be the case) then I think that first person will be viable. In your standard first person MMO, the camera is set at a slight angle, so that you’re looking down on your character. This gives you better omnidirectional awareness, and since you don’t have to hold cross-hairs over an enemy to shoot them, you don’t have to worry about attacks not hitting the person in front of you. However, when you enter third person in Skyrim and set the camera to a similar angle, you target the ground. This means that melee/ranged attacks will hit the floor, and not the enemy.

I imagine that I’ll be using the third-third person perspective before entering a fight (and in brief moments when I can afford to look around), but I will rely on first-person mode to fight with the most precision. Going from the information I have, a good first-person mode is necessary.
Joe Tartaglione

this game is going to be…..pretty shitty….
and its unfortunately going to drag the elder scrolls ip down with it
heres to hoping Camelot Unchained ends up being something special
Key Foster

If they can make the game similar to Morrowind and Skyrim as far as combining the way crafting is done (but much more complex) then there is no limit to what you can do, there would be so many different combination you would have no choice but to be unique. Also if they could do a more balanced cooldown method of taking many potions back to back similar to Oblivion, that would be nice. And having a much more advance Skyrim-esk player housing feature would just be awesome.
I like the faction separation, and I like that fact that you can still play together at max level with other factions (I hope that is still correct). And the way that they are doing the dungeon system is good too, its a nice set up for expansion based off (not only) feed back but game play, many opportunities there.
theunwarshed

the thief’s resource management is the best ability use system of the all classes in gw2. the player is in total control of the how/when and player skill/judgement is at a premium when it comes to playing/mastering this class. cooldowns are lame imo. so, i for one am glad to see this with ESO.
Jeremy Keat

I don’t really think what PoV it has matters, as long as it interacts with the PoV one chooses that matters. In a third person PoV, it can be no different from a first person in the sense you can “aim” things other than a camera being further back but I typically prefer how the previous TES games worked (for all the coming MMOs) where you actually have somewhat physical and realistically simulating interaction from basic attacks to spells.

Its good though to have a decent but non-intrusive motivation for PvP, by making PvP actually a thing of convenient fun with some reward that doesn’t have to be virtual monetary rewards (gear, rep,currency, etc.).

I have a lot of issues with pre-determining oneself into factions at the beginning of an MMO. I don’t think many games have good enough stories to back this up when they claim lore reasons, but segmenting players by and into a choice they may not want later on kind of demeans the player’s optimal experience.

I always loved the idea of resource driven combat rather than CDs, yes lets all look at games like WoW… Even JRPGs had this right, something about CDs kind of makes it boring, you don’t have a choice of abilities as much as whatever is the best ability available, not for the situation. Usually with a resource pool you have to be wise about ability use, moderate yourself and have moments where you pause and conserve instead of button bashing entire fights… again those WoW/EQ-style games.
Enricola

I only ever played the Elder Scrolls games in 1st person because I thought the character movement/running animations seen from 3rd person were so bad they totally took me out of the immersion. But I did end up liking it.
http://www.facebook.com/ReggieRhoden Reggie Rhoden

For an archer, first person view is an absolute necessity.

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